The Awakening

This book is considered a classic partly, I think, because it is considered to be one of the earliest feminist novels. It seems to me to have a lot more to do with the contrast between two cultures, Anglo and Creole. I guess it must be a feminist novel, though, because the main character engages in a profound and courageous assault on the domineering patriarchal establishment: she gets bored with her average life to her mostly decent husband, commits adultery, and then kills herself. How liberating. Well, that seems to be what passes for feminism in so much Western literature: female ennui. Somehow it all seems so self-important in a world where, even today, women are in some places still genitally mutilated, regularly beaten, or basically enslaved.

For once I'd like to see a "feminist novel" in which a woman remains loyal to her family and makes the most of her life and of herself even in the face of society's limitations. At least the novelette is well written and easy to read, and it also makes a good study in symbolism.

A Period Piece… or not?

I read this feminist classic (for the first time, amazingly) in the splendid Simon & Schuster hardbound edition, which I got from the library. Beautifully printed, on generously-sized pages of thick paper, it was a joy to read and to hold. The tone was set from the start by the gallery of period photographs offered as a preface. Beginning with a dark and painterly photo of wind-blown pines on the barrier island of Grand Isle, where much of the novella is set, it moved on to views of the Bayou country, a New Orleans street, women in drawing rooms taking tea or listening to music, dark interiors, a sun-bleached veranda, and a glorious sea-bathing scene like a French Impressionist painting. Together, they are a time machine, transporting us to a different place and era, Southern Louisiana at the very end of the 19th century. Kate Chopin's book was published in 1899.

And you read it like a period piece at first too. It opens in Madame Lebrun's guest house on Grand Isle, where families from New Orleans would take one of the cottages connected by walkways to the main house, the wives and children staying for the entire summer, their husbands working in their New Orleans banks or brokerages and joining them for weekends. A relaxed routine of trips to the beach, meals in the big house, and informal gatherings in the evening devoted to music, recitations, or playing cards. The young Madame Edna Pontellier, the Kentucky bride of a Creole businessman, is there with her two young children and their quadroon nurse. She is waited upon by young Robert Lebrun, son of their hostess and half-a-dozen years her junior, dancing attendance, fetching fans or cooling drinks, and reading to her when requested to do so. Nothing is meant by it; there is nothing to hide from her husband; it is just part of the life of a young and pretty lady of leisure. A life punctuated by picayune problems and restrained celebrations, all of which Chopin describes with sly humor:

n  The ice-cream was passed around with cake—gold and silver cake arranged on platters in alternate slices; it had been made and frozen during the afternoon back of the kitchen by two black women, under the supervision of Victor. It was pronounced a great success—excellent if it had only contained a little less vanilla or a little more sugar, if it had been frozen a degree harder, and if the salt might have been kept out of portions of it. Victor was proud of his achievement, and went about recommending it and urging every one to partake of it to excess.n

I notice that one edition of the book describes it as a "classic tale of infidelity," as though it were a bayou Madame Bovary. But it is not that. Edna Pontellier's Awakening is not about taking a lover, but about realizing herself as an independent human being, her own mistress and the property of no one. I expected this. Some years ago, I adapted Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" of 1894 into a chamber opera. In this, a woman's devastation at the news of her husband's death in a railroad accident turns within the hour to the jubilant realization that she is now free. By comparison with that two-page story, the nine-month span of the novella seemed at first an indulgence, less effective because so much less compressed.

But I didn't take account of what Chopin was doing on the inside, and how the slow development is essential to its effect. For while apparently focusing on trivia, the author is really looking beyond them into her character's mind. There is a scene about a third of the way into the book when another guest, the diminutive and vaguely malevolent Mademoiselle Reisz, a professional musician, is prevailed upon to play the piano. Once more, Chopin uses her gentle humor to pin Madame Pontellier's butterfly taste:

n  Edna was what she herself called very fond of music. Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind. […] Another piece called to her mind a dainty young woman clad in an Empire gown, taking mincing steps as she came down a long avenue between tall hedges. Again, another reminded her of children at play, and still another of nothing on earth but a demure lady stroking a cat.n

But Mlle. Reisz's playing has a totally different effect upon her:

n  The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier's spinal column. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth.

She waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But 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.n

For a moment, Mlle. Reisz made me think of Madame Merle in Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1880), another work in which a young wife comes to question the married state. But Chopin's character turns out not to be malevolent at all, and indeed she becomes a confidante for Edna as she returns to New Orleans for the winter and begins to spread her wings. It is a brilliant trajectory, soaring into the light, especially when her husband goes off to New York for several months, leaving her to her own devices, and her mother-in-law takes the children for an extended stay in the country.

Now the photos at the start of this edition no longer seem like period tableaux at all, but symbols of repression, hints of escape, harbingers of disaster. Not imposed on the text, but brilliantly selected to reflect its inner symbolism. For this may be Kate Chopin's most brilliant stroke of all: not merely to show an inner life blossoming within the confines of period convention, but to suggest that the bright arc of that inner life is not the simple ascender that first appeared, but twinned with its dark and inverse reflection. It is not until the final page that you realize what Chopin has made: a study of a psychological condition that is commonplace now, but I can't think of ever being treated in fiction before. Not a period piece at all, but something strikingly modern in a way that transcends the simple "tale of infidelity" promised in the blurb, or even the pioneering feminist tract, but that goes deep inside the soul.

Fortunately, knowing nothing about the book other than its title, that closing chapter took me entirely by surprise. But only as I was looking back through the text to find my quotations, did I realize how carefully Chopin had in fact prepared both the complexity of her inner portrait and its eventual resolution. For instance, I read right through her Chapter 6 (of 39), which I append here in its entirety for those who have already read this magnificent and deceptive novella.

n  n    Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.

A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her—the light which, showing the way, forbids it.

At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight—perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.n  n

"But they need not thought that they could possess her, body and soul."

If there ever was a Feminist Manifesto, it truly is Kate Chopin's "The Awakening."

Edna Pontellier is a 28-year-old wife and mother in New Orleans, 1900. Her husband is well-off, and Edna's days consist of watching the nanny take care of her two young boys, scolding the cook over bad soup, giving and attending champagne-filled dinner parties, and receiving formal calls from high society New Orleans ladies on Tuesdays. Also, the Pontelliers spend every summer on the coast of Louisianna, in a beach house. (The nanny goes with, while Edna is free to spend her days as she likes--which happens to be boating and swimming with the unmarried son of the beach home's proprietor--Robert).

But there's an anguish growing within Mrs. P. Her inability to connect with her husband and her children leaves her feeling oppressed. Gradually, and with the aid of young Robert, however, a spark is lit. "In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her." In other words, after seven years of marriage, Edna's finally getting "schooled" on what it really means to be a wife and mom. And she's not feeling super cut-out for the job.


Mrs. Pontellier is at a crossroads. Reminded of walking aimlessly through a meadow as a child, Edna yearns for the time (pre-loveless marriage, pre-kids) when she didn't have to calculate every step. She longs to be lifted from the weight of her "blindly assumed" responsibilities and to be allowed to wander purposelessly. Edna aches for solitude, but fears she doesn't possess the courage to defy social constraint and become a free entity--free to leave behind her husband, home, and children and follow her heart.

Edna's duality and transformation reminded me of several in fiction--from Frankenstein's monster to Kafka's cockroach. The new, sexy Edna recognizes herself as different from her former self--a new creation. Like the monster, she is a "newly awakened being." The old world is now "alien" and "antagonistic." She has cast aside the mask that she has been wearing for the world. New Edna is bold and frisky, like "an animal waking in the sun."

Big sigh, because here's where I try to fit myself into Edna's way of thinking. I guess somewhere on the feminist spectrum, like all theoretical spectrums, I fall somewhere in the middle. Yes, I can see how Edna might feel trapped and oppressed. Domestic life can surely be repetitious, mundane, and exasperating. I can imagine yearning for something to happen to break the monotony. I can imagine how it would feel to a woman to be regarded as a piece of property--hand picked to run a household and bear children, with no hope of variation, peering out on the rest of her life and seeing very few choices ahead--outside of what will be next for dinner.

But toward the other end, I can see things that Edna failed to see--the gratification that comes from growing a family...what you get when you give...the inner peace that comes from never doubting your purpose and the course of your life. Edna felt her children were robbing her of her soul, I give mine away freely, every day.

Although I don't 100% identify with Edna, I can still appreciate works like this. Because women like Chopin were bold enough to write characters like Edna, the way women were perceived was drastically changed. Books like The Awakening paved the way for modern women to choose where we fall on the spectrum (the CHOICE is the key), to chart our own course, to soar and not sink.

