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.

I can barely stand this book. I’m not one to give sympathy to anyone who commits infidelity. Man or woman.

The Awakening, Kate Chopin

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899.

The Awakening set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton, and Henry James. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern masterpieces of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.

‎The awakening and other stories, ‎Kate Chopin; edited by Nina Baym; introducton by Kaye Gibbons‬, ‎New York‬: ‎The Modern Library‬, ‎2000 = 1379‬. 375 p.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش نسخه انگلیسی: روز یازدهم ماه آگوست سال2014میلادی

عنوان: بیداری؛ نویسنده: کیت شوپن؛ برگردان: ماهان سیار‌منش؛ رشت دوات معاصر‏‫، 1397؛ در 210ص؛ شابک9786009989133؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالت متحده آمریکا - سده19م‬

رمان «بیداری» نوشته ی روانشاد بانو «کیت شوپن» است، که نخستین بار در سال1899میلادی منتشر شده است؛ داستان درباره ی زندگی «ادنا»، و کشمکشهای ایشان، بر سر اندیشه هایی درباره ی زنانگی، و مادر بودن است؛ کتاب یکی از نخستین رمانهای آمریکایی است، که بر مشکلات زنان تمرکز میکند، و از سویی، در دیدگاه اندیشورزان، نقطه ی آغازینی، برای برابری زنان و مردان، به شمار میآید

داستان با «ادنا» آغاز میشود، او با خانواده اش، برای گذران تعطیلات، به جزایر «گرند» رفته اند؛ در آنجا «ادنا»، به مرد جوانی به نام «رابرت لبران» نزدیک میشود، اما پیش از اینکه با هم رابطه داشته باشند، «رابرت» به «مکزیک» میرود؛ «ادنا» بدون «رابرت»، احساس تنهایی میکند، اما چیزی نمیگذرد، که به خانه ی خویش در «نیو اورلینز» برمیگردند، و ایشان دوست پسری برای خودش پیدا میکند....؛ فیلم «گرند آیزل» نیز با الهام از این رمان ساخته شده است

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 13/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 02/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

“It may all sound very petty to complain about, but I tell you that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust.”
-Warner, Lolly Willowes

This book is an early distillation of a particular kind of novel that was being written periodically throughout the early twentieth century. These novels are all variations on the same theme, but the basic outline is the same. This one will serve to give you a pretty good idea of the lot:

Edna Pontellier is the rather well-to-do wife of a New Orleans businessman with two children, a well-appointed home, servants and a clear, clearly fulfilled place in her particular social circle. Her husband is kind to her in many conventional ways: he spares no expense on the household, takes something of an interest in the raising of the children, buys her personal and lavish presents and summer holidays, seems to offer periodic compliments and is not at all jealous or possessive. He has his faults of course- he likes his routines to be how they are and he places great importance on his wife fulfilling her “feminine” role in the household and society- dealing with the servants, ensuring high quality dinners, ministering to his needs and generally putting him first when he is home, being constantly involved with children, paying the same morning calls to the same wives of business associates that she always has. None of these expectations is particularly out-of-line for her time and place, and indeed she has never had to bear some of the extra morally horrible but legally acceptable extra burdens other wives have to shoulder without questioning. Her husband is occasionally rude and out of temper, he sometimes spends his evening out with his friends and blames her unfairly for occurrences that are blown all out of proportion. But that's about it.

And yet, “It may all sound very petty to complain about, but I tell you that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust.”

Of course, as we know, this is not the real problem. The problem is with the underlying foundations of the Patriarchal System of Various Assumptions and Ground Rules. In this case, the System manifests in her husband’s casual assumption that she sees her “occupation” as he does, to live her life as a recommendation and added enticement to her husband’s business career, or even to further it. There’s a scene where he recommends that she accept and reject calling cards and invitations on the basis of whether each woman in question has a husband that will further his career. He expects to everything at home reflect his success out of the home, including the dinner he eats (which he seems to be more upset about on the basis that it does not suit his status than anything). He conceptualizes her private life as a “public” one (since she has no “public” one to add to his), bound by all the same accommodations and professional decisions that a person in a career might make. When she deviates from her conventionally feminine choices, he assumes she may need medical treatment.

