SOURCE: Freeman, Barbara Claire. “The Awakening: Waking Up at the End of the Line.” In The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction, pp. 13-39. Berkley: University of California Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Freeman explores the notion of the sublime in The Awakening.]

The sublime does not so properly persuade us, as it ravishes and transports us, and produces in us a certain Admiration, mingled with Astonishment and with Surprize, which is quite another thing than the barely pleasing, or the barely persuading: that it gives a noble Vigour to a Discourse, an invincible Force, which commits a pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader.

(John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry)

You can't make a political “program” with it, but you can bear witness to it.—And what if no one hears the testimony, etc.?

(Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend)

Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

(Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)

These waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues.

(Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful)

Longinus cites only one female poet in his influential Peri Hypsous (On the sublime), the first-century treatise whose fame was revived by Boileau's French translation and commentary of 1674.¹ That poet, of course, is Sappho of Lesbos (early sixth century B.C.), and Longinus chooses her lyric phainetai moi to illustrate his view that literary excellence depends upon the writer's ability to harmonize differences and create an organic whole.² Anticipating the New Critic's demand that the perfect poem, like a “well-wrought urn” or “verbal icon,” achieve the status of an autonomous unit, Longinus praises Sappho's ability “in selecting the outstanding details and making a unity of them” (10.1) as particularly exemplary of sublime writing. What is striking, however, is the disparity between Sappho's poem and Longinus' interpretation of it. Whereas the lyric describes an experience of total fragmentation when the speaker hears her lover's “sweet voice” (10.1), Longinus commends Sappho's skill in creating the illusion of wholeness: according to him, she is able to join diverse parts in such a way that “they co-operate to form a unity and are linked by the bonds of harmony” (40.1).

Given this poem's crucial role in establishing Longinus' account of the sublime, it is worth examining in some detail. I cite versions of the poem as it appears in two eminent and recent translations of Longinus, the first by D. A. Russell, the second by G. M. A. Grube.³

To me he seems a peer of the gods, the man who sits
facing you and hears your sweet voice
And lovely laughter; it flutters my heart in my breast.
When I see you only for a moment, I cannot speak;
My tongue is broken, a subtle fire runs under my skin;
my eyes cannot see, my ears hum; Cold sweat pours off me; shivering
          grips me all over; I am paler than grass;
I seem near to dying; But all must be endured …

(10.2)

The translation in Grube's edition renders the last two stanzas as follows:

Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
'Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring
Waves in my ears sounds;
Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
Lost in the love trance.

(10.2)

And here, in Russell's translation, is Longinus' commentary:

Consider Sappho's treatment of the feelings involved in the madness of being in love. She uses the attendant circumstances and draws on real life at every point. And in what does she show her quality? In her skill in selecting the outstanding details and making a unity of them … Do you not admire the way she brings everything together—mind and body, hearing and tongue, eyes and skin? She seems to have lost them all, and to be looking for them as though they were external to her. She is cold and hot, mad and sane, frightened and near death, all by turns.

(10.1-3)

Longinus' insistence that the poem's sublimity resides in its representation of unity, its ability to connect disparate elements and “bring everything together,” is especially puzzling given that Sappho seems so little concerned with univocity. Longinus values the poem because he believes it achieves precisely the opposite of what in fact it does: despite his assumption that its excellence depends upon Sappho's skill in replacing the diverse with the singular, there is little, if any, textual evidence for his celebration of homogeneity. Sappho juxtaposes such apparent dualisms as life and death, hot and cold, or sanity and madness not, as Longinus would have it, in order to create harmony, but rather to unsettle the notion of organic form upon which his notion of the sublime depends. Rather than unify the disparate, Sappho foregrounds the activity of self-shattering. Instead of warding off fragmentation, she insists upon it. It is as if the goal of Longinus' commentary were to domesticate and neutralize the very excessiveness Sappho's text bespeaks.

My principal concern, however, is not with the strength or weakness of Longinus' literary criticism. I wish instead to examine the function Sappho's lyric plays in Longinus' treatise in order to suggest that his is a paradigmatic response to the irruption of a threatening and potentially uncontainable version of the sublime, one that appears to represent excess but does so only the better to keep it within bounds. The move Longinus makes in relation to Sappho is particularly instructive since, as we shall see, later theorists echo it time and time again. Longinus' commentary on Sappho plays a constitutive role in the sublime's theorization by shaping the ways in which the subject's encounter with excess, one of the sublime's most characteristic and enduring features, may and may not be conceptualized.⁴ Neil Hertz's brilliant “Reading of Longinus,” which is itself representative of late twentieth-century American theorists' commitment to a romantic (or Wordsworthian) sublime, continues this tradition by repeating the very same scenario.⁵ Hertz not only recuperates an instance of difference in a literary text and reads it as forming a unified whole; perhaps more important, he constructs a theory of the sublime that perpetuates its tactic of exclusion.

This [essay's] exploration of significant misreadings in the history of the sublime, along with the role and place of gender in producing that history, will let us look at ways in which the sublime might be written otherwise, were that dimension not repressed. Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening amplifies and elucidates precisely those elements of the sublime that Sappho foregrounds and Longinus obscures. The Awakening, which stands at the dawn of twentieth-century American women's fiction and brings forward some of its basic preoccupations and themes, also suggests a particular version of the feminine sublime, here understood not as a transhistorical or universal category, but rather as the attempt to articulate the subject's confrontation with excess in a mode that does not lead solely to its recuperation. At stake in Chopin's novel is the very “transport” (ekstasis) Sappho inscribes, a “going close to death” that marks the limits of the representable. Here the sublime is no longer a rhetorical mode or style of writing, but an encounter with the other in which the self, simultaneously disabled and empowered, testifies to what exceeds it. At issue is not only the attempt to represent excess, which by definition breaks totality and cannot be bound, but the desire for excess itself; not just the description of, but the wish for, sublimity.

I

As Chopin remarks, “The beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.”⁶ We begin with a discussion of Longinus not only because, as the author of the first treatise on the sublime, he defines the set of problems that will coalesce under this name, but because his treatment of Sappho is paradigmatic of the kinds of disturbances that are at the very heart of the sublime's theorization. In order to grasp the significance of his response to Sappho, however, we need to understand Longinus' view of sublimity, the better to ask in what ways Sappho's lyric both exemplifies and undercuts it.

