If Chopin could represent marriage as both lethal and joyful, a more lengthy exploration of her ambivalence is found in “Athénaïse,” the story of an unhappy wife who flees her well-meaning husband, Cazeau. After he tracks her down, their homeward journey takes them past a spot that reminds him of a slave who had escaped his father’s plantation when he was a boy. This unsettling memory implies that for women, marriage is tantamount to slavery. But when Athénaïse runs away again and Cazeau declines to pursue her, it is clear that he sees her as more than a piece of property. Nonetheless, the slave metaphor hangs over the conclusion of the story, which sees the wife’s willing return after several weeks of exile in New Orleans. The decisive factor is the discovery that she is pregnant, which brings her the first sparks of passion for her husband, along with the desire for home. Although the conclusion relegates Athénaïse to her role as wife and mother, its meaning is ambiguous. On the one hand, it seems to propose that learning to accept one’s proper place in the social order is a sign of maturity; on the other, it suggests more affirmatively that a woman must have the freedom to choose when and with whom she will assume that place. So, too, Cazeau has come to recognize his wife’s autonomy, rather than taking her presence for granted.
Although many of Chopin’s stories concern the problems of married women, she also writes perceptively about middle-aged single women. “A Pair of Silk Stockings” and “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” both deal with the struggles of women forced to support themselves. Mrs. Sommers of “A Pair of Silk Stockings” is a generous and self-sacrificing woman who, for once in her life, puts her own desires above those of others. The sympathetic description of her afternoon shopping spree suggests Chopin’s understanding of the loneliness and hardship of life as a single mother. Elizabeth Stock is another working woman, who loses her job at the post office after breaking the rules by reading the mail. Ironically, her transgression comes about because of her excessive dedication, which inspired her to deliver a postcard during a snowstorm when she happened to notice that it bore information crucial to a man’s career. After being fired, Elizabeth Stock lacks a sense of purpose and her health gradually declines. However, her sad demise also leads to the discovery of her abilities as a writer by the story’s unnamed narrator, who has been assigned the task of sorting through the dead woman’s papers. Although most are filled with “bad prose and impossible verse,” the ensuing narrative is the one piece that “bore any semblance to a connected or consecutive narration” (p. 211). While no undiscovered genius, Elizabeth Stock is a figure for the woman writer who finds a voice to tell the most important story of her life. Both she and Mrs. Sommers demonstrate the costs of excessive self-sacrifice. So, too, “The Godmother” is about a woman whose best interests are eclipsed by her fierce love for her godson. When he accidentally kills a man, she goes to such lengths to conceal the crime that she destroys their relationship, her friendships, and her own health.
Chopin’s stories often depict the pain of betrayal, disappointment, or loss of an intimate friend or relative. A woman with few close friends who avoided association with organized groups, she wrote of women who suffer the burden of unwanted social and emotional bonds. The Awakening directly confronts the paradox of being surrounded by loving friends and family but longing for freedom. Like the animal protagonist of “Emancipation,” Edna Pontellier is oppressed by the easy satisfaction of her material needs. A prosperous and agreeable husband, generous friends, and a bevy of cooks, maids, and nannies attend to her every whim and desire. Nonetheless, during a summer vacation at Grand Isle, she is stirred by a vague dissatisfaction that she finds both unpleasant and stimulating. Her unexciting marriage gradually begins to feel claustrophobic as she recognizes the more proprietary aspects of her husband’s behavior. Confronting the demands of marriage, children, and social life, Edna is stricken with a growing desire to escape it all but has limited resources for exploring the alternatives. Back home in New Orleans, she wanders the city by herself, neglects her responsibilities in the home, dabbles at becoming an artist, and engages in an extramarital affair. When none of these outlets proves satisfactory, she wades out into the sea, presumably to her death.
What Chopin’s contemporaries found particularly objectionable about The Awakening was the author’s apparent unwillingness to condemn her protagonist’s unconventional choices. Indeed, many reviews expressed concern with the moral constitution of its central character. “If the author had secured our sympathy for this unpleasant person it would not have been a small victory,” wrote a reviewer for Public Opinion in June 1899, “but we are well satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf.” Others concurred, finding little grounds for identification with Edna’s plight. A piece in The Nation dismissively summarized the novel’s plot, “‘The Awakening’ is a sad story of a Southern lady who wanted to do what she wanted to. From wanting to, she did, with disastrous consequences; but as she swims out to sea in the end, it is to be hoped that her example may lie for ever undredged. It is with high expectation that we open the volume, remembering the author’s agreeable short stories, and with real disappointment that we close it.” Given such evidence, it is not surprising that The Awakening has been mythologized as a scandal in its own time. It is certainly true that many of Chopin’s contemporaries decried the actions of her independently minded protagonist, and that others expressed disappointment at the novel’s departure from the charming local color of her previous fiction. However, these facts have led critics to exaggerate the negativity of reactions to The Awakening, and their consequences for Chopin herself.
