SOURCE: Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. “Kate Chopin's The Awakening: An Assault on American Racial and Sexual Mythology.” Southern Studies, 26, no. 4 (1987): 304-12.

[In the following essay, Elfenbein contends that Chopin challenged American racist and sexist notions about sexuality in The Awakening.]

Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) shocked its nineteenth-century readers by presenting without comment the adultery of Edna Pontellier, a wealthy, white American wife and mother adrift in Creole society. The shock was so great that the novel went unread for almost sixty years. Recent critics have tended to blame the literary double standard, which prohibited female authors at the turn of the century from broaching topics available to male authors, for the opprobrium Chopin suffered. But it was the cultural chauvinism of Chopin's contemporaries that was primarily responsible for their adverse reaction to The Awakening.

For much of Chopin's audience the troublesome issue of female desire was resolved through a racist conception of passion and purity according to which passion was projected onto “dark” women, while purity was reserved exclusively for “white” women. This conception manifests itself in the comments of early reviewers of The Awakening. W. M. Reedy, publisher of the Mirror and responsible for introducing some of Maupassant's provocative pieces to America, voiced the objections of many of his American confreres when he condemned Chopin for permitting her heroine, a “real American lady,” to “disrupt the sacred institutions of marriage and American motherhood without repentance.” Reedy was willing to accept a “woman sinner on American soil if she was a ‘foreigner’”¹ or a member of the lower class, like Stephen Crane's Maggie, Frank Norris's Trina, or Theodore Dreiser's Carrie,² but not if she was white and upper-class, like Edna Pontellier.

Chopin's contemporaries were dismayed by The Awakening because its sexual realism assaulted American sexual-caste mythology. Profoundly subversive and courageous, the novel collapsed the traditional categories that had long segregated “dark” women and “white” women in American literature and advanced a new conception of female desire that was color-blind and democratic. Exploiting the complex social milieu available to her as a New Orleans author and deploying a multi-racial cast of female characters, who share to varying degrees Edna Pontellier's awakened sensuality, Chopin violated the expectations of her genteel readers by showing that sexual passion is no respecter of class or caste boundaries.

The complex social milieu Chopin depicted also distinguishes The Awakening from Flaubert's Madame Bovary, to which it has frequently been compared.³ Instead of the bourgeois aspirations to social status of an Emma Bovary, Chopin's Edna experiences ambivalence toward the sensuality of the New Orleans Creoles. Her disorientation concerning the behavior appropriate for privileged white women in Creole society is perceived by Adèle Ratignolle, the exemplar of white Creole femininity, when she warns Robert Lebrun, who has been pursuing Edna in a conventional Creole way, that Edna “‘is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate mistake of taking you seriously.’”⁴ Edna does make this mistake, and because her status as a privileged white woman depends upon her compliance with an elaborate system of racial and sexual rules that constrict the sexual expression of white women, her awakening and her noncompliance threaten a social order she fails to understand. Constricted by class and caste bias and her propensity to see everything only as it impinges on her own emotional life, Edna's view of her world is not large enough to accommodate her discovery of the common sexual ground of women's experience.

As Edna veers from the path charted for privileged white women, she is contrasted with the other women characters in the novel, characters who occupy an unchanging space in the patriarchal society Chopin describes. Critics of the novel have of course discussed the contrast between Edna and Adèle Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, a pianist, noting that these women present mutually exclusive options for Edna. They have also examined Chopin's ironic coupling of a pair of lovers with a lady in black who tells her rosary while shadowing them and Edna. However, in focusing on this dark lady, presumably a white widow, and the lovers, they have neglected to note Chopin's implicit comparison of Edna with women of color or ambiguous race who make up the novel's gallery of “dark” women.⁵ Peripheral and incompletely realized as characters, these dark women in The Awakening add richness and complexity to the novel, making it possible for Chopin in her depiction of Edna, whose character is so much at odds with conventional views of woman's nature, to subvert literary stereotype and popular prejudice. A matrix of diverse female types, “white” and “dark,” surrounds Edna, who sees other women only in the way convention dictates.

Although Chopin may have shared to a degree the racist assumptions of American culture of her period, the novel's realistic treatment of Edna's interaction with these women exposes the sex and caste prejudices of Creole society—a society itself the object of slur and stereotype in American society at large. In so doing, Chopin challenged the biases of the novel's contemporary detractors, who recognized too well the racial implications of the novel, and its current rediscoverers, who, in emphasizing the novel's depiction of sexism, see only a portion of the picture of a sexist, racist society that Chopin drew with compelling accuracy. At the center of this picture, Edna progresses toward discovery of “her position in the universe” (893), but her way is doubly barred, for sexual and racial prohibitions block her as they block the other women in the novel.

Chopin's realism repeatedly captures the racism as well as the sexism of Edna's acquaintances. Swerving toward social satire in a dinner-table scene that reinforces our sense of the provinciality of her Creole characters, Chopin presents the diners' alarm and prurient interest when they learn that Robert Lebrun, the elder son of their hostess, plans to live and do business in Mexico. Any reader who has been privy to ethnic jokes in similar situations may squirm at Chopin's description of the round-table speculation that follows the news of Robert's departure, culminating in Adèle Ratignolle's request “that Robert … exercise extreme caution in dealing with the Mexicans … a treacherous people, unscrupulous and revengeful. She trusted she did them no injustice in thus condemning them as a race” (924). The discussion concludes with the testimony of Victor Lebrun, who assures all who will listen that Mexicans, especially Mexican women, about whom he implies intimate knowledge, are happy, childlike people.

Victor, the younger son in the Lebrun family, embodies the racist and sexist prejudices of his society, asserting his importance by badgering the black women of the Lebrun household or by bragging of his sexual prowess. The “droll” (924) stories he tells of his conquests and the demeaning treatment he accords the domestics who serve his family pass without notice in Edna's crowd, where such extremes of male self-assertion are sanctioned. Victor's behavior, an adolescent and therefore comic version of male practice in Edna's society, fuses sexual and racial exploitation, assorting Chopin's cast of women characters according to their conventional service functions. Edna fails repeatedly to hear Victor's “highly colored story” of adventures he “wouldn't want his mother to know” (942). Presumably these adventures also take place with women whom he wouldn't want his mother to know.

Edna, Madame Lebrun, and the other white women in the novel accept the presence of such dark rivals as they do the services of dark menials without reflection and without criticizing the habits of their men. Madame employs a little black girl to “work the treadle” of her machine: “The Creole woman does not take any chances which may be avoided of imperiling her health” (901). Edna, marked by her Presbyterian prudery as an outsider in the sensuous and expressive society of the Creoles, awakens too late to the absurdity of racial divisions of labor that do not protect white women from the biological perils women share. Deceived by the seeming candor of Creole society concerning sex, she recoils from Adèle Ratignolle's “harrowing story of one of her accouchements,” which withheld “no intimate detail” from a mixed audience at table, and from Robert's “droll” stories related to an amused audience of married women (889). The meaning of Adèle's “harrowing” story and of Robert and his brother Victor's “droll” stories escapes Edna, who fails to understand, until too late, their applicability to her own situation as a woman. Edna's failure to see compounds her failure to hear. Her negative view of those whose stigmatized status she shares retards the intellectual and emotional development she requires for survival.