First and foremost, the sublime is a certain kind of linguistic event, a mode of discourse that breaks down the differences and involves a merger between speaker (or writer) and hearer (or reader). “Sublimity,” according to Longinus, “is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse” (1.3). It is not an essential property of language but rather makes itself known by the effect it produces, and that effect is one of ravishment; as Russell puts it, “whatever knocks the reader out is sublime” (xiii). Sublime language disrupts everyday consciousness: “great writing … takes the reader out of himself”; it “tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator's whole power at a single blow” (1.4).⁷ The sublime utterance, which itself attempts to represent excess, also involves its production: it is accompanied by a threefold identification between speaker, message, and listener in which the latter comes “to believe he has created what he has only heard” (7.2). This identification displaces the identity of its participants and is characteristic of the moment of hypsous, that state of transport and exaltation that for Longinus is the mark of sublimity. One of the defining features of sublime discourse is its ability to blur customary differences between speaker and hearer, text and reader. As Suzanne Guerlac points out, “this paradoxical moment is presented by the text as being both the effect and the origin of the sublime, which engenders itself through ‘impregnating’ the soul of the listener.”⁸

Unlike the listener's experience of discourse that seeks merely to please or to persuade, the effect of sublime language entails a certain loss of control. Longinus emphasizes that the sublime “produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer” and insists that this “combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. This is because persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer” (1.4). The discourse of the sublime, then, is integrally bound up with the subject's responses to what possesses it, to the nature and effects of such a merger, and to the ways in which various forms of identification may be understood. At stake is the question of how to theorize ravishment.

Although Longinus never explicitly confronts this issue, his treatise suggests (or is most frequently read as if it suggested) that the moment of hypsous becomes a struggle for dominance between opposing forces, an almost Darwinian contest in which the strong flourish and the weak are overcome.⁹ For the sublime not only produces an identification between speaker and audience but entails a modification in relations of power between the parties involved, and the diversity of ways in which such modifications may be conceptualized is at the heart of critical debates regarding the sublime.¹⁰ Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence has as its origin Longinus' precept, itself borrowed from Hesiod, that “strife is good for men” (13.4). The orator attempts to possess the auditor in much the same way that the poet wishes to transport the reader; the view of creativity as bound up with the quest for mastery and ownership shapes Longinus' view of literary production itself. Poets struggle amongst themselves to best one another: even Plato would not have attained greatness without the need to show his superiority to his rival Homer, for he could not have “put such a brilliant finish on his philosophical doctrines or so often risen to poetical subjects and poetical language, if he had not tried, and tried, wholeheartedly, to compete for the prize against Homer, like a young aspirant challenging an admired master” (13.4). Many contemporary American theorists of the sublime reinforce this claim.¹¹ Thomas Weiskel, for example, insists that “discourse in the Peri Hypsous (on Great Writing) is a power struggle,” while according to Paul Fry, “the Longinian sublime appears in a climate of antagonism, as rivalry between authors.”¹²

But if the sublime is, to borrow Fry's phrase, always “a drama of power” and “a struggle for possession,” I must stress what Longinus and the majority of his critics do not: that the kind of power at stake in Sappho's lyric differs in important respects from the other examples Longinus cites as illustrative of the sublime.¹³ For Sappho's ode affirms a form of possession that redefines traditional modes of domination and relations of power. By exploring the differences between Sappho's ode and Homer's—since he is the other poet Longinus chooses to exemplify “excellence in selection and organization” (10.1)—we will see that Sappho's lyric offers an alternative to Longinus's belief that the sublime entails a struggle for domination in which one party submits to another, and that his misreading of Sappho has significant consequences for the sublime's theorization.

For Longinus, who believes that “sublimity will be achieved if we consistently select the most important of those inherent features and learn to organize them as a unity by combining one with another” (10.1), the ability “to select and organize material” is one of the factors that “can make our writing sublime” (10.1). Comparing Sappho's skillful description of “the feelings involved in the madness of being in love” (10.1) with Homer's talent for portraying storms, he especially praises the latter's skill in depicting “the most terrifying aspects” (10.3). And both poems provide impressive examples of realistic description. Sappho conveys precisely what “lovers experience” (10.3); “she uses the attendant circumstances and draws on real life at every point” (10.1); the result of her art is “that we see in her not a single emotion, but a complex of emotions …” (10.3). Indeed, their similar gift for accurate representation prompts Longinus' comparison of the two poets. Like Sappho, Homer is a genius because he is able to choose the details that will convey the essence of an experience. Longinus cites a passage in which Homer likens Hector to a storm at sea as exemplary:

He [Hector] fell upon them [the Greeks] as upon a swift
          ship falls a wave,
Huge, wind-reared by the clouds. The ship
Is curtained in foam, a hideous blast of wind
Roars in the sail. The sailors shudder in terror:
They being carried away from under death, but only just.

(10.5)

Sappho and Homer share the ability to select and combine the most disparate elements of an awesome event in order to present a complete, unified portrait of it. But Longinus implies that the two poets have more in common than rhetorical or stylistic facility: he also suggests that each poet is concerned to describe a version of the same experience, as if the terror of almost dying at sea were the same as almost dying of love. This assumption, however, conflates two very different kinds of near-death experiences and ignores a crucial distinction between the kind of death, or perhaps more important, the kind of ecstasy, at stake. Sappho's and Homer's lyrics may be alike in that both depict the speaker's encounter with death, but they do not exhibit the same concern with self-preservation. While Homer writes about escaping death, Sappho describes the process of going toward it. And whereas the Homeric hero either wins or loses, lives or dies, Sappho's protagonist can only “win” by losing and “death” becomes one name for a moment of hypsous whose articulation eludes any literal description. Sappho, unlike Homer, is not concerned with strife or combat, nor does her poem support the notion that the sublime entails the defeat of death. Moreover, the kinds of power relations about which she writes do not involve dominance, in which one identity subjugates another, but a merger in which usually separate identities conjoin. Such a junction displaces the ordinary meaning of “possession” wherein one either owns or is owned, and instead suggests that the poet/lover can possess that by which she is also possessed.

Sappho's lyric thus articulates a version of sublimity that differs radically from the Longinian sublime of power and rivalry. In so doing, it foregrounds what Longinus and subsequent theorists ignore: the deployment of agency to intensify and underscore the wish for dispossession, and to recognize in the scene of self-dispersal a site of self-empowerment. What is particularly striking about the poem, to echo Chopin's phrase, is Sappho's affirmation of the need for “the unlimited in which to lose herself” (29). But whereas Sappho's poem refuses any binary formulation of life and death, Longinus' commentary, like Homer's lyric, reinforces their separation, and we shall see that Longinus' repression of a certain heterogeneous and irreconcilable desire has far-reaching consequences in the history of the sublime's theorization.¹⁴

II

It may seem a long way from Longinus' treatise to Neil Hertz's End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985), but Hertz's notion of the sublime, especially as evidenced by his well-known “Reading of Longinus” (first published in Poétique in 1973), is strikingly congruent with Longinus'; and I have chosen to focus the discussion of Sappho's lyric through a meditation upon this essay not only because it exemplifies, if not defines, an important moment in late twentieth-century American studies of the sublime, but because Hertz's and Longinus' responses to Sappho have significant affinities.

