This conclusion troubled Chopin’s contemporaries because it seemed to endorse a destructive self-absorption at the expense of social responsibility. It has provoked more recent readers because they see the extent to which Edna’s freedom is bought through the labor of others. She is surrounded by people who work, either in the home, like the resourceful Adèle, or in professions, like her husband. At the same time, the anonymous and rather disagreeable quadroon who cares for her children, the servants who shop, cook, and clean, and the Mexicans, Acadians, and African Americans who exist on the narrative periphery, create an environment in which Edna has no productive function. It is no wonder that early in the novel Léonce regards his sunburned wife as a piece of damaged property. Her crisis has been described by Michelle Birnbaum as that of the “colonial subject,” who cannot consciously recognize the racial and class inequities around her and consequently internalizes those conflicts as divisions within herself. Instead of acknowledging the disparities in her social environment, she experiences an imbalance within her own psychic landscape.
That Edna accepts the racial and class hierarchies of her culture is unsurprising. She lives in a sheltered and highly regulated environment that is rarely interrupted by the surrounding world. This insularity explains why the party at Grand Isle is so dismayed to learn of Robert’s imminent departure for Vera Cruz. It also explains the striking ignorance of their observations about Mexico: The pious lady in black asks him to investigate whether the power of her Mexican prayer beads extends beyond the border; Madame Ratignolle remarks that Mexicans are “a treacherous people, unscrupulous and revengeful” (p. 50), and Victor relays a trite story about “a Mexican girl who served chocolate one winter in a restaurant in Dauphine Street” (p. 50). Not only do they know nothing of Mexico, but lacking resources to understand genuine cultural or geographic difference, they can relate to the foreign only though the lens of their own limited experiences. Even less worldly than her companions, Edna remains silent during this conversation because she can “think of nothing to say about Mexico or the Mexicans” (p. 50). Nor, for that matter, can Robert, whose exact reasons for going, aside from an obscure business prospect, remain murky. Critics have noted that the character of Mariequita and an unnamed “Mexican girl” who gives Robert an embroidered tobacco pouch serve to associate travel south of the border with sexual adventure. But they have differed over the meanings of that association, some seeing it as a place of homosexual license, a reading that explains the unconsummated romance between Edna and Robert as well as “the gentleman whom he intend[ed] to join at Vera Cruz” (p. 49), others as a place of heterosexual opportunity.
While the narrative provides little means to resolve these questions, it is possible to remark on Mexico’s significance to Edna and her fate. She has nothing to say about it because she cannot conceive of places beyond the bounds of her own limited world. Having led a protected and uneventful life, she is unable to imagine that the solution to her problems lies in going elsewhere. Whereas men move to expand the horizon of experience - Léonce leaves his family behind for business trips to New York, and Robert leaves the country altogether—Edna’s only movement (other than circular wanderings in the city) is toward greater confinement, as she relocates from her spacious home into the more enclosed “pigeon house” around the corner. While it might be possible to see the new house as a cozy version of Virginia Woolf’s longed-for “room of one’s own,” it is also, more ominously, akin to the cage in “Emancipation.” Facing an increasing claustrophobia, which is inescapable through either imaginative or literal movement, Edna comes to believe that death is the only possible solution.
The profound ignorance of the characters in The Awakening about the rest of the world returns us to Chopin’s own last activity, her visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair. The Fair spoke to Americans’ thirst for knowledge about the rest of the world. At the same time, its allegedly wide-angle vision was actually a telescope that used other nations as a reference point to establish American superiority. As much as it addressed the desire to learn about and collaborate with a global community, it was also designed to parade the nation’s cultural advancement and growing economic and military might on a world stage. The sad irony that with supremacy come loneliness and isolation is crystallized in the image of Edna’s favored musical composition, “Solitude,” which evokes a man standing desolate and despairing before the sea. In addition to its many other accomplishments, The Awakening succeeds in illustrating the alienation that results from having the best that the world can offer, but existing under conditions that make it impossible to give of oneself in return. Chopin, who read widely, traveled to Europe, and witnessed pivotal events of her time, should not be confused with her protagonist. A widow, single mother, and professional writer, she lived her life fully and to its end. Such experience grants the far more worldly author the insight to depict a character whose lack of reciprocity is less an individual flaw than a flaw of a culture that treated women as property and maintained rigid racial and class structures. Although Chopin herself is often able to see around such obstacles, she also blames them for preventing Edna from finding other opportunities for self-realization on the rich and seething margins of her own empty, white world.
Rachel Adams teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and the co-editor of The Masculinity Studies Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). She has also published articles on American literature, film, disability, race, and gender studies.