The “Solitary Soul” of Chopin's original title for the novel, Edna stands apart from both the white and dark women in New Orleans, though she is implicated in the strict separation of female roles and races there. Edna fails repeatedly to hear, see, or emphatize with others. Her “obstructed” (896) vision eliminates the possibility of transcendence of the fixed roles available to women in her society, though her “natural aptitude” (891) as a portrait painter might have allowed transcendence had she had the critical vision Chopin herself demonstrates in drawing her. However, because Edna is merely narcissistically involved with her art, she effaces her portrait of Adèle Ratignolle in irritation when Adèle objects that it doesn't look like her and irritation commands the dark women of the Pontellier household to pose. Having discovered that the maid's back and shoulders are “molded on classic lines” (940) and that the maid will not object to an unflattering or inaccurate portrait as Adèle has objected, Edna captures only a conventional view of her woman sitter. She must fail as an artist because she lacks the ability to see anything but a highly stylized image such as the image of “Solitude” she envisions when Adèle plays a favorite piano solo. To Edna, “Solitude” must be a male figure. Poised beside a desolate rock on the seashore, watching a distant bird winging its flight away from him, this male figure is a synthetic and sentimental type, epitomized by nineteenth-century calendar art and by the works of Maxfield Parrish.⁶ Although Edna responds more authentically to the music of Mademoiselle Reisz, her response is emotional rather than intellectual and fails to free her from the distorted perspective her society affords women of her social class.

Edna's class consciousness and her incapacity for transcendence appear in her blindness to the quotidian presence of dark women in her world, blindness that establishes her inability to escape those patriarchal imperatives regarding sex and woman's place that her sensual nature leads her to violate. Edna's unthinking reliance on values that will ultimately require her suicide appears in her failure to perceive these women or their significance. Alienated from her role as a mother by the quadroon nurse, who cares for her two sons with “fictitious animation” (935), and unable to take off her wedding ring or shatter a vase without being interrupted by a maid, who silently hands the ring back to her, Edna feels herself alone and exceptional. She wants “to swim far out, where no woman had swum before” (908), but in the end she drowns herself like many other nineteenth-century heroines in no-exit situations.

Edna is not the only woman in The Awakening who fails to make common cause with other women. For the other women in the novel establish no more than the shallowest of female relationships. Ironically, it is Edna who feels the claims of sisterhood most acutely, forgoing the long-awaited consummation of her passion for Robert Lebrun to attend Adèle when her friend sends word that she is in labor. Watching Adèle, who is transformed by travail, her face “drawn and pinched, her sweet blue eyes haggard and unnatural” (994), Edna confronts the facts of life that privileged women see only at rare moments. In contrast, Josephine, the attending “griffe”⁷ nurse or midwife, refuses “to take too seriously … a situation with which she [is] so familiar” (994). Each woman is isolated in this experience that women share: Adèle, awaiting the male doctor, the audience for her grand performance, feels abandoned and neglected. Josephine works hard to maintain her professionalism and patience. Edna recoils from the scene of “torture” (995) so reminiscent of her own experiences of childbirth, fleeing the labor room and later deciding, like other white heroines in Southern fiction, that “To-morrow would be time to think of everything” (997).

The marked separation of the women in this scene underlines Chopin's consistent treatment of class and caste divisions among women in the novel, divisions she realistically portrays and implicitly calls into question. The staging of such separation is most evident in the foregoing scene, and in two other scenes in the novel that depict Mariequita, a peripheral but essential “dark” woman character whom Edna fatally misperceives. Mariequita's response mirrors Edna's, reflecting the class and caste antagonism that divides women from each other and from true self-knowledge. Although racism and sexism in Creole society and in the society in which Edna was born mandate a difference between women of Edna's class and Mariequita's caste, Chopin juxtaposes Edna and Mariequita, blurring the racial categories established by men to control the sexuality of women and exposing the flawed vision of these two victims of such distinctions.

It is no accident that Robert and Victor Lebrun, whose surname reinscribes their “dark” proclivities, court both Edna and Mariequita or that Mariequita appears at two crucial junctures in the story to underscore the unacknowledged importance of dark women in Edna's world. In the Chênière Caminada episode that juxtaposes the limiting facts of life and the romantic fantasies Edna and Robert weave for each other, Mariequita appears, “making ‘eyes’” (915) at Robert. Although Edna views Mariequita as stereotypically “dark” and carefree, it is Edna who is on a fool's errand and Mariequita who has business to transact. Separated from Mariequita by class, purpose, and language but not, quite obviously, by gender and sexuality, Edna is unable to understand Mariequita's amused banter in Spanish to Robert about the lovers in the boat. Edna's view of Mariequita is fragmented, focusing as it does on apparent irrelevancies such as the “sand and slime between her brown toes” (914) rather than on the telling interaction between Robert and this young woman with whom he shares a language closed to Edna.