Does anyone really grow out of crushing on people? You're going to turn around and tell me you have, now, aren't you - that it's years since you had one, you can't even remember when it was, although you vaguely remember who it was.

I'm not like that. I crush constantly; on people I know, people I don't, people out of my own imagination. They last anything from a few months to a few years, and I never admit them to anyone, during or afterwards. I keep a list in my diary, intermittently; there's a folder on my computer of the made-up ones, what they're like and things I've thought about them, with dates stretching back to about 2003. I keep them because they, more than anything else, tell me about myself: what I want to be, what sort of people I want to be close to, and what my sexuality looks like.

That's probably really weird. But I've always been very introspective and a keeper of statistics, so for me, it makes sense - I can articulate a lot about myself because of it, and nobody else ever has to see it.

In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier feels lost and alone in a marriage she feels nothing about, with children about whom she doesn't feel the mothering instinct she's supposed to feel. She crushes on a man she meets on holiday, falls - or so she thinks - in love with him; she goes home and the starkness of her lack of options weighs on her so much that she's dazed, a trapped animal who doesn't see any way out.

Is there an awakening in this book? Maybe Edna Pontellier could do with keeping a secret folder of all her crushes and how she imagines herself holding their hands. If she has any kind of awakening in this book, it's that nobody can live being only a recipient of feelings. Passivity never works forever. Sure, the odds are stacked against her, but one day, you have to learn to delineate your own feelings, and articulate them, if only to yourself. By hook or by crook, you just have to.

And me with my spreadsheets and schedules and quantifyings - I don't think Edna learned to articulate anything. She vaguely felt that there was something that needed to be articulated, and she certainly felt that it made her unhappy. But she attached it to a crush and left it at that, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the real tragedy in The Awakening. Edna is not denied sexual agency - or rather she is, but what does it matter? It's the denial of self-knowledge and self-understanding that seems to me to be the saddest thing here.

What's awful is that in some ways, she gets so close. If I met her, this is what I would say: keep painting, keep drawing. Keep listening to music, just like you do. Write down how you feel, in as much detail as you can. Keep your counsel; set aside some money. And in six months, come back, and look at it all. You'll see the patterns in the tide of your mind, and you'll see what direction they're going in. And, Edna, then, maybe you can know yourself well enough to wake up.

“She had resolved never again to belong to anyone but herself”
Another gap in my knowledge and culture filled. To my shame, I had never heard of the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904), and thus also not of this surprising novel. Surprising especially because it goes against our traditional image of bourgeois society in Europe and America. In short, Chopin offers the story of the ‘self-discovery’ of 28-year old Edna Pontellier as a woman. “Ha!”, I hear you shout, “Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, Effi Briest, Anna Karenina!” Yes, certainly, those are absolutely renowned and respected predecessors. But in this case, and I guess maybe for the first time, it is a story related by a woman herself. Does that make a difference? Yes, you can tell: Chopin records the development of protagonist Edna much more from within, with by the way also a lot of very sensual details, very unusual for that time (1899), while with the male authors, we get to see much more of the outside. And although this story also ends tragically (Chopin ultimately remained stuck within the boundaries of bourgeois morality), Chopin presents the process that Edna goes through much more subtly, with sometimes very telling indirect details. An additional plus is the particular envirenment this story is set in: New Orleans with its large Creole community. It doesn't always have to be the posh European bourgeoisie. Rating 3.5 stars.