THE AWAKENING
CHAPTER 1
A GREEN AND YELLOW parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:
“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!1 That’s all right!”
He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.
Mr. Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, arose with an expression and an exclamation of disgust. He walked down the gallery and across the narrow “bridges” which connected the Lebrun cottages one with the other. He had been seated before the door of the main house. The parrot and the mocking-bird were the property of Madame Lebrun, and they had the right to make all the noise they wished. Mr. Pontellier had the privilege of quitting their society when they ceased to be entertaining.
He stopped before the door of his own cottage, which was the fourth one from the main building and next to the last. Seating himself in a wicker rocker which was there, he once more applied himself to the task of reading the newspaper. The day was Sunday; the paper was a day old. The Sunday papers had not yet reached Grand Isle.2 He was already acquainted with the market reports, and he glanced restlessly over the editorials and bits of news which he had not had time to read before quitting New Orleans the day before.
Mr. Pontellier wore eye-glasses. He was a man of forty, of medium height and rather slender build; he stooped a little. His hair was brown and straight, parted on one side. His beard was neatly and closely trimmed.
Once in a while he withdrew his glance from the newspaper and looked about him. There was more noise than ever over at the house. The main building was called “the house,” to distinguish it from the cottages. The chattering and whistling birds were still at it. Two young girls, the Farival twins, were playing a duet from Zampa3 upon the piano. Madame Lebrun was bustling in and out, giving orders in a high key to a yard-boy whenever she got inside the house, and directions in an equally high voice to a dining-room servant whenever she got outside. She was a fresh, pretty woman, clad always in white with elbow sleeves. Her starched skirts crinkled as she came and went. Farther down, before one of the cottages, a lady in black was walking demurely up and down, telling her beads. A good many person
s of the pension had gone over to the Chênière Caminada4 in Beaudelet’s lugger5 to hear mass. Some young people were out under the water-oaks playing croquet. Mr. Pontellier’s two children were there—sturdy little fellows of four and five. A quadroon6 nurse followed them about with a far-away, meditative air.
Mr. Pontellier finally lit a cigar and began to smoke, letting the paper drag idly from his hand. He fixed his gaze upon a white sunshade that was advancing at snail’s pace from the beach. He could see it plainly between the gaunt trunks of the water-oaks and across the stretch of yellow camomile. The gulf looked far away, melting hazily into the blue of the horizon. The sunshade continued to approach slowly. Beneath its pink-lined shelter were his wife, Mrs. Pontellier, and young Robert Lebrun. When they reached the cottage, the two seated themselves with some appearance of fatigue upon the upper step of the porch, facing each other, each leaning against a supporting post.
“What folly! to bathe at such an hour in such heat!” exclaimed Mr. Pontellier. He himself had taken a plunge at daylight. That was why the morning seemed long to him.
“You are burnt beyond recognition,” he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her lawn7 sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers. He sent back an answering smile.
“What is it?” asked Pontellier, looking lazily and amused from one to the other. It was some utter nonsense; some adventure out there in the water, and they both tried to relate it at once. It did not seem half so amusing when told. They realized this, and so did Mr. Pontellier. He yawned and stretched himself. Then he got up, saying he had half a mind to go over to Klein’s hotel and play a game of billiards.
“Come go along, Lebrun,” he proposed to Robert. But Robert admitted quite frankly that he preferred to stay where he was and talk to Mrs. Pontellier.
“Well, send him about his business when he bores you, Edna,” instructed her husband as he prepared to leave.
“Here, take the umbrella,” she exclaimed, holding it out to him. He accepted the sunshade, and lifting it over his head descended the steps and walked away.
“Coming back to dinner?” his wife called after him. He halted a moment and shrugged his shoulders. He felt in his vest pocket; there was a ten-dollar bill there. He did not know; perhaps he would return for the early dinner and perhaps he would not. It all depended upon the company which he found over at Klein’s and the size of “the game.” He did not say this, but she understood it, and laughed, nodding good-by to him.
Both children wanted to follow their father when they saw him starting out. He kissed them and promised to bring them back bonbons and peanuts.
CHAPTER 2
MRS. PONTELLIER’S EYES WERE quick and bright; they were a yellowish brown, about the color of her hair. She had a way of turning them swiftly upon an object and holding them there as if lost in some inward maze of contemplation or thought.
Her eyebrows were a shade darker than her hair. They were thick and almost horizontal, emphasizing the depth of her eyes. She was rather handsome than beautiful. Her face was captivating by reason of a certain frankness of expression and a contradictory subtle play of features. Her manner was engaging.
