[In the following essay, Delbanco explains why he believes Chopin's works deserve a place among the classics of American literature.]

It seems a long time ago that teachers could distribute without embarrassment The Lifetime Reading Plan or some such guide to literacy and expect students to measure their progress toward adulthood by the number of checks beside the titles read. There is a certain comfort in the authority of lists. But since we may never again have such lists, the idea of the classic—if it is to be preserved at all—needs to be saved from the idea of the absolute. In a charming rescue operation conducted some years ago, Frank Kermode gave this modest definition of what a classic is: “A classic … is a book that is read a long time after it was written.”

It is now nearly a century since The Awakening was written—a once obscure, now famous, novel of adultery and suicide by Kate Chopin. Born into a well-to-do St. Louis family in 1851, Kate O'Flaherty married at the age of nineteen a prosperous New Orleans merchant named Oscar Chopin, who died twelve years later, leaving her a widow in her early thirties. It was under these conditions that she began to write stories.

The reputation of the one novel Kate Chopin published, The Awakening, has fluctuated from scandal when it first appeared in 1899 and was angrily received as an American Madame Bovary to near-oblivion during the first half of the twentieth century until Cyrille Arnavon translated it into French and Robert Cantwell and Edmund Wilson began to reclaim it for our own literature. According to my last count, it was in print in sixteen editions competing for the college and high school market.

During its long dormancy, The Awakening did manage to survive in scholarly histories as an example of regionalism or “local color.” To be designated a work of “regionalism” was, not too long ago, to be dismissed as provincial, but one reason The Awakening is now a classroom staple is that “local” has become an honorific term. If it once implied limits and smallness, the word “local” now suggests integrity, purity, and resistance to a malevolent power often referred to in academic circles as the “center.” I want briefly to consider this strange new geography of value before turning to the novel itself.

One representative critic, Marjorie Pryse, puts the matter clearly:

The belief in universals has [too long] held its own in the face of attacks by what we might collectively term regional interests: black studies and the civil rights movement, women's studies and the resurgence of feminism, American studies and a return to grassroots politics, as well as movements for gay rights, Native American heritage, and so on. Therefore, a reevaluation of regional concepts must begin by accounting for the pervasive undermining of “local” concerns and texts by the conviction the majority of citizens in the culture share that there do indeed exist “universals.”

Reclaiming the regional tradition amounts, in this view, to an act of solidarity with the excluded, the oppressed, the “marginalized.”

It may, however, be worth enlarging the question of why regionalism has lately enjoyed academic revival by looking beyond the sphere of literary study. As recently as thirty years ago in the United States, “the revision of accepted standards of cultural value” (Pryse's phrase) chiefly meant revision of such “universals” as these: race hatred, indifference toward the poor, and tolerance of prevailing conditions in the industrial workplace. Moreover, the revision of these accepted standards was carried out not regionally but from Washington, the nation's center of political power.

In what is surely a conspicuous irony, the language of antagonism toward the “center” has become, in the last twenty years or so, the shared property of the political right and the academic left. One remembers, for instance, that Richard Nixon often invoked the formula that it was “time for power to stop flowing from the people to the capital, and to start flowing from the capital to the people,” a kind of talk that became more common in the 1980s and 1990s (even as I write, the responsibility for millions of needy children is being redistributed, through the process of welfare “reform,” to “local” authorities) and is the leading language of cultural criticism as well. The leftish academy celebrates regionalism as an assault on what it decries as the pernicious “norms” of American ideology (patriarchy, laissez-faire capitalism, imperial expansion), while the political right invokes the idea of regional autonomy as a way to restore those very norms under new names: “family values,” entrepreneurship, national defense. If regionalism is in good odor among both professors and politicians, perhaps we ought to wonder if the gap between the academic left and the political right is as wide as both sides like to claim.

With this question in mind, what does one make of The Awakening, whose transformation from a work of local interest into a prestigious novel has been rivaled only by Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God? This book does not fit within any of the customary ideological categories. Anyone who has discussed it in the classroom knows that it can be read with assent by readers of quite opposite convictions on issues of sexual politics. This story of a frantically unhappy woman sets itself off from the usual regional evocation of the sexually awakened country girl—as Hamlin Garland described her, for example, in his collection of sketches about life in the Midwest, Main-Travelled Roads (1891):

“Girls in love ain't no use in the whole blessed week,” she said. “Sundays they're a-lookin' down the road, expectin' he'll come. Sunday afternoons they can't think o' nothin' else, 'cause he's here. Monday mornin's they're sleepy and kind dreamy and slimpsy, and good f'r nothin' on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday they git absent-minded, an' begin to look off toward Sunday agin, an' mope aroun' and let the dishwater git cold, right under their noses. Friday they break dishes, and go off in the best room an' snivel, an' look out o' the winder. Saturday, they have queer spurts o' working' like all p'sessed, an' spurts o' frizzin' their hair. An' Sunday they begin it all over agin.”

This Midwestern Penelope is not yet grown into an adult capable of stratagem, but she is on her way to becoming the eternally untarnished wife, a human exemplar of the fertile land in which she makes her life, or, more accurately, in which she performs her service. She is what Carrie Meeber would have been if she had stayed in rural Wisconsin and never boarded the train for Chicago.

The tormented wife and mother of The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, is entirely different. The daughter of a Kentucky Presbyterian who “atone[s] for his weekday sins with his Sunday devotions,” Edna marries into the dying French Catholic culture of New Orleans, where, even at the end of the nineteenth century, women were still living virtually without rights under a version of the Napoleonic legal code. In this static world she becomes a sort of captive ambassador from the frontier country in which she had been born—and an object of flirtatious interest among the quasi-Frenchmen of New Orleans.

These men are of a recognizable sort in turn-of-the-century American fiction. One may think not only of Henry James's ineffectual males (“Young men are very different from what I was,” says the elder Mr. Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady [1881], “when I cared for a girl—when I was young—I wanted to do more than look at her”) but of Dreiser's Hurstwood in Sister Carrie descending through shabbiness into despair, or of Stephen Crane's boy-soldier in The Red Badge of Courage trying to prove himself on the battlefield, or, a little later, of this complaint from Mrs. Bart in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905): “It had been among that lady's grievances that her husband [whose bankruptcy and death have left the family groping for position] in the early days, before he was too tired, had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as ‘reading poetry.’” If the literary record can be trusted, America at the turn of the century seems to have been populated by men who could not cope.

Kate Chopin agreed. She witnessed in New Orleans what Wharton saw in New York and what another “regionalist,” the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett, saw in coastal Maine: a once haughty privileged class on the edge of extinction, nominally led by men too shriveled to lead. Edna's first infatuation, Robert Lebrun, brings his “high voice” and “serio-comic” charm each summer to the tony resort at Grand Isle, where he constitutes “himself the devoted attendant of some fair dame or damsel … sometimes a young girl, [or] a widow … [or] some interesting married woman.” He seems best pleased as a kind of humored troubadour sitting at the feet of an unavailable lady. From this posture he recites titillating accounts of his amorous adventures, and is excited in turn by “the lady at the needle [who] kept up a little running, contemptuous comment: “Blagueur—farceur—gros bête, va!’” There is a hint of sexual self-abasement here, but in the end such entertainments on even the hottest Louisiana nights feel more filial than carnal. This man has fallen out of the active world. He has become something between a jester and a gigolo.

So male attenuation is one theme Chopin shared with other regional writers of her time. Jewett populated her Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) with men who are either drifting into senility or frozen in boyhood, keeping about them “a remote and juvenile sort of silence.” But whereas Jewett gives us a settled psychic condition as a consequence of New England's economic decline (her men languish in a kind of melancholy reverie about the past), Chopin shows us a Southern version of the same problem as social process—a process she makes visible by giving us glimpses of Creole men who are mainly devoted to dissipation. Robert, whose voice Edna finds so “musical and true,” leaves suddenly for Mexico with no evident itinerary. Alcée Arobin, whose “good figure [and] pleasing face” console her after Robert's departure by “appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her,” has no evident vocation—except to be her second conquest.

As Edna ventures further from her husband, she finds herself, sometimes literally, on a border between old and new. “I saw her,” reports Dr. Mandelet, “… walking along Canal Street”—the dividing line between the French Quarter and the modern city that was outgrowing the historic New Orleans boundaries. Her house, dressed and painted “a dazzling white” to please the scanning eye, is an expression of the old Creole femininity as a self-advertising bauble. Graceful, glad to be owned, its “round, fluted columns support the sloping roof.” But it is also Edna's prison. Chopin conveys the sense of confinement from the first sentence of the novel, which presents “a green and yellow parrot … hung in a cage,” making imitative sounds to the amusement of visitors.

When she gets an occasional furlough, the place where Edna most likes to spend her free moments is the home of Mademoiselle Reisz, whose “apartments up under the roof” are high above the world of noise and barter. “There were plenty of windows in [Mademoiselle Reisz's] little front room. They were for the most part dingy, but as they were nearly always open it did not make so much difference … From her windows could be seen the crescent of the river, the masts of ships and the big chimneys of the Mississippi steamers.” If Edna's house is all surfaces, the home of Mademoiselle Reisz has an interior genuinely expressive of its owner, but also bravely open to the world.

Much of the novel is concerned with Edna's attempt to learn something from this example. She struggles to open her mind to the meaning of the appurtenances—some chosen, some not—among which she must live out her life. To put it another way, she begins to understand that she can at least modify the scenes of her existence. Rooms, views, streets, furnishings—in the full sense of the word, “decor”—are a realm of experience whose significance had once been lost on her. Now that she begins to distinguish between the life assigned to her and the possibility of fashioning herself anew, she makes her boldest (and most often quoted) declaration: “I would give up the unessential; I would give away my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.” With this series of renunciations, she has come to sense the existence of a free and irreducible self.

But what constitutes this self? What can be discarded as “unessential”? Edna's first hint of an answer, as she rises out of her appointed role as imported wife, is her discovery that self-awareness begins with the sense of touch:

Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing the greater part of them. She bathed her face, her neck and arms in the basin that stood between the windows. She took off her shoes and stockings and stretched herself in the very center of the high, white bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed, with its sweet country odor of laurel lingering about the sheets and mattress! She stretched her strong limbs that ached a little. She ran her fingers through her loosened hair for a while. She looked at her round arms, as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh. She clasped her hands easily above her head, and it was thus she fell asleep.

Complaining that he meets his wife now only “at breakfast,” Mr. Pontellier has no role in his wife's sexual awakening, but neither exactly does the flirtatious Robert, who seems poised to supplant him as her partner: Robert's “face [grows] a little white” when she gives him a glimpse of her aroused sexuality. Even Arobin, though less hesitant to test his capacity to slake her desire, is more voyeur than lover. In thwarted pursuit of partnership, Edna grows more and more lonely. Whenever she hears her friend Mademoiselle Reisz play a certain plaintive piano melody (though she knows that “the name of the piece was something else”) she calls it “Solitude,” and imagines “the figure of a man standing [naked] beside a desolate rock on the seashore.” She is haunted by this image of a single figure interrupting an unpeopled vista. Her situation calls to mind that wicked rejoinder spoken by Marilyn Monroe at the opening of Arthur Miller's screenplay for The Misfits: The devastated young husband, just discarded on the courthouse steps after signing the divorce papers, begs her to say why she wants to leave him. “If I have to be alone,” she replies, “I'd rather be by myself.”

Edna, too, refuses to be part of her husband's bric-a-brac and begins to create an environment of her own invention—a process that begins in earnest with her husband's departure for New York on business. As the day for his leaving draws near, she scurries about the house in a new kind of agitation—guilty, we suspect, not so much over remaining without him as over her premonition of the temptations of independence. “She was solicitous about his health and his welfare. She bustled around, looking after his clothing, thinking about heavy underwear …” Nearly twenty-nine, she behaves like a child of sixteen whose conscience acts up in anticipation of a weekend without supervision. But when she is at last left alone, relief conquers guilt, and she tours “her” house with a combination of proprietorship and sensory excitement:

A feeling that was unfamiliar but very delicious came over her. She walked all through the house, from one room to another, as if inspecting it for the first time. She tried the various chairs and lounges, as if she had never sat and reclined upon them before. And she perambulated around the outside of the house, investigating, looking to see if windows and shutters were secure and in order. The flowers were like new acquaintances; she approached them in a familiar spirit, and made herself at home among them. The garden walks were damp, and Edna called to the maid to bring out her rubber sandals. And there she stayed, and stooped, digging around the plants, trimming, picking dead, dry leaves. The children's little dog came out, interfering, getting in her way. She scolded him, laughing at him, played with him. The garden smelled so good and looked so pretty in the afternoon sunlight. Edna plucked all the bright flowers she could find, and went into the house with them, she and the little dog.

This is a passage into discovery but not, I suspect, an introduction to self-knowledge. Edna's mood of release at her husband's departure, which begins as involuntary exultation, quickly becomes conscious and strategic, until she takes the first step toward remaking her life. She will, she decides, move out of the big house into a cottage around the block. “Just two steps away,” she tells Mademoiselle Reisz, who has challenged her for an explanation. “I'm tired of looking after that big house. It never seemed like mine, anyway—like home.” As Mademoiselle Reisz senses, the key word is “mine”; Edna is developing a taste for ownership. She falls into pecuniary explanations:

Oh! I see there is no deceiving you. Then let me tell you: It is a caprice. I have a little money of my own from my mother's estate, which my father sends to me by driblets. I won a large sum this winter on the races, and I am beginning to sell my sketches.

It is now possible to see why Chopin has used a teasing, ironic sentence to mark the moment when the novel shifts from the open spaces of Grand Isle to the interiors of New Orleans: “The Pontelliers possessed a charming home on Esplanade Street.” Strictly speaking, Edna—as distinct from her husband—possesses nothing. As Margaret Culley, one of the modern editors of The Awakening, has pointed out about the Louisiana legal code, “all of a wife's ‘accumulations’ after marriage were the property of her husband, including money she might earn and the clothes she wore.” Yet Chopin implies that in a larger sense Edna is becoming an equal partner in the plural subject (“the Pontelliers”) of her sentence. She is becoming a possessor. She has begun to escape the condition of being (or at least learning to be) a proper Creole lady. But it is not sufficient to speak of what she is leaving behind. To come fully to terms with this novel, we must follow Edna into the terrible limbo into which she now falls. By the time of her husband's departure, The Awakening has become a book about her suspension not merely between Kentucky Presbyterianism and Creole Catholicism, or between halves of the city divided by Canal Street, but between the genders themselves.

This transformation has been hinted from the start. “She was rather handsome than beautiful,” we are told early, and before long she learns to drink “liquor from the glass as a man would have done.” This most basic of the novel's suspensions—between femininity and masculinity as forms of social being—takes a predictably large psychic toll. Edna's statement that “I am beginning to sell my sketches,” for instance, is a check on her emerging artistic commitment, which is explicitly associated with female dissent from the male world of commodity display and exchange. Surely her moment of highest self-realization comes when she is able—like her friends Madame Ratignolle (with her children) and Mademoiselle Reisz (with her music)—to take pleasure in the intrinsic value of something she has produced. Edna “had reached a stage [with her painting] where she seemed to be no longer feeling her way, working, when in the humor, with sureness and ease. And being devoid of ambition, and striving not toward accomplishment, she drew satisfaction from the work in itself.”

In Chopin's world, this experience is unavailable or, more accurately, unaffordable for men. Edna's brush with it is one of those moments when it is useful to think of The Awakening in roughly Marxian terms: she has escaped, at least momentarily, from alienation. Even if it is only a fleeting freedom, she conceives, for a moment, of neither her work nor herself as a commodity—which is why “I am beginning to sell my sketches” is double-edged. What in one sense is the beginning of independent professionalism—a feminist victory—is also a lapse into equating the expression of self with marketable goods and services. Edna, who has been bought and sold, is entering the marketplace as a vendor.

Both aspects of this awakening—liberation and constriction—are adumbrated in the brilliant account of her father's visit. Once a proud colonel in the Confederate Army, he sits “before her pencil … rigid and unflinching, as he had faced the cannon's mouth in days gone by.” This is, if ever there was one, a phallic pencil: an emblem of daughterly usurpation. “Her lack of filial kindness and respect” is not excused by the scrutiny to which she subjects him while making his portrait. When she refuses to attend her sister's wedding, he accuses her of further deficiencies: a “want of sisterly and womanly consideration.” As both Mademoiselle Reisz and Madame Ratignolle realize, Edna is replacing her thralldom to men in general and to particular men—father, husband, imagined lovers—with the thrill of partaking in exactly the experience that they had once monopolized: the experience of power.

This exchange of roles creates the conditions for her self-destruction:

“Take the fan,” said Edna, offering it to [Robert].

“Oh, no! Thank you. It does no good; you have to stop fanning some time, and feel all the more uncomfortable afterward.”

“That is one of the ridiculous things which men always say. I have never known one to speak otherwise of fanning.”

Mocking Robert for the calculus of pain and pleasure that he applies to the most trivial choices, Edna has had enough of computation; enough, when she wants to linger outside in the night, of her husband's “you will take cold out there.” To fan or not to fan, she suggests, is a pathetic question. Edna is learning a new language of impulse that is explicitly identified as female, at least within the universe of the novel, and this is precisely why it is so ominous when she falls back, like the caged parrot, into mimicry: “I hardly think we need new fixtures, Léonce,” she says to her husband. “Don't let us get anything new: you are too extravagant. I don't believe you ever think of saving or putting by.” Such spousal scolding is a fair imitation of her husband's nagging.

Edna's “awakening” never wholly renovates her consciousness. She “never awakens,” as Elaine Showalter has pointed out, “to the dimensions of her social world … never sees how the labor of the mulatto and black women around her makes her narcissistic existence possible.” Because of the servants, she is able to keep the world of her children at a muted distance: “The boys were being put to bed; the patter of their bare, escaping feet could be heard occasionally, as well as the pursuing voice of the quadroon.” The children's life upstairs is a bit of background noise. Edna exists in a relation to governess and children not very different from her husband's relation to her, as a remote employer. “If one of the little Pontellier boys took a tumble whilst at play, he was not apt to rush crying to his mother's arms for comfort; he would more likely pick himself up, wipe the water out of his eyes and the sand out of his mouth, and go on playing.” Childbirth itself is something she had once barely apprehended through an anesthetic haze. And the numbness lingers not only in memory but as a “stupor which had deadened sensation,” and which, despite the novel's title (chosen, we should recall, by the publisher, not the author), closes tighter and tighter around her as her “awakening” proceeds: “She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world.” Sensory deprivation is another point toward which she converges in company with the men around her. Léonce sits at their dining table pouring “pepper, salt, vinegar, mustard—everything within reach” into his soup, in the hope of giving it some bite. He and Edna are not so much an opposition as a matched pair.

But if Edna and her husband descend together into dull discontent, they differ in how they cope with the death-in-life they share. For him the only release is to carry on his business, to make the pretense that nothing is off-center in his life. For Edna, the resort is to sex:

She leaned over and kissed [Robert]—a soft, cool, delicate kiss, whose voluptuous sting penetrated his whole being—then she moved away from him. … She took his face between her hands and looked into it as if she would never withdraw her eyes more.

Granting to Edna this control over the rhythm of penetration and withdrawal, Chopin takes her still further away from “femininity.” Squeamish Robert is appalled. “Foolish boy,” Edna calls him, and declares herself “no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions. … I give myself where I choose.” As Robert declines to receive this gift, The Awakening becomes one of those books devoted to exposing the male fear of female sexuality, a fear that runs deep through American culture, from drawing-room magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book to the Playboy airbrush. Robert cannot abide what F. Scott Fitzgerald was later to call the “ghastly reiterated female sound” of a woman's orgasm.

Arobin is more willing to parry Edna's thrusts. Yet there is no fulfillment in her intimacy with him. Using the language of pathology, Chopin remarks that “the excitement [of Arobin's presence] came back upon her like a remittent fever.” She acquaints Edna with desire not only for men but for drink, for gambling, for anything that will heat her blood. It is an appetite of which Edna is aware to the point of fear:

“Will you go to the races again?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I've had enough of the races. I don't want to lose all the money I've won, and I've got to work when the weather is bright, instead of—”

“Yes; work; to be sure. You promise to show me your work. What morning may I come up to your atelier? To-morrow?”

“No!”

“Day after?”

“No, no.”

“Oh, please don't refuse me! I know nothing of such things. I might help you with a stray suggestion or two.”

“No. Good night. Why don't you go after you have said good night? I don't like you,” she went on in a high, excited pitch, attempting to draw away her hand. She felt that her words lacked dignity and sincerity, and she knew that he felt it.

Arobin has attached himself to her not with anything resembling love, but with an anthropological interest in a woman who has put away her husband, who paints, and who plays the horses like a man. She knows that his patronizing visit to her studio would contaminate her. She does not want to paint for the likes of him, to be beholden to him; and as their confrontation comes to its manifold climax, she pays a high price for her excitement:

“… I can tell what manner of woman you are.” His fingers strayed occasionally down to her warm, smooth cheeks and firm chin, which was growing a little full and double.

“Oh, yes! You will tell me that I am adorable; everything that is captivating. Spare yourself the effort.”

“No; I shan't tell you anything of the sort, though I shouldn't be lying if I did.”

“Do you know Mademoiselle Reisz?” she asked irrelevantly …

“I'm told she's extremely disagreeable and unpleasant. Why have you introduced her at a moment when I desired to talk of you?”

