The Awakening

The Awakening

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is, as advertised, a strongly feminist novel. In that respect, it is clear that its most controversial feature is not its fairly standard narrative of “awakening.” After being awakened by Robert Lebrun, Edna Pontellier loves him, rather than her husband, but is ultimately disappointed that, despite being temperamentally more suited towards her, Robert still believes that she is a piece of property to be transferred from an earlier husband to a new husband. Nevertheless, she resolves to possess him (172) but is disappointed when he leaves her, perhaps because she has disregarded male proprietorship, and she commits suicide. The controversial aspect of this all is not her husband or Robert but, as in A Doll House and the considerably later The Hours, the leaving of her children. This is the novel’s feminist dilemma: can a woman leave her children to find happiness? It doesn’t succeed in resolving this issue, but simply stumbles toward an answer; Edna says: “I want to be let alone. No one has any right – except children, perhaps – and even then, it seems to me, or it did seem –“ She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts, and stopped abruptly.’ (171). Neither Edna nor the novel can fully grapple with this problem, and the result seems to be a novel less progressive than A Doll House – Edna does not set off on her own.

In terms of naturalism, I’m most interested in Edna’s complete and utter servitude to her whims, especially as they seem so similar to Sister Carrie’s constant desire for fine things and directly in contrast to the strong-willed masculine single-mindedness embodied in Frank Cowperwood or any of London’s heroes. Throughout The Awakening, Edna never does anything that was not merely suggested to her by her most recent whim: “An indescribable oppression […] filled her whole being with vague anguish […] it was a mood” (49). These moods or whims are also often brought on by exactly what Cowperwood seems to be invulnerable to: music. Although she cannot hear solitude, hope, longing, or despair in Chopin, “the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her” (72). Acting on her at a subconscious level, the music of Chopin drives her, not because she can hear hope or despair in it, but because she can feel it. Strangely enough, it is also the music of Chopin which so strongly affects the Methodist preacher Theron Ware in The Damanation of Theron Ware – perhaps Frederic Chopin occupies a privileged place in naturalism.

In short, I have found two main areas of interest in The Awakening. First, its feminist nature is difficult and conflicted, firmly in line with Ibsen and Bovary but also possibly resistant to them. Secondly, it seems to offer up a portrait of a human with no will at all, which seems perfectly naturalist, but which is also perfectly opposed to the naturalist conception of the human who is nothing but will. Both of these extremes seem naturalism – in both cases, the human subject can offer no reasons for their actions. Edna is affected by multiple changing whims, Frank Cowperwood by a single overpowering desire, but in both cases rational thinking offers no control. This bears further investigation: the creature of complete whim and the creature of complete will standing as equally naturalist.
“The Rhythm Method: Unmothering the Race in Chopin, Grimke, and Stein” by Jennifer Fleissner, in Women, Compulsion, Modernity, excerpt on Chopin, 233-244

In keeping with her larger examination of the feminine within the moment of American naturalism, Fleissner here takes aim at Edna’s potential, and difficult, status as a naturalist heroine. She begins by acknowledging Edna’s status as a potential tragic heroine; her suicide, in this reading of Edna through the lens of romantic individualism, is re-rendered “into the transcendent rebirth-through-death of a latter-day Aphrodite” (234).

In order to push beyond this tempting but incomplete reading, Fleissner begins by noting The Awakening’s failures to meet its traditional reading: as a novel of sexual awakening. Fleissner accomplishes this by contrasting Edna to her friend Adele. Adele is, unlike Edna, a “mother-woman” but Adele’s actions make it clear that Edna’s rebellion cannot become a standard reaction against the Victorian society that demands women to repress their sexuality and their voice. Adele already confounds those demands by “speaking her mind, asserting her, sexuality, and otherwise breaking loose from the constraints of convention” (238). This makes Edna’s rebellion a tricky one; in the creole milieu in which Edna finds herself, chastity goes hand-in-hand with a free spirit and on open sexuality, not against it. Furthermore, Adele has a perfect manner of communication wither her husband – she has not only a voice, but the perfect manner to express it.

The result is that Edna’s awakening takes a strange path; she doesn’t learn to “find her voice” but, in opposition to Adele, “learns what cannot be expressed” (239). Nowhere is this inability to speak clearer than in her inability to communicate to the doctor why she is rebelling against the presence of her children (236-7).

So Edna’s awakening eventually is not a positive or freeing action. It is in fact an acknowledgement that the Utopian state of motherhood, freedom, and communication result in the invalidation of the self, and that nature itself seems to participate in this invalidation. “Her ‘awakening’ then, appears much less as an ideal self-realization than as the terrible question of how to understand selfhood at all in the face of its radical negation” (242). Edna’s awakening shows her that her project must be to “define being a person as the pitched confrontation with nature’s meaningless endlessness, a sea that we enter and against which we can only pit our own particular rhythms” (242). From there, Fleissner moves on to a discussion of the racial figures in The Awakening and how they fit into a larger schema, something I was unable to grasp without a stronger understanding of the rest of Fleissner’s book.