Trezirea la viaţă este un roman găsit întâmplător acum patru ani când căutăm altceva... prima citită in aceasta manieră după Madame Bovary, carte a scandalizat autoritatea catolică conservatoare a sfârşitului de secol al XVIII-a datorită libertăţilor exacerbate şi anormale perioadei respective însuşite de personajele feminine ale lui Kate, un feminism incipit şi încă stângaci ce anticipează o maniera literară mai dezinhibată a începutului de secol al XIX-lea,precursoare a Zeldei Fitzgerald şi avându-i ca mentori pe: Maupassant, Flaubert sau Zola ,Kate abordează tematici prea deranjante pentru societatea închistată doar între alb şi negru,scriitoare îşi permite să scoată lanţurile într-un mod brutal şi nepermis de pe mâinile femeilor şi să le trimită în libertatea valurilor, lucru privit cu un ochi critic,denigrat de cei mai catolici decât Papa la vremea aceea…
Trezirea la viaţă i-a uimit pe marii scriitorii ai vremii contemporani cu Kate, dar a inhibat şi mai mult publicul larg inchizitor, da, Edna-protagonista romanului îşi permite să iasă din confortul casei singur tot mai des, să se plimbe prin cartiere mărginaşe zilnic uitând de cei doi copiii şi de soţul său-un domn cu reputaţie imaculată în societate.
Edna mai are şi pretenția să simtă oarecum un ataşament şi faţă de un bărbat,altul decât soţul ei, se îndrăgosteşte de Robert un tânăr mai mic cu cinci ani decât ea care posedă după părerea mea o conştiinţă aproape dostoievskiană pâna la sfârșit deoarece nu o încurajează pe Edna spre un adulter deşi e îndrăgostit nebuneşte de ea şi ca urmare a acestei nebunii pe care nu o mai poate stăpâni pleacă în Mexic ca să o uite...
Totul devine chinuitor şi apatic pentru Edna care lipsită până şi de chipul bărbatului pe care îl iubeşte cu adevărat şi închistată într-o căsătorie numai de convenienţe unde până şi maternitatea e o corvoadă.

Edna cedează avansurilor domnului Arobin, un tip aventurier cu reputaţie proastă, devenindu-i amantă…
O carte care m-a ţinut în suspans,naturaleţea scrierii şi stilul rafinat al povestirii precum şi aptitudinile narative o apropie pe Kate de marii genii ale literaturii clasice franceze: Emile Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, subtilitatea lirică şi neforţată a descrierii, fluenţa desfăşurării acţiunii şi subiectivismul faptelor personajului care nu necesită niciodată o justificare,totul se petrece spontan, neplănuit şi parcă e învăluit într-un abur de mister şi beatitudine regăsită ce nu mai lasă loc de prejudecăţi sau cântăriri inutile.

Blimey, I didn't see that end coming...

This was an early feminist work, about a woman's struggles against conformity of society and married life. Written in 1899, it wasn't recognised as any sort of feminist work until much later, though I think it is still little heard of today.

I read this for a feminist group choice and I'm glad to have discovered it. There were elements that reminded me of Madame Bovary, with the main character feeling unsatisfied with her seemingly comfortable married life. Much like with Emma, in this story we follow Edna, as she seeks to find her own happiness.

On the whole I enjoyed this, as I was intrigued to find out what happened to Edna and the other people in her life. There were some nicely written passages, though it did feel a little unrefined at times and the short disjointed paragraphs took some getting used to. In the end I was left wanting, with many more questions than answers.

All the way through I pondered the different conclusions, trying to guess if Edna would get a happy ending or not. At no time did I consider how things would actually turn out and I'm not sure that I liked it.

The story of a woman’s self-discovery, ‘The Awakening’ explores the emotional journey of Edna Pontellier, who is materially and socially successfully, but emotionally unfulfilled. Edna begins to fall in love with Robert Lebrun, a callow if sensitive young man whose charismatic nature wins over Edna, making her realise the emotional shallowness of her marriage with her husband and its superficial and passionless nature. This awakening washes over Edna gradually, like the undulations of the tide they gradually carry Edna into a stormy sea, which acts as a dominant motif in the novel, a kind of symbol of freedom and self-realisation and ultimately, the place where Edna decides to end her life. Indeed there is a sense of restrained poetry throughout the novel, of the pale, opalescent moon-light on the beach-shore, as a heavy sense of symbolism dominates the novel; in a world in which emotions are restrained or repressed, they find their outlets in the environment;

“It was then past midnight. The cottages were all dark. A single faint light gleamed out form the hallway of the house. There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an owl in the top of a water-oak, and the ever-lasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It was like a mournful lullaby in the night.”

Mixed in with the sense of melancholy which pervades the novel is the somewhat decadent world of Creole Louisiana, as well as the changes taking place in an increasingly modernising society, a world in which female emancipation was beginning to gain a foot-hold and where sexual mores were gradually being relaxed. The heroine, Edna, isn’t a particularity brilliant or dazzling woman, artistic proclivities aside, but she is a woman who is gradually awakening form the emotional slumber which she had stuck in, as love jolts her from her long somnabulation.