[In the following essay, Ewell explains her approach to teaching The Awakening.]

The Awakening may be the quintessential text for a course in women's studies. Greeted with polite dismay at its publication in 1899, revived and hailed as a lost classic sixty years later on the crest of the most recent women's movement, the novel offers a paradigmatic tale of a woman's abortive struggle toward selfhood in an oppressive, uncomprehending society. Who could ask for a more rousing exemplar of the fate of women who seek personal integrity in a world that reduces womanhood to role-playing? Or, for that matter, of the fate of women writers who dare to reveal the “life behind the mask” of conventional propriety? The stories of Edna and her author are the real stuff of consciousness-raising. And consequently, often without trying, sometimes even actively resisting, I have found The Awakening emerging as a touchstone if not the resonant centerpiece of my course on women in literature.

The centrality of The Awakening has been consistent over ten years of teaching the course, primarily in the South: to young sophisticates of a women's college, to the more provincial young people of a rural state university, or, most recently, to the professional adult students of a liberal arts college in a major city. Variations of student responses do occur, of course, but a common identification with the southern landscapes hardly accounts for students' consistent and riveted fascination with Chopin's novel.

These southern, and thus relatively conservative, contexts have also shaped my own rather traditional approach to the course itself. Women in Literature, as I teach it, is an intensive study of novels, short stories, poems, and occasionally plays by women. Partly in deference to student interest and, until recently, to the dearth of handy texts, the bias has been toward nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American writers. Of late, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and my own expanded reading have encouraged the inclusion of many earlier and more international works, though I persist in avoiding translations. My usual practice is to assign one or two nineteenth-century novels—Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a Brontë novel (Jane Eyre or Villette work well), a selection from Wollstonecraft; then Chopin's The Awakening, often preceded by regional short stories by Jewett, Chopin, and Freeman; sometimes Wharton's The House of Mirth, Woolf's Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse or Orlando, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Plath's The Bell Jar (less and less), a Lessing novel (The Golden Notebook or Memoirs of a Survivor); sometimes Welty's Delta Wedding or Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (excellent with Jane Eyre), Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Morrison's Sula or The Bluest Eye; and from time to time, Atwood's Surfacing, Ellen Douglas's A Lifetime Burning, Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, Jong's Fear of Flying, Rebecca Hill's Blue Rise, or some other contemporary work that has piqued my—or other reviewers'—interest. In addition to the six to eight novels finally chosen, we often read selections from a short-fiction or drama anthology and always spend several weeks with an anthology of poetry.

My aims in this course are perhaps apparent from the reading list—to expose students to some of the great British and American works by women that focus on female concerns: marrying, dealing with social roles, discovering sexuality, developing selfhood. I emphasize the “other” perspective that women have on their lives, the way stereotypes disintegrate when one sees this other point of view, and the peculiar constraints women must face and resolve. These thematic approaches seem appropriate in a course frequently elected by non-literature majors, but the texts themselves are studied principally as aesthetic rather than cultural documents.

The susceptibility of The Awakening to the approaches of women's studies is clear even in the biographical introduction with which I try to begin any new text. These life sketches, which are pointedly not going to be “on the test,” encourage students to appreciate not only the very human creators of these wonderful textures and narratives but also—I hope—the pleasures of knowing some things solely for their own sake. Chopin's biography, which I know better than most other biographies of women writers, is an especially good instance of a writer whose life and fiction interact in oblique, but perhaps typically female, ways. The fairly conventional patterns of her youth in St. Louis and adulthood in New Orleans and in the Cane River country, for example, are broken by her widowhood in midlife and the writing career that followed. Chopin's fictional exploitation of these settings is fairly obvious, but students are also always intrigued by the contradictions of her apparently happy marriage to Oscar and Edna's less fortunate relationship with Léonce, factors that underline the inventive dimensions of art. The scandalized reaction to The Awakening is also instructive, focusing for students the differing historical realities of the novel and preparing them better for the social inhibitions that later limit Edna's alternatives. Finally, Chopin's response to the rejection of her work and the oblivion of the novel after her death are poignant examples of the power of the critical industry to suppress or neglect whatever voices that unsettle its complacent self-conceptions. That particular lesson usually has considerable impact.