According to Hertz, the sublime moment involves a turn or “transfer of power” (7), a crucial movement in which the subject shifts “from being ‘under death’ to being out from under death” (6). Precisely because no such “turn” occurs in Sappho's poem, it is particularly surprising that Hertz chooses her ode to support this account of the sublime. Although there is a marked difference between the beginning and the end of the poem (the speaker, for example, begins by reporting specific sensations [“my eyes cannot see, my ears hum”] and concludes by describing general ones [“I am paler than grass; I seem near to dying”]), such a progression bears no relation to the notion of “the sublime turn” upon which Hertz insists. It is also surprising that Hertz reverses the order of Longinus' text; he quotes Homer's poem before beginning to discuss Sappho and then cites only the last stanza. Just as Hertz points out that “Sappho's ode serves Longinus' purposes” (7), so she serves his: reading her poem as if it were a microcosm of Homer's lends credence to his view that the sublime entails a chiasmatic reversal, a shift from “victimized body” to “poetic force” (7). According to Hertz, what Longinus writes of Homer—that he has “tortured the words to correspond with the emotion of the moment” and has “in effect stamped the special character of the danger on the diction: ‘they are being carried away from under death’” (10.6)—is equally true of Sappho. Hertz thus ignores the crucial differences between the two poems and reads Sappho's lyric as if, like Homer's, it celebrates a “turning away from near-annihilation” (6), which, for him, is the hallmark of the sublime. In a telling comparison, Hertz compares Sappho's alleged turning away to two lines from Wordsworth's Prelude, lines that will also figure in Hertz's subsequent “Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime” (1978): “Sappho's turn from being ‘under death’ to being out from under death … is, characteristically, the sublime turn (compare Wordsworth's ‘my mind turned round / As with the might of waters’)” (6).¹⁵ Hertz's agenda is to show that Longinus' treatise authorizes and endorses a basically Wordsworthian sublime that, precipitated by a collision with mortality, celebrates the self's triumph over anything that would undermine its autonomy or interfere with its movement toward transcendence.

It is crucial both that Hertz establish the structure of the sublime as a transfer of power and that he define this turn as one of “disintegration and figurative reconstitution” (14), a movement from chaos to unity. Insisting that “the turn itself, the transfer of power, can take place only if some element can shift its position from one side of the scheme to the other” (7), Hertz reads Sappho's text “not simply (as) a poem of passion and self-division but one which dramatizes, in a startlingly condensed fashion, the shift from Sappho-as-victimized-body to Sappho-as-poetic-force” (7). Hertz's insistence upon a clear and present difference between (defeated) “victimized body” and (triumphant) “poetic force” parallels his view that the sublime moves from a state of “disintegration” to one of “figurative reconstitution”; moreover, both distinctions endorse a view of the sublime as entailing the transcendence of an overwhelming obstacles or force. But is there any textual evidence that such a shift occurs? As we have seen, Sappho does not conceive of the speaker's experience in terms of victory or defeat, nor does the poem confirm Hertz's view that her body is “victimized.” At the end of the poem the speaker proclaims herself “near to dying” (or in Grube's translation, “caught in the pain of menacing death”), yet neither phrase supports Hertz's contention that the poem illustrates “the transfer of power” or “shift from-body-to-force” that supposedly characterizes the sublime turn; neither attests to the essential turn “away from near-annihilation” that is indeed central to Homer's lyric. Sappho rather describes a kind of excess that cannot exist within Hertz's (or Longinus') conceptual framework.

If libidinal and linguistic energies are not quite the same, her poem implies, they may also be less neatly separable than Hertz might wish. In so doing the poem exhibits a sublime that, at once visceral and verbal, inscribes both “body” and “poetic force” without collapsing the difference between them. Hertz's contention that the sublime entails a transfer of power that progresses from defeat to victory (or from body to mind) thus upholds precisely the dualism Sappho's poem denies. An important question, then, is not simply what authorizes Hertz's characterization of Sappho's body as “victimized,” but why he fails to see that her text resists and critiques such a theorization of sublimity? The relevance of gender to this question cannot be underestimated, and this issue comes to the fore in Hertz's second essay on the sublime, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime” (1978). Published two years after Thomas Weiskel's influential Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Hertz's “Notion of Blockage” examines what his earlier essay had overlooked: the notion of a potentially unrecuperable excess that, in Jacques Derrida's famous phrase, cannot “be brought back home to the father” (52).

In this new essay Hertz continues to emphasize that the sublime entails a transfer of power, a movement in which the self is first “checked in some activity … then released into another order of discourse” (44). Here, however, his explicit focus is the problem of excess raised both by the mind's movement of blockage and release at play in Kant's mathematical sublime and by Weiskel's psychoanalytic reading of Kant. For Weiskel as for Kant, the sublime arises from a moment when the self confronts and overcomes an obstacle or “blocking agent.” Because Hertz wants to consider “both the role it (the moment of blockage) played in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of the sublime and the fascination it still seems to exert on contemporary historians and theorists of literature” (41), he examines the function of “blockage” in texts on the sublime by Samuel Holt Monk and Weiskel. In each case a feminine figure (or traditional symbol of femininity such as water or chaos) becomes a metaphor for the obstacle or “blocking agent.”¹⁶

The first indication of a relationship between femininity and the notion of blockage emerges in Hertz's discussion of Monk's magisterial study of the sublime. Monk begins “with a careful paraphrasing of Kant” (45) because the latter's paradigm of the sublime as a moment of blockage followed by a compensatory positive movement provides a defense against total immersion in the labyrinth of eighteenth-century speculation about the sublime. The sheer magnitude of writing about the sublime during this period is, in effect, a version of what it purports to describe: it would, Monk says, “be unwise to embark on the confused seas of English theories of the sublime without having some idea as to where we are going.”¹⁷ (Note the remarkable recurrence of images of the sea as metaphors for the sublime: Homer's “huge wave batters the ship, bringing the sailors close to death”; Sappho hears the sound of roaring waves as sweat runs rivers down her body; and in “The Notion of Blockage” Hertz remarks upon “the rising tide of academic publications” just before he cites Wordsworth's image of “the Fleet waters of a drowning world” [41].) We will return to the link between the sea and sublimity in connection with The Awakening. For the moment, it is important to remark that English theories of the sublime, here aligned with the threat of excess Monk attempts to ward off, are symbolized by femininity. Monk begins his introduction by likening speculation about the sublime to “the confused seas” and proceeds to compare it to a woman in disarray: “theories of beauty are relatively trim and respectable, but in theories of the sublime one catches the century somewhat off its guard, sees it, as it were, without powder or pomatum, whalebone and patches” (6). Perhaps English theories of sublimity, the confused seas, and a woman caught without makeup are, for both Monk and Hertz, parallel terms. Speculation about the sublime becomes the obstacle the scholar needs to overcome in order to construct its definitive study and, appropriately enough, a woman unfit to be seen presents herself as the appropriate symbol for this inhibiting, yet necessary, force.