Indeed, a number of reviews recognized the novel’s artistic accomplishment. Charles Deyo, exchange editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, enthused: “There may be many opinions touching other aspects of Mrs. Chopin’s novel ‘The Awakening,’ but all must concede its flawless art.” Compared with her previous publications, he detected a newfound confidence in its pages: “There is no uncertainty in the lines, so surely and firmly drawn. Complete mastery is apparent on every page. Nothing is wanting to make a complete artistic whole. In delicious English, quick with life, never a word too much, simple and pure, the story proceeds with classic severity through a labyrinth of doubt and temptation to dumb despair.” The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art concurred, praising Chopin for her bold approach to controversial topics: “The author has a clever way of managing a difficult subject, and wisely tempers the emotional elements found in the situation.”
Nancy Walker has observed that emphasis on The Awakening’s scandalous reception is linked to several other myths about the end of Chopin’s life. The first is that Chopin was ostracized by St. Louis society and that her book was banned from libraries. In truth, her most recent biographer, Emily Toth, notes that “the Mercantile Library and the St. Louis Public Library both bought multiple copies and kept them on the shelves until they wore out.” Nor is it the case, as a second myth suggests, that negative reactions to The Awakening drove Chopin into authorial paralysis. She lived only four years after its publication and, although she struggled to find venues for publishing her work, she continued to write and circulate short stories until her death.
It is true, however, that The Awakening was not fully appreciated until its rediscovery half a century later by a new generation of readers, who acknowledged its considerable formal sophistication and the complexity of its characterization. The publication of two major works by Norwegian scholar Per Seyersted—Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography and The Complete Works of Kate Chopin—inaugurated the reassessment of Chopin’s career that would establish her firmly within the annals of American literary history. It is no accident that surging interest in Chopin in the early 1970s coincided with the emergence of feminist criticism, which sought to bring overlooked authors into the literary canon and to reevaluate themes and locations trivialized by earlier generations of critics because of their association with women writers. While contro
versial to her contemporaries, Chopin’s frank treatment of female desire and autonomy, the dissatisfactions of marriage and motherhood, and the importance of artistic expression intersected perfectly with the concerns of the women’s movement. Influential members of the first generation of feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Sandra Gilbert would use Chopin as a paradigmatic instance of the work of feminist literary recovery. But once the struggle to establish Chopin as an important American author was won, it was possible to see that her significance extends beyond the bold thematization of women’s concerns. Her fiction’s considerable technical accomplishment and complex treatment of diverse characters and topics makes her a subject of ongoing scholarly interest. As critical tastes change and novels go in and out of fashion, Chopin’s work has consistently remained in print and become a staple of course syllabi.
The durability of The Awakening is due, in part, to the fact that, as with so much of Chopin’s previous writing, it refuses to provide simple answers to the difficult questions it raises. Its conclusion has proved especially resistant to definitive interpretation. Is Edna’s suicide a victory over the many demands her society has made of her? Or is it an easy way out of the otherwise messy and inevitable compromises of modern existence ? Has she reclaimed control by asserting the right to end her own life? Or has she passively acquiesced to her fate? Is wading into the sea a liberating alternative to the confines of a male-dominated culture? Or is it a pessimistic admission that women cannot find a space of their own within the existing social order?
How various readers have answered these questions has much to do with their assessment of Edna’s character—whether they take her to be a feminist heroine, selfish woman, victim, or bold iconoclast—as well as their understanding of the novel’s place within literary tradition. In certain respects, The Awakening borrows the concerns and settings of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. As Elaine Showalter has argued, its emphasis on domestic space and relationships between women locates it in the company of novels by such sentimentalist precursors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Susan Warner, and Maria Cum mins. However, Chopin avoids the rhetorical excesses and moralizing tendencies of these earlier authors. Her attention to the specifics of place, depiction of everyday life, and concern with women’s artistic autonomy aligns her with the somewhat later generation of female regionalists like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman.
There is also a case to be made for The Awakening as a work of naturalist fiction, despite the fact that this category has typically been associated with such aggressively masculine authors as Jack London and Frank Norris. Influenced by Darwinian theory, the naturalists depicted a world governed by powerful, amoral forces that would ultimately defeat the exertion of human agency and will. Bert Bender has suggested that Chopin was provoked by Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which emphasized the competitive aspects of the species’ struggle for reproduction. Though compelled by the notion of an innate physical attraction that could not be regulated by social institutions, Chopin objected to Darwin’s Victorian characterization of the female as passive and modest. A robust woman with strong appetites and a well-proportioned physique, Edna is determined to take an active role in the ritual of sexual selection. In a Darwinian universe, the social conventions of marriage are irrelevant to the sexual drive, which demands variety over constancy in choice of partners. In Bender’s analysis, Edna’s suicide results from the realization that her life is governed by forces outside her control. Her desire for autonomy is at odds with the species’ necessity to reproduce, which—after the exhilarating process of sexual conquest—inevitably relegates women to the role of motherhood.