Like the feminine version of Bartleby the Scrivener, the rebellion phase begins with “I would prefer not to,” and continues until she’s figured out she would simply prefer not to live most of her life at all. Then of course, she has to decide what to do next.

This is where a lot of the stories differ. In Lolly Willowes, perhaps the clearest parallel to this book, the book brings to the surface all the guilt and self-hatred that that “fine dust” can arouse in a woman used to a lifetime of its constraints. Lolly actually conceives herself to be a witch, *an actual servant of the devil*, because she finally chooses to live a life according to her desires, to ignore the claims and needs of the other people that she has spent her life tending thus far. This is encouraged by the fact that Lolly has never achieved that supposed “highest calling” for women: a husband and children. Thus, all she is supposed to have to offer is a life of selfless service to others that she is dependent on. Thus it makes sense for her to consider herself not only less than nothing, but actually actively evil for denying to further repay society what is seen as her only natural duty, given her lack of these highest blessings. All Passion Spent is another perhaps more mature parallel. In this iteration, Lady Slane actually has achieved the husband and children. What is more, they are grown and successful, with children of their own. Her husband was an eminent public servant and she fulfilled her “role” (just like Edna’s husband had requested) for all of her life. As Edna states clearly and expressively in The Awakening:

"at a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life- that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions."

Lady Slane has maintained this and chosen not to tell anyone for decades upon decades of marriage, so much so that even her family forgot that she was an actual person rather than a precious object, of sorts, to be taken care of much as an heirloom might be. Her Bartleby moment comes through in a meeting deciding her future, where her children have almost forgotten that she is a participant in the conversation. She decides to live out her life, like Lolly, in a house of her own. In this case it is the house itself, rather than an imaginary relationship with the devil, that becomes Lady Slane’s rebellion. A quirky, falling apart house with a sympathetic caretaker, becomes, bafflingly to her family, of greater interest to her than her children and grandchildren.

The Enchanted April is a luxurious, loving and-all-too-temporary bath of the golden sunlight of the prime of this story. It’s presented as a fantasy of escape. The women involved take a house in Italy and spend charmed, perpetually-twilight-hour weeks of stillness, contemplation, repressed anger and joy escaping their obligations to their family, to their husbands or other men, their poses to the world and their need to repress their feelings. There is one woman, indeed, who sometimes barely seems to move at all, perpetually walking around with a suppressed, blissful smile on her face. There are men in the novel, but they enter what is clearly a world of women, enchanted indeed by their fantasies and repressed longings. Some women place more boundaries and limitations on letting themselves go than others, but the trend is there, and it is the opposite of what is found on the outside. Even this brief moment of suspension and stillness restores some of the women enough to go on, some couples leave transformed, more or less, and we fade out with quiet, with sheer quiet still the ultimate dream of nirvana.

Mrs. Dalloway provides a different, more kaleidoscopic perspective on the same theme, perhaps even a slightly more optimistic and loving one in its own way. Clarissa Dalloway actually finds a kind of fulfillment in her duties as a housewife, in her every day errands and domestic creations. The interesting change of perspective here is that it seems like Woolf’s attempt to understand how this can be the case when she herself is so unlike this, rather than having the perspective be explaining a “different” woman to a mass of people who understand and live her opposite. Clarissa Dalloway, like Edna, understands that split between the interior and exterior life and instinctively lives it out each day. She, like these other women, has desires beyond her household, but has found reasons not to fulfill them. She has found her own way of making her life her own- even with a husband that she seems to have not much connection to, with a former lover for whom she can still have strong feelings after all these years, and with an unsatisfying daughter who is decidedly not her double in any way. She’s able to make these obligations into a kind of mission and to see the tiny beauty in the every day things that she achieves, or at least to come to see it after a daily struggle with her whole situation that mirrors some of the feelings these other women have, even if she justifies it to herself and thinks through it differently. Her slightly more optimistic conclusion (in its way) about the business of fulfilling her role as a woman and what it can lead to, at its best, does not at all lessen the struggles and doubts and reflections that we see her go through. Her success in repressing them might make her stronger in some ways, but it doesn’t mean that she, like Lady Slane, has seemingly ceased to be a person in the eyes and become only outward show. She maintains her personhood throughout, which is triumph most of these ladies desire to achieve anyway.