Weiskel's study of the romantic sublime contains a similar movement of thought that represses femininity in order to construct identity. Whereas Monk relies upon Kant, Weiskel finds in Freud's Oedipus complex—the “structure beneath the vast epiphenomena of the sublime” (11)—means to chart a course upon the perilous seas. Because Kant's sublime is equivalent to the “moment in which the mind turns within and performs its identification with reason,” the sublime moment “recapitulates and thereby reestablishes the Oedipus complex, whose positive resolution is the basis of culture itself” (93-94). Weiskel thus identifies Kant's notion of the moral law with the Freudian superego in which, as Hertz points out, “an identification with the father (is) taken as a model” (51). But Hertz also remarks Weiskel's suspicion that the Oedipus complex does not function as the “deep structure” (103) of the sublime, and that it wards off a terrifying heterogeneity for which the theory cannot account; indeed, Weiskel worries that he has “arrived at [the] model by pressing one theory and suppressing a multitude of facts for which it cannot account” (99). The Stolen Boat episode in The Prelude (1.357-400), in which the speaker suffers overwhelming remorse after Mother Nature persuades him to steal a boat in “an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure,” leads Weiskel to conclude that the boy's guilt conceals “a deeper, original ambivalence” (102) that cannot be explained by the notion of “an ambivalent struggle against an essentially benevolent pedagogy” (102). “Could it be,” he wonders, “that the anxiety of the sublime does not ultimately result from the pressure of the super-ego after all?” (103). It will come as no surprise that the frightening excess that, if unleashed, might block the theory's success is, for Weiskel as for Longinus, Monk, and Hertz, symbolized by the feminine.

The magnitude that cannot be “returned to the father” leads to the territory of the mother. Although Weiskel does not use the term “pre-Oedipal,” his explanation for this new anxiety of the sublime calls up an invocation of the desire and terror at work in the (maternal) pre-Oedipal phase, in which the infant is still bound in symbiotic union with its mother:

The very gratification of instinctual aims, in its quality of excess, alerts the ego to a danger. There is simultaneously a wish to be inundated or engulfed by pleasurable stimuli and a fear of being incorporated, overwhelmed, annihilated. This is hardly a rigorous formulation of the original “oral ambivalence,” but it helps to account for the peculiar, ambivalent quality of the abyss image. … Our line of thought postulates a wish to be inundated and a simultaneous anxiety of annihilation: to survive, as it were, the ego must go on the offensive and cease to be passive. This movement from passive to active is technically a reaction formation, and the Oedipal configuration we have remarked thus appears as itself a defense against the original wish.

(104-5)¹⁸

Becoming a self, in this scenario, requires a transfer of libidinal energy from the mother to the father, as if the mother were herself the threatening agent that, without paternal intervention, would interfere with the formation of the child's separate identity. Yet Weiskel does not remark that the shift from passive to active (or pre-Oedipal to Oedipal) is accompanied by a correlative shift in which the father replaces the mother, or that “survival” depends upon her repression. The excess that might have impeded the theory's performance again turns out to instantiate it, for Weiskel concludes that “though the sublime of magnitude does not originate in a power struggle, it almost instantaneously turns into one as the secondary Oedipal system takes over” (106). In every case, the gender of the blocking agent that seems to interfere with but in fact enables the sublime moment is feminine.

Given Hertz's attunement to the connections between issues of gender and motifs of scapegoating, it is surprising that he does not notice the reenactment within his own work on the sublime of the very strategies of repression he explores so astutely within the works of Monk and Weiskel. His conclusion regarding Weiskel's use of the pre-Oedipal phase and the scholar's wish for the moment of blockage are particularly instructive:

We might even see in Weiskel's invocation of the [maternal] pre-Oedipal phases, in his interpretation of them as constituting the deep (hence primary) structure of the sublime and yet as still only a tributary of the Oedipal system into which it invariably flows, a more serious and argued version of Monk's joke about the woman not fit to be seen. The goal in each case is the Oedipal moment, that is, the goal is the sublime of conflict and structure. The scholar's wish is for the moment of blockage, when an indefinite and disarrayed sequence is resolved (at whatever sacrifice) into a one-to-one confrontation, when numerical excess can be converted into that supererogatory identification with the blocking agent that is the guarantor of the self's own integrity as an agent.

(53)

Hertz and Weiskel employ similar strategies in their wish to bring the sublime safely back home to the father. Conceiving of excess only as a frightening (and feminine) other provides the occasion for a confrontation that enables the (masculine) self to confirm, or enhance, its own existence. Excess in such a formulation cannot be defined as heterogeneity, but rather is understood exclusively as a hostile, persecutory force; as in Longinus, the sublime becomes synonymous with the self's ability to master the other.

Although it is to Hertz's credit that his essays make explicit the rhetorical strategies by which such mastery is achieved, he fails to envision a sublime that does not depend for its construction upon the repression of excess. He concludes “The Notion of Blockage” with an alternative formulation of the sublime, “not the recuperable baffled self associated with scenarios of blockage, but a more radical flux and dispersion of the subject” (58), yet does so only the better to exclude the notion of this more “radical flux” in the very act of describing it: while “the moment of blockage might have been rendered as one of utter self-loss, it was, even before its recuperation as sublime exaltation, a confirmation of the unitary status of the self” (53). The second half of the sentence disqualifies the possibility the preceding phrase had seemed to affirm; the sublime “of utter self-loss” serves merely as the exception that confirms the theory's rule. Once again excess is thematized as a “blocking agent” that guarantees the self's own “unitary status.” What seems to be the articulation of a problem functions as the form of its dismissal.¹⁹

Whereas Hertz appears to examine a kind of magnitude that cannot be read as “a confirmation of the unitary status of the self” (53) and one that, in Weiskel's phrase, does not “dramatize the rhythm of transcendence in its extremist and purest form” (22), his treatment of excess repeats and enacts the very movement it appears only to describe: the theorist needs a potentially uncontainable form of excess (or “blocking agent”) in order that the model, by successfully defending against it, may strengthen and thereby confirm itself. The “common function of the moment of blockage in sublime scenarios” (60) is to legitimate differences, restore continuity, and ensure that the boundary between self and other will remain unblurred. And although Hertz may be correct to insist that while “some remarkable effects can be generated by crossing the line … the line needs to be established in order to be vividly transgressed” (59), we need to reassess a critical tradition that can consider the sublime exclusively in terms of a model of transgression. What notion of the sublime might ensue if one could no longer determine exactly where a line ends, or what crossing it entails?