In its emphasis on interior psychology at the expense of external description, and in its formal experimentation with time and perception, The Awakening also anticipates many of the strategies of modernist fiction. In contrast to the realist commitment to mundane surface detail, Chopin seems relatively unconcerned with mimetic representation. Michael Gilmore has described this quality as a privileging of subjective responses and expressions over the replication of external reality. He attributes Chopin’s interest in music to the fact that it is “an imageless art... neither mirroring nor duplicating an external form, and it shakes Edna to the depths because it provides immediate entrance to the subjective world of feelings.” The Awakening seems propelled more by impulse than measured narrative progression. While individual chapters are temporally coherent, the time that passes between one chapter and the next is highly varied, sometimes spanning a few hours and sometimes making a bigger or less clearly delineated leap forward. Memories, particularly of Edna’s childhood in the Kentucky blue-grass country, surface at unpredictable moments like a musical refrain that ties past and present together.
Just as time does not move in a predictable pattern, narrative perspective in The Awakening is constantly shifting. At some points the third-person narrator seems to echo Edna’s point of view. For example, in the final moments of her life, the narrative voice channels the protagonist’s own subjectivity: “How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (p. 133). At other points, it hovers at a remove that allows for ironic commentary. This is the case in an account of an evening at Grand Isle. When a tedious interlude by the Farival twins is interrupted by the parrot’s shrieks, the narrator observes wryly, “He was the only being present who possessed sufficient candor to admit that he was not listening to these gracious performances for the first time that summer” (pp. 28-29). We are to understand that these are not Edna’s observations, but the products of a more detached narrative consciousness. So, too, on the night of Edna’s first swim, the narrator checks Edna’s perceptions against reality. Believing herself to be far from shore, “a quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her senses” (pp. 33—34). The sublimity of Edna’s experience—in which she genuinely believes she has confronted the possibility of her own death—is put into perspective with a more measured description of the same event: “She had not gone any great distance—that is, what would have been a great distance for an experienced swimmer” (p. 33). This tonal disparity distinguishes Edna’s own melodramatic sensibility from a more reasoned narrative voice. Such experiments with narrative and point of view locate The Awakening somewhere between the realist commitment to external detail and the modernist interest in individual subjectivity.
Such varied cadences of tone and perspective are well suited to this story of desire and sexual awakening. Although the actual consummation of Edna’s affair with Alcée Arobin takes place in the space between chapters 31 and 32, the novel is suffused with sensual images, from the illicit books that circulate at Grand Isle to the luxuriant feel of expensive clothes and possessions, the gustatory pleasures of fine food and drink, the romantic intonations of the piano, and the caressing waves of the sea. Experiencing a heightened perception that engages all of her senses, Edna’s awakening is not reducible to heterosexual contact. And although the flirtations of Robert Lebrun are most commonly credited for prompting Edna’s desire, Showalter has rightly observed that her sensuality is actually ignited by intimate relationships with two women, Adèle Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz. Sitting with Adèle and Robert, Edna’s gaze is drawn not to Robert but to the “excessive physical charm” (p. 17) of her female companion. Seeking words to describe the intense bond between Edna and Adèle, the narrator concludes that “we might as well call [it] love” (p. 17). Edna develops a very different but equally intense attachment to the dour Mademoiselle Reisz. Hearing her at the piano arouses Edna’s passions to an orgasmic intensity that resonates “within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body” (p. 31). As this passage suggests, when it comes to women, love and physical desire are closely aligned. In Edna’s relatio
nships with men, the two are more often at odds. With a history of romantic attachments to unattainable male figures—“a sad-eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky” (p. 21), her neighbor’s fiancée, a great tragedian—it is not clear that Edna is actually seeking to consummate a heterosexual relationship. Although she loves Robert, she has sex with Arobin because his kiss awakens her desire. The regret she feels afterward is “neither shame nor remorse” (p. 97), but more a dawning awareness that she is “assailed” by emotions more powerful than reason or affection.
The seeming paradox that a greater knowledge of self comes through the suppression of rationality is at the heart of Edna’s development. In spite of its title and the many references to awakening that appear throughout the novel, readers are often surprised at how often Edna is either sleeping or overcome with a drowsiness that obstructs clarity of thought. For every image of a stirring, emergent consciousness there is another of narcotic stupor. As a “light was beginning to dawn dimly within her” (p. 16), Edna is moved not to wakefulness but to dreams; learning to swim gives her new power “to control the working of her body and her soul” (p. 33), but it also inspires her to reach “for the unlimited in which to lose herself’ (p. 33). Whereas Adèle is a figure of bustling, productive maternity, Edna is listless and disengaged. Whereas Mademoiselle Reisz turns her artistic talents into a career, Edna is satisfied to dabble at her painting “in an unprofessional way” (p. 14). Ironically, then, the awakening intimated by the novel’s title is not an initiation into any of the recognizable social roles modeled by its characters, but rather an escape from them.