course guidelines path one calendar class discussion path two calendar essay prompts reference pages


ornamental line

That Monster Made Up of Beauty and Brutality

“all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate,
and awaited the consequences with indifference” (91).

Points for Reflection

K. Chopin's The Awakening (1899), chps. 24-39

  1. student-generated questions . . .



M. Lambert's Grand Isle (1991)

  1. Does the film define Edna’s awakening in the same terms as the novel?
  2. How does the style of transitions used to move between scenes (fades to white, hard cuts, dissolves) affect the story’s tone?
  3. Do you approve of what the film does with Edna’s two flashbacks to that moment in her meadow experienced in youth?
  4. What should we make of the recurring shot of flames in the fireplace?
  5. The novel describes Edna’s artistic impulses manifesting in a number of different mediums.  Does the film mirror this creative plenitude?
  6. What does showing Edna’s visual artistry on a screen do to our understanding of her creative impulses?
  7. Do Edna’s and Léonce’s artistic preferences converge or diverge in the film?  In the book?
  8. Do Edna and Léonce parent their children in the film as they do in the book?
  9. Does Edna’s and Léonce’s marriage dynamic resemble that described in the book?
  10. In the novel, Edna interacts with Nature in a variety of ways, both while in Grand Isle and back in New Orleans.  Does the same rapport appear in the film?
  11. Is the Mademoiselle Reisz of the film the same surly curmudgeon in the film that we meet in the novel?
  12. The novel refers to various servants as “the negro” or “the quadroon.”  Does the film humanize the black folk more than the book does?
  13. Does the film version of Edna exhibit the same emotional range as the novel?
  14. Do Edna’s experiences in the ocean capture the emotional range of the various experiences recorded in the novel?
  15. What do the various crabs added to the beach scene add to our understanding of the Pontellier family and its respective members?
  16. Do the novel’s descriptions of Mrs. Adèle Ratignolle’s appearance mirror the camera’s attention to her in the film?
  17. Does the film effectively frame the physical beauty of Edna as described in the novel?
  18. Do you think the amount of sex and nudity in the film, absent from the book, is tonally and/or thematically consistent with the way Chopin describes romantic encounters in the book?



a painting of an elegant woman from the waist up looking to the right at a flower arrangement. She has dark brown hair in a soft updo. Her dress is off the shoulder with sheer voluminous sleeves. Both arms are bent at the elbow with her hands to her chest. She has a large, detailed corsage of yellow roses.
Lady with a Corsage (1911)
Edmund Tarbell


Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu