Anne Bradstreet and Kate Chopin are both very influential writers. Anne Bradstreet has produced some of the greatest Puritan poems. Bradstreet’s passionate love poems to her husband are very memorable because she puts her whole heart and soul into the rawness of these pieces. “To My Dear and Loving Husband” is a love poem that symbolizes Anne’s extreme passion and worship to her husband. Kate Chopin’s writing focuses on the lives of young women trying to break into the feministic movement. Chopin’s The Awakening explores Edna’s passion to find her true self. Both Anne Bradstreet and Kate Chopin use the main character’s passion and need to express their desires as the central theme of their works.
“To My Dear and Loving Husband” is the poet speaking to her husband, celebrating their unity and saying that there is no man in the world whose wife loves him more. She asks those women who say they are happier with their husbands to compare themselves to her. She prizes her husband’s love more than gold or the riches of the East. Rivers cannot quench her love and her desire for him is never satisfied. There is no way she can ever repay him for his love. She hopes that when they die, their love will live on eternally.
The Awakening explores Edna’s desire and passion to find and live life that fully expresses her. Edna begins to identify her true self, the person who goes beyond just being a mother and a wife. Robert, who is not her husband, encourages her to indulge in this infatuation with one another. But in the end, Robert leaves Edna and this leads her to become obsessed with her desires and needs. She neglects her household duties and refuses to obey social standards. When she sees Robert again, she tells him that she will do anything for their love. But soon realizes she is being selfish, thinking about only her desires, and not about her sons. Robert leaves, with only a note left for Edna. Edna cannot take this pain of losing her love and she cannot go back to the way things were with her husband, so she kills herself.
Both Anne and Edna use their passion to express themselves the way they like too. Anne and her husband go beyond the mutual respect and love for each other. They have a very passionate and overwhelming love for one another that is not very Puritan like. She describes her love as “such that rivers cannot quench” (Bradstreet, pp. 77). The implied image is sensual, subtly alluding to sexual desire and need for her husband’s love to live. She then proceeds to touch on her religious perspective but only once saying, “The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let’s so preserver, that when we live no more we may live ever” (Bradstreet, pp. 77). Anne hopes that when they ascend into heaven, God will reward them and let their love live on eternally. Expressing her love and passion for her husband is the only way she wants to live. She ultimately is trying to reach heaven and through her love for her husband, she will be able to be with God and her husband forever.
Edna also uses her passion to express herself. She changes her life and focuses solely on her new desires and passion for change. She discovers her strength when she swims, the pleasure of individual creation when she paints, and this new-found love interest with Robert, someone who makes her feel a live. These things bring Edna pleasure and a sense of independence from the life she lives caged in the house. But when she tries to bring her pleasure and independence out into the open, her husband brings her back into restraint. Edna decides she needs to break free from her lifestyle and embrace her new found independence. She realizes that to live the life she wants with all these pleasures, she needs to go against the socially acceptable lifestyle and be her own person. Once Edna finds this new self, she will do anything she can to keep living with these pleasures.
The difference for these two characters is their love and passion for their husbands. Anne is very devoted to her husband. Her love for her husband is earthly. Even though she shows so much passion for her husband and his love, she uses that earthly love to fulfill her Puritan ways. She is consumed by that love and it seems that for Anne to be a good Puritan she needs to love her family to the fullest. Her earth love is a connection to her Puritan beliefs and is a sign of spiritual salvation. Anne hopes that her love will bring her eternal salvation with God and her husband. She loves her husband so much that to find something that equals it, she must turn to God and heaven.
Unlike Anne, Enda could really care less for her husband’s affection. Maybe in the beginning she wanted him to show interest but once she met Robert, she gives up on her husband. His intense focus on his work blinds him of the emotional and intense changes she is going through. She clearly does not love him, she feels like a possession to him. Edna was supposed to fulfill this “mother-women” image, who worshipped her husband and did everything for her children, but she no longer wants to live that way. Léonce feels like he can buy her happiness or kindness with elaborate gifts but all Edna wants is to feel something real. And she does with Robert. She becomes totally obsessed with him. Her realest love is for Robert and not for her husband. Her love for Robert gives off an attraction to a new love that she does not have with her husband.
Anne hopes that after death God will reward her and her husband with their love eternally. But Edna kills herself because of her husband’s love and this caged feeling she has being with him. Edna states before killing herself that “She thought of Léonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought they could possess her, body and soul” (Chopin, pp. 1297). She is unable to have the human life the way she chooses, so she chooses no life at all. But Anne loves that her husband consumes her. Anne and her husband are like one in the same and Edna could not disagree more with her marriage.
Even though these stories were written during different time periods, they both show the connection to the topic of love and expressing yourself. As a Puritan, husbands and wives are supposed to adhere to the Biblical way of marriage, mutual love and respect between man and wife. They were not supposed to put all their efforts into an earthly relationship but rather to God in their union. But Anne is showing an intense attraction to her husband as the central theme for her existence. The same goes for Edna. The Grand Isle society defines the role of wife as full devotion towards their husband and to self-sacrifice for your husband. Edna never adhered to the societies definition, even at the beginning of the novel. For example, the other ladies at Grand Isle all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world. And Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit she knew of none better. When she clearly feels like he is not someone who is worth fawning over. Both Edna and Anne encounter the resistance of the societies standards to their desires. Anne should follow the Puritan rules of marriage, one unity for God, but Anne shows affection for husband in a non-societal way. Edna never wanted to follow societies description of the perfect wife and women. She pushes that stereo-typical standard away from herself and embraces the new life that fits her. So, both Kate Chopin and Anne Bradstreet use Edna and Anne’s passions and desires to express themselves as the central theme of their stories.