In my psychoanalytic essay, I look at Kate Chopin’s The Awakening through a Freudian perspective. I discuss Edna’s struggle between her id and superego, and how the end of the story is the victory of her id. Freudian theory was the easiest of the psychoanalytic theories for me to use as I had already studied Freud in high school, so after I chose to write through his ideas, the argument of my essay quickly became clear.
I began this essay with the same process that I stated in my introduction, I quickly wrote down examples from the book that lined up with my argument that Edna battles between her id and superego often in the story, leading to desire repression before taking on the essay as a whole. From there, it was pretty simple to assemble my peer review draft, although I turned in my peer review without an intro or conclusion.
In my first few drafts, I struggles with being too descriptive of the story. I had a problem with talking about the novel much more than connecting it to my essay, which took a few drafts to fully correct. This essay has also been through a good number of revisions as I was quick to describe my ideas, but needed a bit of work on my delivery. Slowly and surely, though, we are coming to the end.