Of course, the most obvious precursor to all this is the infamous Emma Bovary’s disastrous venture into speculation and dreams, due to her insatiable longing for something more, something higher to believe in than the calling she’s been given as a woman. Anna Karenina has its own piece to share as well, of course, in its way. But these headlong, rush-to-the-head statements, these explosions of joy and rage are screams in the night, almost in a category by themselves, one separate from the whispers, the candlelight dreams and embedded-in-the-everyday transformations that are the rest of these books. Those ladies seek to destroy, to smash, in a way, whereas these ladies seek to simply… exist in a different way. They want to find a way for themselves that is slightly different, not the expected, but not…publicly. These are still private individuals still interested in keeping their privacy and existing within most bounds. They are at most…. Slightly off, in the context of their day, or perhaps in the case of Clarissa Dalloway, not outwardly “off” at all. They are interested in delving into and acting on some specific and long cherished thoughts that are not necessarily radically out of the norm. It is the sort of “odd” that earns you sideways looks from your children and a “Well, I just never thought that you,” or “I just don’t know what you mean by…,” when you push them as to what exactly is wrong. It’s eccentricity, not revolutionary.

I think the better predecessors are the more-or-less coded versions of the narrative that we find in Villette and Jane Eyre, and a wistful, painful statement of it through Dorothea in Middlemarch. Charlotte’s versions of it are covered over with the Victorian balm of marriage, of course, in the end. But both Lucy and Jane are interested in the sort of honesty, the sort of “to thine own self be true” that leads so many of the other ladies above to question what it is that they want and why. Villette, especially, offers its audience an ending that is, at best, deeply ambiguous as to whether it is marriage itself (rather than the act of it) that sets Lucy free or not. Her husband will never be any sort of ideal, and the way that he speaks to her has what would politely be called bracing honesty for a virtue. With Jane, of course, while she allows marriage to be more of an ideal achieved for her, the ideal is not achieved until they can meet as both financial and intellectual equals with something both material and spiritual to bring to the marriage, to assure anyone judging them that Jane has something worthwhile to contribute. This echoes Edna’s abandonment of her home and everything her husband ever bought her, her fixation on her husband’s money as the thing that binds her and keeps her in servitude, the same way that Jane refused the finery Rochester offered for their first wedding.

Dorothea’s Saint Theresa is a more or less open presentation of a woman with more passion, intelligence and drive to achieve something than the bounds of her life will allow. Like Lolly, her dreams and thoughts of how to conceptualize these capacities inside of her are bounded by the perceptions and assumptions that are presented to her by society. Thus, she dreams of assisting a “Great Man,” of the sort of loving service that Lolly has been condemned to provide, if of a more intellectual sort. When women are encouraged to make ideals of men, to see them as the “superior sex,” those sorts of personalities that are inclined to want the best for themselves, to reach for all life has to offer, will take actions to see that they are a part of that. Her disillusionment is both expected and painful to read about. What is interesting about her is that she actually is a person who wants obligations to fulfill and to provide the sort of self-sacrificial service that women are demanded to provide. She’s begging for it- her problem is that the obligations given to her are not enough. In the end, she too finds happiness in the “better marriage,” that allows her more outlet to take on more obligations and be happy doing it. And yet, her end still leads to one of my favorite expressions of the reasons why feminism exists and is still so necessary:

“Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done.”

It’s tossed in the middle of a paragraph in the midst of an epilogue that includes the entire main cast- coded, in its own way then and robbed of the end-of-book statement it should have enjoyed, but we still end on Saint Teresa, contemplating the great sacrifices that Dorothea was capable of, and questioning what more she might have achieved without these every day obligations pressing on her.

Thus Edna Pontellier had many eloquent sisters saying, painting, singing, and subliminally messaging all the shades of this message for decades before The Awakening gained a wide, or almost any, audience. But she was one of the ones who did it both first and openly (remember again that the Brontes and George Eliot did it in more coded ways, and that Madame Bovary was, after all French and a scandal for decades.) In 1899, while not banned, the book was widely rejected and shunned by the reading public. Libraries refused to carry it. It got mixed reviews, but even the good ones who shied away from prudish or “conventional” condemnation of morality and unorthodox gender roles chose the secondary criticism of those who find it distasteful but realize that to say so would make them look backwards of bourgeois: the condescending complaint that she could have chosen a loftier, better subject for her talents rather than “entering into the overworked field of sex-fiction,” as a writer for the Chicago Times Herald put it.

