Engl

Oceanic Feeling: Delving into the “Psyche”

Edna Pontellier, from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, begins her journey as a housewife and mother on vacation. While on her vacation she realizes that she was meant for greater things. She loves her children and her husband, but she feels some kind of pull from the universe to broaden her horizons and explore the new possibilities waiting to be welcomed by her. Her senses become alive as new opportunities and sensations expand about her. Also, Edna moves from a mere mortal to a goddess-like state by giving into her desires. Edna’s childhood memory introduces a series of events that expose her to a connection with the universe; Edna then opens herself to this oneness with the world, thereby transforming herself from mother and wife to celestial being.

As Edna Pontellier and her friend Adéle Ragionelle are sitting by the ocean, Edna begins staring out into space. Adéle asks her where thoughts were and after much reflection Edna realizes she had been experiencing a childhood memory. Within this memory Edna is in “… a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water” (Chopin 18). This one memory initiates Edna’s sense of longing for something greater than herself. This longing is described in Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud as an “oceanic feeling.” An oceanic feeling is a sensation where one has a sense of eternity, and a profound and instinctive link with all things, a direct connection with the world (Freud 11). According to Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology, an oceanic feeling “... is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate” (19). It becomes Edna’s fate to become discontent with her life, give in to her desire for sensations, and...