Having thus established some biographical context for the novel, I generally turn to the students to discover what their initial impressions of and reactions to the novel have been. I am rarely disappointed. The Awakening has always seemed to me easy to teach precisely because it does elicit such various—often passionate—responses. It is difficult, I think, not to read Edna's story without some response: outrage, disgust, pity, wonder, terror. All these good old Aristotelian cathartic emotions are particularly elicited by the ending: why did Edna kill herself? what does it mean that she did? More often than not in this initial discussion, students bring up most of what I consider the significant elements of an interpretation—Edna's relations with others, men and women; her role as mother and wife; her notions of self and sexuality; the role of setting—and thus set the stage for my eventual comments. But the students' engagement is itself a liberating classroom experience. Many who had never ventured any opinion suddenly become vociferous defenders—or protesters—of Edna's fate. And frequently, their involvement with this text frees them to express themselves on other texts as well. Of course, that kind of engagement is central to a women's studies class, which, in the best traditions of liberal education, proposes to examine the moral and personal relevance of historical texts.

The pertinence of Edna's dilemma—how to be an individual in a society that insists she play specific roles—is certainly a key to its fascination since it uniquely engages both younger students (who are much involved in articulating their selves) and older students (who are well aware of the compromising forces of social reality). But in presenting the terms of that dilemma, Chopin exposes a number of specifically female concerns, issues that are inevitably the focus of women's studies: the nature of female sexuality, the conventional opposition of romance and passion, the moral isolation of women in patriarchal systems, the role of female friendship, the importance of the body and the physical world to self-realization, the ambivalence toward children and childbearing. One good approach to many of these matters—which also helps to define Edna's dilemma and thus to interpret the novel's disturbing ending—is a close scrutiny of chapter 6, the first and most deliberate of Chopin's editorial intrusions. Not only does the chapter articulate the nature of Mrs. Pontellier's crisis—“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”—but it also epitomizes the features of that crisis. The “two contradictory impulses,” for example, that Edna obeys in first refusing and then following Robert to the beach underline the spontaneity of her awakening; a corresponding ambivalence is reflected in the image of the “certain light” that both shows the way and then forbids it. Edna's irrational and moody behavior is thus shown to be a function of deep and deeply uncomprehended recognitions about her “position in the universe as a human being.” While these observations help to explain Edna's erratic and impulsive, almost involuntary quest, Chopin also insists on the unsettling uniqueness of Edna's awareness—“a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight.” This characteristically wry irony is immediately followed by the narrator's sympathetic regard for anyone expecting to survive such interior chaos. Edna's moral isolation as a woman—not to mention as a Protestant and a Kentuckian in this Catholic Creole society—is thus made a prominent and ominous element of her self-awakening. The sensuality that for women is often a path to awareness is also beautifully evoked here, coupled with its major symbol, the sea. A lyric refrain personifies the sea as lover, whose initial invitation to solitude and reflection conceals depths that Edna has only begun to plumb. A comparison of the initial version with the altered repetition in the final pages offers a dramatic instance of the subtleties of Chopin's style even as it underlines the real possibilities of choice that do remain for Edna, if only for the short space of the novel.

Although all these seminal elements can be made the focus of critical discussion, the sensuality of the passage seems to me particularly useful in launching an examination of the overall role of setting—especially of the sea. The alternation between Grand Isle and New Orleans clarifies the conflicts Edna experiences between the sensuous and physical realities that awaken her self and the strict social conventions that have previously defined her. A good place to focus on the specific role of the sea is Edna's learning to swim. Paula A. Treichler has a fine analysis of the ambiguity of the language in this passage and its relevance to female perceptions of power, but most students quickly grasp there the metaphoric power of Edna's struggles with the sea and the prescient vision of death her conquest of its forces eventually yields. The ensuing battle of wills on the gallery with Léonce and his efforts to enforce his sexual desires on her only emphasize Chopin's narrative skills and her ability to mingle event and symbol provocatively.

But it is Edna's own character that most clearly embodies the complexity of women's choices in a world defined by male concerns. The ambivalence, for example, highlighted in chapter 6 recurs both in decisions Edna makes later and in the figure that she poses to the reader. Exploiting that duality in classroom discussions is a good way, I find, to dramatize the difficulty of “objective” judgments or even of moral absolutes. Such an approach calls into question not only the conventional structures of Edna's society but our complicity with them—challenges to our assumptions about reality, which are obviously basic to Chopin's intent in this novel as well as central to the perspectives of women's studies. It is useful at this point, then, to pose to students two possible views of Edna: is she a hopeless, irresponsible romantic, revenging herself on the universe, or a purposeful individual, seeking selfhood, but lacking any real alternatives? Although such formulations oversimplify the matter, they do provide a basis for discussion and a means of understanding both Edna's personal dilemma and ours in attempting to comprehend its significance. The evidence for either perspective is persuasive; witness the available criticism of the novel. Edna's natural sensuality, for example, her “sensuous susceptibility to beauty,” is everywhere: from her admiration of Adèle to her awareness of her body, especially at Chênière Caminada, to her recurrent eating and sleeping and dreaming in the novel. While this affinity for the physical implies very female concerns, if not some substantiality in her self-awakening, evidence for her romanticism is also powerful: her adolescent fantasies about unattainable men, her prosaic and thus “real” marriage to Léonce, and her general equation of “life's delirium” with the desirable and the ephemeral and of reality with the mechanical and endless. At the same time, Edna declares her need for self-determination and quite consistently abandons Léonce's house and money in her effort to cast “aside that fictious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world” (19). In contrast, she does not think very much or very clearly about her predicament; Adèle calls her an unthinking child, and even en route to her suicide she appears to have no definite insight or plan.

But the central ambivalence in Edna and the critical issue for nineteenth-century women focuses on her understanding of love and passion. The crucial passage here is another (though less intrusive than the first) editorial chapter, chapter 28, recounting Edna's response to Arobin's passionate embraces. Like most nineteenth-century women, for whom sexual passion was deemed at least unladylike if not downright vitiating, Edna had learned as a child to confuse sexual passion with romance. In Arobin's purely physical attractions, the separateness of these experiences is revealed. The mist is “lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality.” As Edna's illusions about sexual passion begin to fall away, she understands more clearly what she wants, not from Arobin, but from Robert—a romantic, physical relationship, the consummation of body and soul, self and other. Her romantic, adolescent dreams of fulfillment—“life's delirium”—now disclose their physical component, sexual desire. But what Edna has yet to understand is that physical passion, real contact with real people, has concrete consequences. The complications of that insight are the crux, not only of Edna's dilemma, but, as Chopin saw, of the contemporary woman, attempting to forge a realistic, implicitly modern perspective on the dissolving paradigms of Victorian culture. This crisis of sexual identity, posed so prominently and disturbingly in the life of a woman, is a central issue of the age, forming a primary if often unacknowledged undercurrent of realist fiction in Chopin's time. But Chopin's explicitly feminine perspective challenges those paradigms more profoundly and thus more threateningly than any vision before that of the modernists themselves.

This female perspective is similarly apparent in Chopin's treatment of Edna's women friends. Adèle Ratignolle and Mlle Reisz are Edna's primary confidantes and models; she admires and loves them both and values their counsel. At the same time, Chopin exposes their insufficiency as models and embodies in them aspects of Edna's basic conflict between her romantic desires and her longing for self-sufficiency. Adèle's romantic beauty, her absorption in the role of “mother-woman” are attractively conventional, but Edna cannot sacrifice “the essential” for the sake of such blissful immersion in others' needs. Similarly, Mlle Reisz possesses the courageous soul of independence—the essential self Edna cherishes—but Edna cannot bear the pianist's lonely solitude or the lack of romance in her life. Chopin creates in these two women rich models of the limited alternatives late nineteenth-century America offered women. The different responses they elicit from that society (as well as from Edna)—its benevolent protectiveness toward Adèle or its condescending tolerance of Mlle Reisz—are instructive. A significant insight of women's studies has been the power of roles—of social structures—to determine personal choices, complicating the search for self (a sympathetic quest, particularly for adolescents), especially a search as undirected and unhappy as Edna's.

