The Awakening as a Tragic BildingsromanI always considered this to be a tragic bildingsroman A professor suggested it was a love story. If it's his self love or finding it. It's no more a love story than Call of the Wild. I guess because there is a woman and love, it constitutes a love story. I agree that Reiz symbolized art and romantic ideals and Mme. Ratignolle. However Edna was less romantic because her confinement was real. Betty Freudian has this same kind of problem in Feminist Mystique. A physical independence symbolized by birds seems to be the best analogy for his needs throughout the book. I didn't think the hypertext guide really covered this. Birds were present throughout the novel, in dreams and in his life (more than this parrot). The fact that she couldn't be confined by anything that required her to be caged, her children, her husband. She didn't like these people or their cages because they used her for their own gain. A guy suggested in another class that she should have thought about it before she got married and had kids. I suppose that would be easy to say for someone who will never have children or be held responsible for their existence or dependence on them. (NO, not all men are so bad!) His grief for Mme. Ratignolle's birth represented a birth in itself. An awakening that she had reborn. By the way, the hypertext did not explain all the awakenings she had experienced or compare them with the times she woke up and fell asleep. She tells her husband that marriage is a “dismal spectacle.” At the cabin with Robert, she was not Sleeping Beauty but a Rip Van Winkle. Sleeping Beauty was passive, Edna certainly was not. The cottage I felt represented indulgence almost gluttony without the negative connotation. She's finally having fun - HER - Self. The church was another oppressive cage in his life. Every mention in the book was negative, even though Edna says she is religious. It turns out that her encounters with him in the book are miserable. Also, I felt like the rings weren't explained. There are at least five separate mentions of rings throughout the novel, each at critical moments..