Chopin, Kate - Cynthia Griffin Wolff (essay date spring 1996)

Cynthia Griffin Wolff (essay date spring 1996)

SOURCE: Griffin Wolff, Cynthia. “Un-Utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in The Awakening.” Studies in American Fiction 24, no. 1 (spring 1996): 3-23.

[In the following essay, Wolff examines The Awakening in terms of nineteenth-century medical discourse on female sexuality.]

Because novelists are particular about beginnings, we should notice that The Awakening opens with two things: sumptuous sensory images and an outpouring of babble—words that resemble ordinary speech, but which really have meaning for no one, not even the speaker.

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! That's all right!”

He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody...

[The entire page is 8530 words long]

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