But it is Edna's final awakening that centers this novel in a course about women. For the real complication of sexual identity and selfhood for women remains the responsibility for children. Edna's climactic recognition begins with her unexpected meeting with Robert at Catiche's garden café and their return to the “pigeon house” where they finally confess their love (36). But Edna's response to Robert's “mad” dreams of divorce is a dramatic measure of how far even an errant soul like Edna's can go toward insight and freedom. No one can any longer set her free, she explains to a stunned Robert: “I give myself where I choose.” But Chopin brilliantly interrupts any reply Robert might offer with a knock on the door and Adèle's request for her friend's presence at her imminent labor and delivery. Not only does Edna's departure reveal the priority of her friendship with Adèle over her tryst with Robert, but that seemingly chance intrusion on their imminent sexual encounter is also a summons to recognition. Precisely as Edna is about to realize “life's delirium”—the merging of passion and romance with Robert—its results, especially before effective and widespread birth control, are vividly recalled to her: children. That relation of passion and children, which for women remains the chief issue of sexuality, is more fully expounded in Edna's conversation with Dr. Mandelet, who understands “intuitively” the sources of Edna's dismay (38). Romance is an illusion, and, deliberately confused with passion for young Victorian girls, it becomes “a decoy to secure mothers for the race”; but the children that result from that illusory confusion are real responsibilities, whose rights even Edna cannot ignore or “trample on.” To awaken thus, as she must, to these bitter facts of life is to incur responsibility for one's choices, even ignorant choices; it is to recognize one's position in the universe as a responsible individual and to relinquish the romantic dream of union with others—the very dream that had led to that self-recognition—at the very moment when selfhood had made communion really possible. And though Edna tries to defer this unpleasant recognition, Robert's pusillanimous note—“I love you. Good-by—because I love you” (38)—which confirms his own inability to deal with real consequences, leaves her no choice.

But Edna's return to Grand Isle is as ambivalent as her spiritual path. I find it a lively exercise to review with students her final deliberations, especially her focus on her children, whom she will not allow “to drag her into the soul's slavery” but who are still the only ones that “matter” (39). The wonderfully complex tone of that final passage, with its insistence on Edna's despair and its symbolic bird with a broken wing, coupled with the deeply attractive imagery of birth and the sensuous pleasure of the sea, only heightens the ambivalence of Edna's plight. But it also provides excellent material for either side of the debate that, we hope, is now raging in the classroom about whether Edna's deed is justifiable or even defensible. Appropriately, too, children become the key element in such a discussion—as children have always been in the seemingly endless—if not timeless—debate about the nature and place of women in human being.

If the classes on The Awakening have gone well, many inhibitions are dissipating both in the classroom and in the informal journals that I have found a vital writing component of a women and literature course. When students have to articulate their thoughts and feelings about texts and discussions—even, perhaps especially, negative ones—classroom participation is dramatically improved, in both quality and quantity. Moreover, rewarding students for at least trying to see the moral and political as well as intellectual pertinence of these texts to their lives reinforces the sense of literary engagement that I want to encourage. Indeed, the many unresolvable and emotionally confusing issues raised in such a class almost require this expressive outlet. But the other well-known function of journal writing is its usefulness in generating formal papers. While I generally do not assign research papers in this course, I do ask for at least two short essays. And The Awakening, which evokes such strong responses, also provides very manageable material for analysis, especially for a first paper, when student insecurities loom large. Assignments on the role of setting, the use of female models or foils, image patterns (birds, the sea, eating and sleeping), and the function of minor characters have all proved fairly successful. Broader topics are also possible, such as the conflicts of women and society, the ambivalences of childbearing, the portrayal of men, the alienation of the outsider, female friendships, the value of suicide, or the nature of freedom or of female sexuality.

Though, as I have tried to suggest, The Awakening broaches many issues central to the perspectives of women's studies, the crucial value of the novel in a classroom remains for me its ability to generate excitement and real involvement with a text. Throughout my years of teaching the novel, those responses have varied, but they remain intense. Younger, less sophisticated students, for example, who still believe the world is their liberated oyster, seem more intransigent toward Edna's suicide (why didn't she just move away? elope with Robert? get a job?) and less forgiving of her abandonment of her children, who, for these students, are still part of a misty, happy future. To such students, Chopin can teach tolerance and empathy. Many black women, especially older ones, who have a long heritage of overcoming vastly greater obstacles than Edna's, are frankly disgusted with her cowardice (white ladies just don't know what real trouble is!). Chopin's gift to them can be renewed confidence in their own powers and traditions. Edna's problems perhaps find greatest understanding among other older, middle-class women, who have known the bittersweet burdens of children and who recognize the silent, choking restrictions of bourgeois respectability. But most students, while they may not agree with Edna or may even find her weak and foolish, as perhaps Chopin's ironic distances suggest she is, rarely fail to see the poignance of her dilemma. They recognize, as Chopin obviously intended us to, that weak and confused as Edna may be, her conflict with an uncomprehending society has a piercing and resonant reality. And while even Chopin withholds her judgment on its outcome, none of us is rendered exempt from evaluating its causes or its complex components of sex, freedom, and the demands of society and selfhood. Such engagement, of course, is the manifest goal of women's studies and, indeed, of all effective learning and teaching.