It is not surprising that the specter of difference that haunts Weiskel and Hertz is one to which Hertz's reading of Sappho was blind: that of a kind of excess (and ecstasy) that not only cannot “be brought back home to the Father” (52) but that, within the terms of the tradition, is never addressed as such. The pages that follow attempt to redress this omission by attending to what the Longinian-Hertzian model of sublimity excludes. At issue is the articulation of a sublime that not only does not conform to the pattern of “preordained failure, and the consequent feeling of bafflement, and the sense of awe and wonder” that for Monk exemplifies “the sublime experience from Addison to Kant” (58) and that so many of its recent theorists continue to uphold, but to which writers such as Sappho bear witness without attempting to contain. It is this “more radical flux and dispersion” that Sappho describes and Chopin's novel affirms, for in The Awakening Edna Pontellier embraces the solubility Monk, Hertz, and Weiskel so fear. Faced with what Monk could theorize only as “the confused seas of the sublime” (6), she walks right in.

III

Words at their most sublime have the force and feel of water. The ocean is The Awakening's central character, the axis around which the narrative turns. From the beginning it is represented as a linguistic presence, possessing a voice that speaks to Edna's soul. What it says simultaneously resists and impels symbolization. Unlike the green and yellow parrot whose voice inaugurates the novel by mechanically repeating the same unintelligible phrase and who, Chopin tells us, speaks “a language which nobody understood” (3), the sea speaks the language of the unsayable.²⁰ Its voice, “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” (15), necessarily partakes of many tongues and reaches Edna “like a loving but imperative entreaty” (14). Perhaps because the ocean possesses a multitude of voices, the command it proscribes is never reducible to any single precept or act.

The sound of the ocean haunts the novel. Like a lover's half-forgotten touch, it betokens absence; indeed, it is a carrier of absence, giving Edna—or whoever hears it—access to a certain kind of knowledge. Hearing it, for example, implies the ability to hear the sound of “wake” within “awakening” and thus to recognize that the same word can signify both life and death, for “wake” simultaneously denotes consciousness of life and a funeral rite, a collective ritual for the dead. (There is a wake within The Awakening, but it takes place before Edna's death, at a feast she gives as a gift to herself.) That the same word has contradictory meanings, or means contradiction, points to the irreconcilable coexistence of opposites without the possibility of resolution. Signs of life are equally signs of death, and hearing the ocean's voice impels knowledge of their proximity.

Chopin consistently refuses a dualistic formulation of the relation between life and death, sleeping and waking, or pleasure and pain, and in so doing radically alters a Homeric (or romantic) view of the sublime in which the protagonist's encounter with a potentially overwhelming obstacle leads to heightened powers and a resurgence of life. Displacing the notion that the sublime attests to a polarization of opposites is the novel's insistence upon their co-implication. The voice of the sea indicates polarities only to combine them. Although, for example, Edna perceives the sea's touch as “sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (15), its waves also “sway,” “lash,” and “beat upon her splendid body” (27). Chopin thus implies that what lulls may just as easily lash, that what soothes also inflames, and that nursery songs can kill.

Sappho's lyric and Chopin's novel both describe what occurs in response to hearing a beloved voice. In The Awakening, as in phainetai moi, hearing the other's voice makes something happen: it is a singular event that engenders shock or crisis. The novel's beginning thus reproduces Longinus' description of the unique relation between orator and auditor at play in the sublime, in which the hearer's (or reader's) identification with the speaker (or text) allows the latter to imagine that he “has created what he has merely heard” (1.4). The rapport between Edna and the ocean's voice replicates not only that between orator and auditor in the Longinian sublime, but that between lover and the beloved in Sappho's poem: hearing its address inaugurates a desire where previously there was none. In this case the reader hears through Edna's ears, and what she hears is the ocean.

Chopin's representation of the ocean continually emphasizes its independence from the domain of vision. It is significant, for example, that Edna hears it for the first time in total darkness. Wakened after midnight by the return of her husband, Léonce, Edna sits alone on the porch and suddenly hears “the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour,” a voice that breaks “like a mournful lullaby upon the night” (8). Absence of light allows awareness of a kind of presence one does not need eyes to discern: the sea's “mournful voice” breaks like a lullaby, a song sung by mothers to comfort their children and send them to sleep, as if its capacity to offer solace suggests a relation between the representation of absence and a distinctly aural register.

Throughout the history of the sublime the sea has often served as its most appropriate, if not exemplary, metaphor; and it is worth recalling some traditional representations of this relation the better to understand just how dramatically Chopin's construction of the oceanic sublime differs from them. In both Longinus and Burke, the sea is a major source of sublime sentiment. For Longinus the ocean's majesty is self-evident: he holds that “a natural inclination … leads us to admire not the little streams, however pellucid and however useful, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all, the Ocean” (42, Russell). For Burke the ocean is so appropriate a symbol of sublimity that he chooses it to illustrate the precept that “whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too” (53). Our differing responses to the sight of “a level plain of a vast extent on land” and to the “prospect of the ocean” show that the latter “is an object of no small terror” in a way that the plain, despite its vastness, is not: the ocean's capacity to arouse terror is the source of both its power and its sublimity (53-54). In Schopenhauer the ocean actually outranks all other forms of natural display. Transfixed and uplifted by its sight, the “undismayed beholder” watches “mountainous waves rise and fall, dash themselves furiously up against steep cliffs, and toss their spray high into the air; the storm howls, the sea boils, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and the peals of thunder drown the voice of the storm and sea.” Indeed, Schopenhauer holds that such oceanic immensity yields “the most complete impression of the sublime.”²¹ In each case, however, the ocean's sublimity is bound up with vision: the sea is something a detached observer looks at, usually from afar. That Edna is transfixed by the ocean's sound rather than its sight is important because here Chopin revises typical constructions of the oceanic sublime. Edna transgresses Kant's injunction that “we must be able to view (it) as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye [was der Augenschein zeigt]—e.g., if we observe it while it is calm, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky; or, if it is turbulent, as being like an abyss threatening to engulf everything.”²² Edna's relation to the ocean would, according to Kant, be neither poetically nor philosophically correct: merely looking at the sea holds no particular interest for her. She has a natural, if untutored, aptitude for painting and “a serious susceptibility to beauty” (15), yet only the ocean's voice and touch affect her. Chopin's oceanic sublime is not something “we must regard as the poets do, merely by what the eye reveals,” but rather functions as a mode of address.²³ As in Sappho, sublime encounters are occasioned by something heard.