Edna has, of course, introduced Mademoiselle Reisz not “irrelevantly” at all, but as a last shield against him. Work and sex are explicitly countervailed at this critical moment—just as they are in a number of Chopin's best stories (“Wiser Than a God” [1889], “Aunt Lympy's Interference” [1897]) that document a woman's refusal to give up her vocation for a sexual attachment. Arobin, Edna knows, is nothing more than a measure of her desperation to find an antidote to numbness.

He is, however, no fool. He chides her with wicked aptness about her plan to hold a fête in honor of her leaving the old house: “What about the dinner,” he asked, “the grand event, the coup d'état?” His phrasing cannot be improved upon, for it drives home the point that Edna's is to be a revolution in incidentals only. Nothing, Arobin implies, will change except the identity of the ruler, a proposition with which Chopin appears to agree: “There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.” With Mademoiselle Reisz propped on a cushioned chair as if in proxy for Edna's absent children, the whole affair has an air of unintentional self-mockery. Edna sits alone, presiding at a childless table while her lover undergoes interrogation by the one man present who speaks for the ancien régime—Monsieur Ratignolle. This is one of the great sad parties in American literature. It ranks with the Touchetts' tea at Gardencourt (in The Portrait of a Lady) and the revels on Gatsby's lawn. After this coup d'état (Edna takes possession of her “pigeon house” upon her thirtieth birthday), the rest of the novel is a long coda.

What makes the final pages of The Awakening so painful is their accumulating sense that Edna is living with foreknowledge of her doom. She sputters in sentences that start and stall and start again. She tells Dr. Mandelet:

There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the prejudices of others—but no matter—still, I shouldn't want to trample upon the little lives. Oh! I don't know what I'm saying, Doctor. Good night. Don't blame me for anything.

It was this kind of self-exoneration that offended Chopin's first readers. Edna has lost a battle that, according to the respectable opinion of her time, she should never have begun. She has lost her fight against ennui and, what is worse, she knows it: “There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone.” Her walk into the sea delivers her from a limbo that Chopin is at pains to liken to that of the mulatto woman in whose home Edna takes refuge: “‘Do you come here often?’ Robert asked, in the woman's garden. ‘I almost live here,’ Edna answered.”

This bitter remark tells what sort of book The Awakening finally becomes. Edna's flight from her condition as her husband's possession is strikingly akin to what one encounters in many turn-of-the-century novels that take the predicament of the mulatto as their main theme. These books are built on a tragic paradox: that the only hope for the fugitive is to become indistinguishable from those from whom she is in flight.

One well-known example of such a novel is Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), a book that attacks the premises of racism (as The Awakening does the idea of woman's “proper place”) by demonstrating the danger of revealed genealogy. Like The Awakening, it is a meditation on how the sex or color of the body with which one is born becomes an ineffaceable sign of one's obligation and worth. “One drop of black blood makes the whole man black,” says one of the many bigots in Chesnutt's novel, and we cringe, much as we do when Mr. Pontellier rattles off the time-honored proscriptions that Edna is beginning to defy. Yet the suspense of Chesnutt's novel builds as the white lover stumbles close to the discovery that there is “black blood” in the veins of his beloved. Holding our breath as we follow her efforts to conceal this fact from him, we become complicit in a strategy that amounts to a repudiation of her past. The naming of blackness in such a book becomes a drifting illusion: a woman is black only if someone knows it, only if (in the phrase of an earlier novelist, William Wells Brown) “the melting mezzotinto” in the iris of her eye is noticed. I suspect that this reduction of black identity to an epistemological riddle goes some distance toward explaining why Chesnutt spent the last thirty years of his life in literary silence.

Except for a few stories and reviews, Chopin, too, fell silent before her writing life seemed ready to end. She died in 1904 without producing or even embarking on a work comparable in ambition to The Awakening. In her earlier work she had been explicitly concerned with the mulatto theme only rarely, notably in her well-known story “Désirée's Baby.” Yet surely it is no accident that Edna seeks refuge in a mulatto woman's home. We wish Edna free. We shudder at her confinement and thrill to her release. But her “awakening” leaves her mimicking the social instincts of those who have suppressed her in the first place. Just as the “ex-colored” awaken one day to find themselves irredeemably white, she becomes what she once fled.

In other words, Edna recognizes in her “awakening” a new form of degradation. She swims to her death not, as some readers would like to imagine, in a kind of ecstatic suicide amid the warm Gulf waves, but in despair at not having found a third way between the alternatives of submission and emulation when faced by those who regard power as the ground of all human relations.