Later in this episode, Edna anatomizes her own body as she awakens to her sensuality and looks “at her round arms … as if [they] were something she saw for the first time.” It is the whiteness of her skin, “the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh” (918), that is stressed here, as in an earlier episode when her husband Leonce looks at her tanning skin “as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage,” and she responds by surveying her “hands, strong, shapely hands … drawing up her lawn sleeves about the wrists” (882). The connection between Edna's badge of class, white skin, and her status as a married lady is forged here with a resigned closural gesture, as she “silently reache[s] out to [Léonce], and he, understanding, [takes] [her] rings from his vest pocket and drop[s] them into her open palm” (882). Edna's fragmented body is not unified until the end of the novel, when she emerges “naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.” At this moment, she, like Mariequita, stands barefoot in the sand, “the foamy wavelets curl[ing] up to her white feet, and coil[ing] like serpents about her ankles” (1000).

The Chênière Caminada episode in which Mariequita first appears prepares for her reappearance in the final scene of the novel, linking Edna to a class of women conventionally assumed to differ from privileged women. This linkage is sustained through recurrent mention of dark women with flashing eyes who satisfy their desires without suffering the social ostracism Edna must suffer if she “swims out where no [white] woman had ever swum before.” On the return from Chênière Caminada, Robert teaches Edna a romantic little air, Ah! si tu savais!—“Ah, if you knew what your eyes tell me!” Edna, who has dark and passionate eyes, parrots the words, failing to perceive the ironic connection between the lyrics of this refrain, Mariequita's eye-play, and the flashing eyes of other dark women in the novel. Although haunted by the melody, Edna refuses to confront the truth embodied in its lyrics until the end of the novel, when she flees her discovery of the impersonal and ephemeral nature of sexual passion.

Edna's first intuition of this truth comes when Robert returns from Mexico with a memento (aptly Freudian)—a finely embroidered tobacco pouch. When Edna, who has indulged in a brief consolation affair with Alcèe Arobin, a notorious roué, questions Robert about this gift from his Vera Cruz “girl” and about the women of Mexico “‘with their black eyes and their lace scarfs’” (985), she betrays the limited range of her worldly experience. Robert's response shows his worldly wisdom, as does his blasé attitude toward the experience. Although Robert's experience contrasts with Edna's naivete, they both recognize the insignificance of the affairs they have enjoyed while apart. His callous assertion that the Vera Cruz girl “‘wasn't of the slightest importance’” (985) and that “‘There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water’” (985) accords with Edna's claim that Alcée Arobin's photograph means nothing to her. The untimely interruption of this interchange by Alcée himself adds another voice to the tasteless, chauvinistic discussion of the dark women of Mexico, whom Alcée characterizes as “‘Stunning girls’” (985). Although Edna fails to see that her own status as an object of male possession is no different from that of women who serve as objects of male passion, she realizes that Robert, who shares a male language with Arobin that is as closed to her as was Mariequita's Spanish, “had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico” (987). Arobin's pointed request that Edna convey his regards to Mr. Pontellier when she writes puts her in her place, which differs from that of the dark women under discussion only in the strictly artificial or legal sense agreed upon by men.

The ability of men like Robert and Alcée to assert their mastery of women in such discussions confirms Edna's powerlessness to change her lot by allying herself with men. The end of the novel, which presents Mariequita once more, suggests Edna's powerlessness to change her lot by allying herself with women. When Edna walks as though catatonic past Mariequita and Victor to her death, she cannot really see Mariequita, nor can she be seen by her. Edna's hard-won understanding of her sexual nature thus remains bounded by race and class prejudices, which are signaled by the fact that here as in the beginning she is called “Mrs. Pontellier”⁸ and by the fact that here as in the Chênière Caminada episode, she is unable to interact with Mariequita except by casting herself once more into the social role that she has sought to escape. Thus, she intrudes upon Victor and Mariequita and gives them orders for a supper she never intends to eat. In this, her last social act as Mrs. Pontellier, Edna betrays once more the conventional attitudes of her class, which dictate suicide, the socially correct choice for a respectable white woman who has strayed from her role as wife and mother. Through food, the emblem of her subjugation and her self-indulgence throughout the novel, Edna insists on service from Victor and Mariequita, the dark woman who will provide a plausible story to account for her “accidental drowning.”

Held in reserve until this final scene and sketched once again with minimal but telling strokes, Mariequita responds to Edna according to convention. Even Edna's suspicious appearance at Grand Isle before the summer session cannot crack the class code that disables both women. Both are centered on themselves and must act out the roles they have been assigned, roles that satisfy neither but maintain the patriarchal order. Thus, Edna ignores Mariequita, addressing her remarks to Victor. And Mariequita feels jealous of Edna, believing the myth of a woman “who gave the most sumptuous dinners in America, and who had all the men in New Orleans at her feet” (998). Such a belief, so at variance with the truth, suggests the romantic illusions that will survive Edna to perpetuate male control. Because Mariequita lives on to tell Edna's story—and to get it all wrong—and because Mariequita's story is so clearly the one Victor has told her to maintain his power over her, Edna's partial knowledge of the sexual realities concealed by romantic fictions dies with her.

The true story, Kate Chopin's story of Edna's awakening, however, remains to cancel those romantic fictions that lead Edna astray. The inevitable consequence of her initial belief in her ability to venture further than other women of her class and of the caste, and of the class consciousness she shares with other privileged women, Edna's suicide indicts both sexism and racism. For Edna, and Edna alone among the women in the world of the novel, awakens to the truth about her own sexuality and that of other women, a truth concealed by romantic, racist fictions. Through Edna's awakening and her suicide, through her “obstructed vision” of the sexual realities that impinge on the lives of all women, Chopin took her stand against the sexual stereotypes that deny women, including Edna and the other women in the novel, not only the freedom and the opportunity but even the ability to experience and express their diversity.

Notes

1. Quoted by Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge, 1969), 114.

2. Edna Pontellier is unique because her creator was a woman and because she [Edna] is a white, upper-class wife and mother. Stephen Crane's Maggie, Hamlin Garland's Rose, Theodore Dreiser's Carrie, and Frank Norris's Trina manifest passion, but only Edna possesses an independent sense of herself as a sexual being; and she defies race, class, and sex conventions regarding woman's sexual nature.

3. It is worth noting that Chopin's debt to Flaubert's Madame Bovary is less than has been suggested by those who draw analogies between Edna Pontellier's situation and Emma Bovary's. Significantly, Emma is surrounded by male characters, while Edna is surrounded by a gallery of female types, white, black, and racially mixed.

4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, Vol. II, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge, 1969), 900. All subsequent references to The Awakening will be parenthetically cited in the text.

5. This critical neglect is merely one case in point of white solipsism. In Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), Bell Hooks [Gloria Watkins] indicts white critics in general for making black women invisible in their readings of literature.

6. James H. Justus, “The Unawakening of Edna Pontellier,” The Southern Literary Journal 10 (Spring, 1978), 107-22. Justus perceives that the male image originates in romantic iconography but fails to see that it has more than a personal reality for Edna, since it suggests her programming by her culture, a programming she shares with other women encouraged to visualize themselves as men in order to attain vicarious individuality.

7. This is the term for an individual of mixed black and native American ancestry.

8. In “The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening: A Linguistic Analysis,” Women and Language in Literature and Society, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furnam, eds. (New York, 1980), 239-57, Paula A. Treichler notes that Edna achieves individuality in the course of the novel and becomes identified to the reader as Edna. Treichler asserts that by the final chapter Edna has fully achieved her identity, but “the real Edna is elsewhere” (254). The use of Edna's married name in the final chapter, however, also suggests that in commiting suicide Edna is behaving as she has been programmed to behave. She is following the only path open to women of her class who experience sexual passion outside of marriage.