Edna's first encounter with the sublime is marked by an identification with what she hears. The sound of the ocean's “everlasting voice,” which disrupts the everyday world she has taken for granted, speaks a language radically different from any she has previously heard and it leaves a mark: “an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day” (8). Sound tears and Edna has been torn. Thus begins her awakening.

Learning to swim is merely its continuation. Although hearing the ocean's voice awakens her desire, Edna does not venture into it until she has been touched by another kind of sound, namely, by one of Chopin's preludes. Listening to music composed by the artist whose name replicates the author's own is a prelude to immersion in that which she has heard. Passion comes in waves that sway the soul, but sound also gives rise to waves and hearing them precedes Edna's awakening.

Toward the end of a festive midsummer soirée, Robert Lebrun arranges for Mademoiselle Reisz, a renowned but eccentric pianist, to play for the assembly. Hearing the prelude has a dramatic effect on Edna: usually music “had a way of evoking pictures in her mind” (26), but now she sees nothing; what she hears possesses and overcomes her. That Edna's most profound encounters are occasioned by what she hears suggests that hearing may entail entanglement in a way that seeing does not. For hearing, as Gerald C. Bruns reminds us, is not the spectator's mode:

The ear is exposed and vulnerable, at risk, whereas the eye tries to keep itself at a distance and frequently from view (the private eye). The eye appropriates what it sees, but the ear is always expropriated, always being taken over by another (‘lend me your ears’). The ear gives the other access to us, allows it to enter us, occupy and obsess us … hearing means the loss of subjectivity and self-possession … [and] puts us in the mode of being summoned, of being answerable and having to appear.²⁴

Bruns's gloss on Heidegger's On the Way to Language also applies to Edna's response to Chopin: “the very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent out a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier's spinal column … 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” (27).

How to say something that cannot be said, that confronts us with the inability to present it? The problem that has occasioned the discourse and theory of the sublime is the same as that posed by The Awakening: the difficulty of symbolizing an excess that resists visual or linguistic formulation but is there nonetheless. Edna's experience of what Hertz would call “blockage”—her inability to translate sense-impressions into images—calls for a radically different mode of perception, but one that does not lead to an enhanced sense of self. Adorno's conviction that music's value resides in its ability to call “for change through the cryptic language of suffering” is enacted by the prelude's effect on Edna: she trembles, chokes, is blinded by tears, and then, as if to seek deeper knowledge of the “cryptic language” she has heard, she learns to swim.²⁵ The figurative parallel between the prelude, whose notes arouse passion in her soul, and the ocean, whose waves like music beat upon her body, is established just before Edna, with the other guests, walks down to the ocean and swims for the first time.

Edna's first swim is neither an attempt to appropriate the ocean's power nor a submission to it. It does not represent a struggle for dominance over a force that, as in Homer, has the power to engulf her, but rather, as in Sappho, allows a relation to “the unlimited” in which she seeks “to lose herself” (29). Swimming offers a way of entering apartness; finding her “self” is, paradoxically, a matter of entering the water of the Gulf of Mexico and learning how to lose that which she has found:

That night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who all of a sudden realizes its power, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence. She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water … she turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out from the unlimited in which to lose herself.

(28-29)

Learning to swim also entails awareness that the ocean can be lethal. Swimming too great a distance from the shore and at the limits of her strength, Edna experiences a “flash of terror”; “a quick vision of death” smites Edna's soul but she manages to regain the land.²⁶ She perceives her experience as an “encounter with death” (29) yet makes no mention of it.

Nor do most of Chopin's critics. For although, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out, “in the past few decades The Awakening has become one of the most persistently analyzed American novels,”²⁷ surprisingly few critics have discussed the role of the ocean and its voice, an omission made all the more startling given Chopin's insistence upon it.²⁸ Dale Bauer, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Patricia Yaeger discuss the ways in which the sea functions as a metaphor for Edna's awakening, yet none of these critics recognize that it is also a metaphor for language itself. Nor are they attuned to the ways in which Edna's newly awakened desire must also be understood as a desire for the sublime.

In “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire,” Gilbert and Gubar offer a meticulous and insightful interpretation of “oceanic imagery” in The Awakening. According to these persuasive critics, the sea provides an alternative to patriarchal culture: lying “beyond the limits and limitations of the cities where men make history, on one of those magical shores that mark the margin where nature and culture intersect” (102), it also provides an element “in whose baptismal embrace Edna is renewed, reborn” (103). For Gilbert and Gubar the novel not only tells the story of Edna's awakening and initiation into a “pagan paradise” in which “metaphorically speaking, Edna has become Aphrodite, or at least an ephebe of that goddess,” but examines the consequences that “would have befallen any late-nineteenth-century woman who experienced such a fantastic transformation” (106). They propose that the novel be read as “a feminist myth of Aphrodite/Venus, as an alternative to the patriarchal Western myth of Jesus” (96), in which the Gulf, incarnated by the white foam of the sea from which the goddess emerges, is Aphrodite's birthplace. Just as Gilbert and Gubar find in Edna a modern Aphrodite, so they mythologize and idealize the sea and its “magical shores,” for their apparent attentiveness to the ocean ignores the very register Chopin emphasizes—that of sound, not sight. Privileging vision, in this case the image of Venus rising from the waves rather than the voice of the ocean Edna hears, allows them to offer the comforting, if implausible, message that the embrace of Chopin's ocean promises only fulfillment, never terror, and that the one may be neatly separated from the other. Such an idealization upholds a vision of plenitude that a more sustained attention to the ocean's voice would function to resist. Chopin's construction of the ocean suggests not self-presence but self-dispersal; it invites the soul “to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation” (15); and what it instills is the desire for loss.

