Defying the Power of Society in Bread Givers and The Awakening Essay Example

Taking power of one’s self can indicate how they live the rest of their lives. Gaining independence grants that power. This can overpower the concept of societal norms and community standards. In both Anzia Yezierska's book “Bread Givers” and Kate Chopin’s book “The Awakening”, the desire for independence and self-awakening is shown through both main characters, Sara and Edna. In “Bread Givers”, Sara finds herself struggling to become someone outside of her family. After coming to the United States, her family did not necessarily change their religious and societal ways from life in the shtetl. In order to use her power and perseverance as a young woman, Sara strives to separate herself from the influence of her religious father, who has taken grasp of how Sara and her sister’s are going to live their lives. Similarly, but in a drastically different story line, the protagonist, Edna, in “The Awakening”, finds herself searching for a version of herself that is different from the role that society gave her. As a wife and mother, she is striving for a sense of being that is separate. She defies the power of societal norms to change who she is and to grasp a new life she is longing for. Both Edna and Sara, strive to defy the power of their societies to become the versions of themselves that they have longed to be. 

In Yezierska’s novel, “Bread Givers”, Sara seeks for something different than her religious family from an early point in the novel. As a teenager, Sara watches her sister’s fall under the direction of her father and their religion as a teenager, while she strives for independence. As the narrator, Sara says, “But still I kept on peddling herrying. Earning twenty-five and sometimes thirty to fifty cents a day made me feel independent, like a real person. It was already back to me to pick coal from ash cans. I felt better to earn the money and pay out my own earned money for bought coal” (Yezierska, page 28). Earning money on her own was one of the first feelings of independence that Sara felt. She persevered, defying the power of the societal norms that she had grown up with. This first step into independence gave Sara the power to start striving for the life that she wanted. A life where she controlled her own life and was able to protect those around her. While continuing to pursue her desire for independence, Sara realizes that she is unlike her sister’s, “I began to feel I was different from my sisters. They couldn’t stand Father’s preaching any more than I, but I could suffer to listen to him, like dutiful children who honour and obey and respect their father, whether they like him or not. If they ever had times when they hated Father, they were too frightened of themselves to confess their hate” (Yezierska, page 65). With the realization of her differences to her sister’s, Sara realizes that she is one to show the hatred she has for the way that her father treats her and her sister’s. This hatred of where she was as a young adult gives her the ambition to change her life in a way that her sisters are not necessarily able to. 

Similarly to Sara, the main character Edna in “The Awakening”, realizes that the societal norms that she has grown accustomed to are not the life that she wants to lead. As a mother and a wife, Edna begins to strive for change different to her conventional life. Early on in the novel, Edna has small realizations that she aspires to be more of an individual than a mother and a wife. She realized she was different from other mothers in Grand Isle: “They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (Chopin, Page 27). Edna wanted to be more than what society was prevailing for her life. The power of society had taken over the lives of the mothers and wives around her, but she had a realization that there was so much more to life than this. She aspired to grow beyond and bring her life into her own power in order to gain independence. Edna struggled to gain this aspiration that she had and did not necessarily why it tore her down in the way that it did. Chopin writes, “There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood” (Chopin, Page 140). Edna had reached a point where the power of society was somewhat punishing her because she did not conform. She felt the destruction that society was adding to her life a she strived to be the sexual and artistic being that she wanted to. 

Although Sara and Edna aspire for independence coming from very different backgrounds, they both pursue the lives that they wish to live. Looking for her own place to live, Sara has a realization that no matter where a new life was awaiting her. Saying, “Like a drowning person clinging to a rope, my tired body edged up to that door and clung to it. My hands clutched at the knob. This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting point of becoming a person. I simply must have this room with the shut door. And I must make this woman rent it to me. If I failed to get it, I’d drop dead at her feet” (Yezierska, Page 159). The thought of “becoming a person” grasped onto Sara Smolinsky. She wanted to defy the power of her society and especially her father. Finding her own room to live in may have just been the start, but it opened her eyes to all the opportunities she had been striving to achieve on her own. Without following the expectations of her hypocritical, religious father, Sara was able to pursue the independence she sought out to find.