Robert rolled a cigarette. He smoked cigarettes because he could not afford cigars, he said. He had a cigar in his pocket which Mr. Pontellier had presented him with, and he was saving it for his after-dinner smoke.
This seemed quite proper and natural on his part. In coloring he was not unlike his companion. A clean-shaved face made the resemblance more pronounced than it would otherwise have been. There rested no shadow of care upon his open countenance. His eyes gathered in and reflected the light and languor of the summer day.
Mrs. Pontellier reached over for a palm-leaf fan that lay on the porch and began to fan herself, while Robert sent between his lips light puffs from his cigarette. They chatted incessantly: about the things around them; their amusing adventure out in the water—it had again assumed its entertaining aspect; about the wind, the trees, the people who had gone to the Chênière; about the children playing croquet under the oaks, and the Farival twins, who were now performing the overture to “The Poet and the Peasant.”8
Robert talked a good deal about himself. He was very young, and did not know any better. Mrs. Pontellier talked a little about herself for the same reason. Each was interested in what the other said. Robert spoke of his intention to go to Mexico in the autumn, where fortune awaited him. He was always intending to go to Mexico, but some way never got there. Meanwhile he held on to his modest position in a mercantile house 9 in New Orleans, where an equal familiarity with English, French and Spanish gave him no small value as a clerk and correspondent.
He was spending his summer vacation, as he always did, with his mother at Grand Isle. In former times, before Robert could remember, “the house” had been a summer luxury of the Lebruns. Now, flanked by its dozen or more cottages, which were always filled with exclusive visitors from the “Quartier Français,”10 it enabled Madame Lebrun to maintain the easy and comfortable existence which appeared to be her birthright.
Mrs. Pontellier talked about her father’s Mississippi plantation and her girlhood home in the old Kentucky blue-grass country. She was an American woman, with a small infusion of French which seemed to have been lost in dilution. She read a letter from her sister, who was away in the East, and who had engaged herself to be married. Robert was interested, and wanted to know what manner of girls the sisters were, what the father was like, and how long the mother had been dead.
When Mrs. Pontellier folded the letter it was time for her to dress for the early dinner.
“I see Leonce isn’t coming back,” she said, with a glance in the direction whence her husband had disappeared. Robert supposed he was not, as there were a good many New Orleans club men over at Klein’s.
When Mrs. Pontellier left him to enter her room, the young man descended the steps and strolled over toward the croquet players, where, during the half-hour before dinner, he amused himself with the little Pontellier children, who were very fond of him.
CHAPTER 3
IT WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK that night when Mr. Pontellier returned from Klein’s hotel. He was in an excellent humor, in high spirits, and very talkative. His entrance awoke his wife, who was in bed and fast asleep when he came in. He talked to her while he undressed, telling her anecdotes and bits of news and gossip that he had gathered during the day. From his trousers pockets he took a fistful of crumpled bank notes and a good deal of silver coin, which he piled on the bureau indiscriminately with keys, knife, handkerchief, and whatever else happened to be in his pockets. She was overcome with sleep, and answered him with little half utterances.
He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation.
Mr. Pontellier had forgotten the bonbons and peanuts for the boys. Notwithstanding he loved them very much, and went into the adjoining room where they slept to take a look at them and make sure that they were resting comfortably. The result of his investigation was far from satisfactory. He turned and shifted the youngsters about in bed. One of them began to kick and talk about a basket full of crabs.
Mr. Pontellier returned to his wife with the information that Raoul had a high fever and needed looking after. Then he lit a cigar and went and sat near the open door to smoke it.
Mrs. Pontellier was quite sure Raoul had no fever. He had gone to bed perfectly well, she said, and nothing had ail
ed him all day. Mr. Pontellier was too well acquainted with fever symptoms to be mistaken. He assured her the child was consuming at that moment in the next room.
He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother’s place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once; making a living for his family on the street, and staying at home to see that no harm befell them. He talked in a monotonous, insistent way.
Mrs. Pontellier sprang out of bed and went into the next room. She soon came back and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning her head down on the pillow. She said nothing, and refused to answer her husband when he questioned her. When his cigar was smoked out he went to bed, and in half a minute he was fast asleep.
Mrs. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake. She began to cry a little, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her peignoir.11 Blowing out the candle, which her husband had left burning, she slipped her bare feet into a pair of satin mules12 at the foot of the bed and went out on the porch, where she sat down in the wicker chair and began to rock gently to and fro.
It was then past midnight. The cottages were all dark. A single faint light gleamed out from the hallway of the house. There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night.