Emphasizing only the sea's beneficent aspects, Gilbert and Gubar are able to put forward an entirely reassuring interpretation of it. Not only is Edna swimming “into a kind of alternative paradise”; the novel is itself “a new kind of work, a mythic/metaphysical romance that elaborates her female fantasy of paradisal fulfillment” (104). Their reading ignores not only the question but the consequences of asking what hearing the ocean's voice entails and enables a view of the novel's conclusion in which the ocean functions solely as a redemptive site, an “alternative paradise”: “Edna's last swim may not seem to be a suicide—that is, a death—at all, or, if it is a death, it is a death associated with a resurrection, a sort of pagan female Good Friday that promises an Aphroditean Easter” (109). Gilbert and Gubar's commitment to a thematics of redemption mirrors Hertz's and Weiskel's treatment of the sublime as a sustained, if interrupted, progression toward transcendence. In each case what is envisioned is an ocean without undertow, a voice that is able to tell everything it knows, and the possibility of desire without loss.

For Dale Bauer, however, the ocean does not speak at all, an extremely surprising omission given that her Baktinian reading of the novel emphasizes such notions as “dialogue,” “heteroglossia,” and above all, “voice.” In Bauer's view, Edna's relationship to the sea reflects her need to withdraw from a constraining and oppressive society and return “to a womb-like sea. Hers is also a retreat to the imaginary realm in which the only ‘voice’ with which Edna must contend is the sea's.”²⁹ That Bauer puts the word “voice” in quotation marks is perhaps indicative of her own assumptions about language, namely that the domain of the unrepresentable and excessive, here symbolized by the sea, belongs to a “pre-linguistic, imaginary realm” (149) that has no relation to speech and language. Bauer's assurance that we can distinguish the cultural (or spoken) from the natural (or silent) elides Chopin's representation of the ocean as that which blurs the difference between the two. Whereas The Awakening foregrounds these issues, Bauer's reading precludes them. And whereas the sea as represented by Chopin conjoins realms usually assumed to be separate, Bauer reinstates the distinction the ocean's voice displaces. Her failure to hear is perhaps symptomatic of the view that language is, or ought to be, a site of plenitude, offering a realm in which everything can be said and nothing need go unheard. That language may possess a force that, as in Sappho, threatens to overwhelm the auditor and bring her close to death is perhaps something that current readings of The Awakening wish to avoid.

While Patricia Yaeger's “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening” is unquestionably the most sophisticated critical treatment of these issues, it nonetheless shares the assumption that language, in principle if not practice, should offer a refuge from, rather than an amplification of, the unsayable. According to Yaeger, Edna's quest is for an alternative form of communication, a speech and voice of her own. In this regard she compares the speech of the parrot to the voice of the sea: both are expressions of “the absent or displaced vocality” Edna seeks; both “emphasize Edna's need for a more passionate and intersubjective speech that will allow Edna to revise or rearticulate her relation to her own desire and to the social reality that thwarts this desire.”³⁰ But whereas Yaeger conflates the voice of the parrot and that of the sea, I wish to emphasize their differences. While Yaeger finds in the parrot's nonsensical jabber and the sea's voice alike metaphors for “a potential lack of meaning in words themselves” (203)—meaning, that is, in the words available to Edna—I contend that the voice of the ocean attests to the incommensurable in a way that the parrot's mechanical babble does not, and that in so doing it depicts an alterity that is, strictly speaking, unsayable.

Yaeger is the only critic of The Awakening to find in Jean-François Lyotard's theory of “the differend” a useful way of explaining Edna's linguistic predicament and its outcome. And while I agree that “Edna's absent language is not a manifestation of women's permanent expulsion from ‘masculine speech’ but of what Lyotard calls ‘le différend’” (204), I disagree with her understanding of just what this concept implies. According to Lyotard:

In the differend, something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.³¹

Lyotard employs the notion of the differend to describe practices that remain beyond the grasp of representation. Unlike Wittgenstein's injunction, “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence,” his goal is to make the presentation of the fact that the unpresentable exists as much the concern of a critical politics as of aesthetic practices. Lyotard's differend has much in common with his concept of the sublime.³² For the differend, which entails both “the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom)” (13), foreshadows Lyotard's insistence that the sublime entails “the pleasure of a displeasure” (165) and recalls his famous definition of sublimity in The Postmodern Condition: “the real sublime … is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.”³³ In The Differend pain accompanies silence while pleasure accompanies the invention of a new idiom, but for our purposes what matters is that the differend and the sublime both emphasize something that is fundamentally inexpressible.³⁴ Both concepts underscore the dimension within language that, like the voice of Sappho's beloved or Chopin's ocean, testifies to the unsayable. Both signify neither absence nor presence but rather the possibility of an absolute and untranslatable otherness.

Yaeger's essay precludes consideration of the single element upon which Chopin and Lyotard insist: the force of the incommensurable. Whereas Lyotard maintains that to testify to the differend is a matter of calling attention to the disjunction between radically heterogeneous genres of discourse, for Yaeger such testimony is equivalent to recovering the silence left by the ocean's, and Edna's, not yet articulate voice, and by replacing the unsayable with speech. According to Yaeger something crucial is missing and language—a new idiom—will repair the differend by putting speech in the place of silence. I would contend that the ocean's voice intensifies the hearer's relation to that which cannot be translated into speech, making audible an absence to which she must nonetheless bear witness. In The Awakening hearing entails the recognition that something remains to be said, and this linguistic residue exceeds what can be put into words. The search for new “idioms,” then, is not simply a matter of putting speech in the place of silence, of filling in gaps and replacing absence with presence, but of attesting to an excess that resists the attempt to translate sheer heterogeneity into a univocal message. Chopin's evocation of the ocean functions as a differend not because it replaces a flawed or missing speech-act with a more successful one, but because it stresses the impossibility of paraphrasing the singularity and particularity of its voice, and thereby allows us to hear a silence that might otherwise have remained unheard.

IV

Critics of The Awakening continue to be perplexed by the nature of Edna's desire. As Walter Benn Michaels argues convincingly, what is most confusing about the novel is not that Edna's desires are frustrated, but rather that so many of them are fulfilled: as he points out, the narrative “is marked by Edna's inability … to reshape her own ability to get what she wants.”³⁵ And Edna's wishes do appear to be granted without apparent effort on her part. She wants to become an artist and quickly finds a market for her work; longs for freedom from her husband, children, and domestic routine and soon has personal and financial independence; desires sexual adventures and has them; indeed, the only thing Edna wants and does not get is Robert's love, but the reader suspects that had he not left her she would have left him, that frustration rather than fulfillment conditions her desire. The view of Edna as suffering somewhat narcissistically from the “problem” of getting nearly everything and everyone she wants draws support from her own assessment of her capacity of desire: “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” (113). Edna's world seems simultaneously to offer her nothing she can want at the same time that it satisfies her every whim, and Michaels's assessment of the novel's conclusion, in which he holds that Edna's suicide “may best be understood neither as the repudiation of a society in which one can't have all the things one wants nor as an escape from a society in which one can't want all the things one can have but as an encounter with wanting itself” (498), would appear irrefutable. I argue, however, that understanding Edna's desire within the context of the sublime offers an alternative to this interpretation.