Of course I understand that in 1899 writing about women having any sort of sexual feeling or longing would have made this smut, automatically. But looking at the book from a modern reader’s point of view, I would be hard pressed to call this “sex fiction” of any kind. What I appreciate, and what I think other modern readers may appreciate about this particular iteration of the theme was how honest and free of…. devices, I guess would be the best word, that it was. There were minimal metaphors used to try to describe what she was trying to say, nor was the thing encased in the alternate, inner universe of thought. The book was almost… naïve, childlike, even sentimental about the way that it depicted Edna’s realization and actualization of her freedom. I thought that it was very earnest about trying to just… almost just record a series of moments that added up to Edna’s inability to deny what she had been feeling.

Therefore, like these other quiet, figuring-it-out- ladies above, we get to go from her smallest feeling of “oddness” and difference through to her growing desire to act on it. The first major stand-off starts from a desire that Edna has to sleep outside on a hammock on a warm evening, rather than come inside. It is a small thing that increasingly becomes important the harder her husband pushes her on it. Eventually, he joins her outside to smoke his cigar and pretend to anyone watching that this was a communal desire. Slowly, this crushes out any magic her rebellion has until she slowly slips inside. We see her little by little move from stand-offs to the simple refusal to do ever larger things, withdrawing herself by choice from her life, from every thing that does not matter in itself, but, when added up, constitutes the life that she has been living in its entire. I think that this method of doing it was quite powerful, since we get to see all the little things that prick her and needle her into, after years of repetition, making the huge change that she does.

Eventually, Edna has a frank conversation with one of her closest friends, trying to explain the essential difference between this woman’s priorities and her own. She finally tells her:

“I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”

The woman doesn’t understand, and says so, but the important part is that we see Edna trying to think through this and express her own new limits and boundaries and define them as different than others. Which is of course, as we saw above, the real work of becoming a person on your own, rather than an accessory, or someone acting out a defined role for themselves that does not require them to think out their own feelings or desires.

This was my favorite part about what Edna’s journey tries to show us. That, sexuality and all, one of the major essences of feminism is, as someone said, that women are people. All Edna is doing in this book is testing out her likes and dislikes, finding friends that she herself enjoys, finding an occupation that fulfills her, and rooting out those things from her life which she does not like or need.

I mean, that sounds like college to me. High school, college, my twenties. Edna is twenty-eight and has had really, none of that experience except brief infatuations, conquered quickly. She’s missed out on it all, and this is about her realizing that she has missed out on something. Which, as Chopin eloquently tells us, is more than most women of her class and status get the chance to realize, given the confines, expectations, obligations and, frankly, apparent rewards and the something-like-happiness endings that many are able to achieve, at least according to the script they’ve had since they were little girls:

“A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her- the light which, showing the way, forbids [her realization of why she was doing what she was doing]. 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 vouchsafed 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 a beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!”

Do you see what I mean by how straightforward it is?

(... continued in the comments).

As somebody who lives for stories that depict flawed women who act outside of what is expected from them until they realise that convention is not for them, I loved The Awakening. Whilst it may not be the greatest novel I have ever read, it is a fascinating exploration of a woman's identity beyond the life she feels trapped in as the wife of a possessive man and a mother of young children.

There are countless one-star reviews present on here detailing so much but translating to: I did not understand this. The novel's point is the discovery journey that twenty-eight-year-old  Edna Pontellier finds herself on when she falls in love with another man. The life she should have been happy in with a devoted husband (note: he may be but what he also is is incredibly possessive to the point where even you will feel his suffocation) and children anyone would adore. But she is not happy. She struggles to adore to the level that society wants. I won't spoil the rest but I will say this is a good feminist novel that many misunderstand. It is not groundbreaking nor would I consider it a favourite but it tells a story worth its existence and depicts that marriage and motherhood are not as straightforward as hammered into us from youth. Nor is it for everyone, and that is okay.