What does “an encounter with wanting itself” entail? On the one hand, Michaels implies that such an encounter signals the death of desire. Getting what you want means no longer being able to want it, for desire's satisfaction implies its annihilation. Seen in this light, Edna's desire can be understood only as an addiction to the unavailable, as a never-ending quest for something new to want. But Michaels also suggests another interpretation of such an encounter, “in which the failure of one's desire for things and people need not be understood as exhausting all desire's possibilities” (498). Basing his second account upon Edna's remark to Dr. Mandelet that “I don't want anything but my own way,” he implies that Edna's desire “can survive both the presence and the absence of any desirable things” (498) but is nonetheless doomed to failure because it is separated from the realm of subjects and objects. Seen in this light, Edna's problem is not her inability to desire, but her “submersion in it and idealization of it, an idealization that immortalizes desire by divorcing it both from the subject (which dies) and the object (which is death) that it seems to require” (498-99). In either case, for Michaels “an encounter with wanting itself” entails an encounter with death. The specificity of Edna's desire, however, redefines both of Michaels's accounts; Edna's “encounter with wanting itself” is unintelligible unless we explore what Michaels ignores: her wish for “the unlimited in which to lose herself.” For although, as Michaels points out, “no body in Chopin can embody the infinite” (499), Edna desires precisely what she cannot embody.

What, or perhaps more important, how does Edna want? In The Awakening fulfillment entails not satisfaction but prolongation; it is neither a matter of getting what one wants (independence, money, sexual freedom, etc.) nor of removing desire from the realm of contingency. Rather, it involves a certain relation to excess, one that requires the representation or “embodiment” of that which one cannot possess. What Michaels fails to notice is that Edna's encounter with desire is simultaneously an encounter with language, here embodied by the ocean's voice, and that she wants the ocean's “everlasting voice” because it alone signifies that which is in excess of any boundary or limit. Like the bluegrass meadow that “she traversed as a child, believing that it had no beginning or end” (114), the ocean offers itself as sustaining a relation to that which she cannot represent. Given the choices available to her, the “fulfillment” of Edna's desire can only be merger, and presumably death, in the element that first awakened it. And although Edna wants to maintain a relation to what the ocean represents, her world offers nothing beyond the satisfaction of her demands. In this case, then, “desire gives birth to its own death” (496) because death within the force that awakened desire is all that remains for Edna to want. By the end of the novel there remains “no one thing in the world that she desired” (113)—a situation that comes about not because she is now incapable of wanting nor because she wants too much. The “object” of Edna's desire is neither a person nor a thing but a sustained relation to the ocean and everything it signifies.

To make what is unnameable appear in language itself—the desire at stake in the sublime is akin to Edna's desire for the ocean's voice: both defy the subject's representational capacities and can be signified only by that which, to borrow Lyotard's formulation, “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself,” seeking “new presentations not in order to enjoy them but to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.”³⁶ At issue is not a mastery of the ineffable, as in Hertz's and Weiskel's account of the romantic sublime, but rather an attestation to the unspeakable and uncontainable elements within language itself. This version of the sublime contests what Weiskel contends is the “essential claim of the romantic sublime: that man can, in feeling and speech, transcend the human” (3). Indeed, Edna wants the opposite: to find in “the unlimited” not a site of self-transcendence but rather a means of self-loss.

Edna's final swim—her going (and coming) “close to death”—must be understood both within the context of her initial encounter with the ocean and as the consequence of having awakened to desire in a social and political milieu that, as Gilbert and Gubar so rightly suggest, offers no means of articulating and sustaining her capacity for desire.³⁷ When, at the end of the novel, Edna tells Doctor Mandelet “perhaps it is better to wake up after all even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life” (110), nowhere does her culture allow a means of representing her connection to the voice by which she has been called. In this context Edna's love for Robert bears no relation to his availability but rather results from his ability to manifest and facilitate her connection to the other. He is the only character attuned to Edna's need for the unlimited and until his departure for Mexico he is central to her intensifying relationship with it. Edna wants Robert because he sustains rather than satisfies her desire.

If Sappho's lyric ends by representing a merger that conflates the difference between any two sets of terms without at the same time annihilating their difference, so the end of The Awakening underscores the proximity and irreconcilability of opposites. Offering disparate accounts of Edna's walk into the ocean, Chopin first compares Edna to a crippled bird whose disabled wings make flying, or, in this case, living, impossible. Standing at the edge of the Gulf, Edna sees that “a bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (113), images that lead us to interpret Edna's last swim as a sign of her failure to survive in an oppressive world. But Chopin proceeds to suggest just the opposite. Before going into the sea, Edna removes her old bathing suit: she casts “the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her” (113). Standing naked under the sky Edna feels “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known,” reversing the earlier connotation in which she saw that “all along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight” (113). As in Sappho's lyric, Chopin maintains the residue within language that is unhearable at the same time that she finds a new idiom for presenting its voice. But Edna's last walk into the ocean does not institute “a new idiom” in the sense that it puts speech in the place of silence (thus upholding the view that language is merely a vehicle of communication). Rather her response bears witness to the incommensurable voice she has heard. This is a “going close to death” that cannot simply be rendered by a phrase but to which phrases can testify nevertheless. Chopin's construction of the ocean's voice and the woman's response presents itself as one example of such an idiom: as a figure for the sublime, the ocean is also a figure for the unfigurable.

The novel's final paragraph, which describes Edna's last moments of consciousness, continues to foreground contradiction:

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.

(114)

Chopin insists upon the disparate. Images of triumph—looking into the distance, vanquishing “the old terror”—coincide with symbols of authority and oppression, and then give way to sensory impressions that can be construed in neither context: the “hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks.” As Jane P. Tompkins remarks:

Contradictory signs are everywhere. … The sight of an injured bird implies defeat, but Edna's shedding of her bathing suit signals rebirth. The act of swimming out so far seems both calculated and almost unconsciously performed. Edna's final vision, as she goes under, is sensual and promising, Whitmanesque, but qualified by images of a chain and spurs.³⁸

But whereas Tompkins chastises Chopin for leaving the reader at sea in ambiguity, Chopin's conclusion foregrounds the very incommensurability Edna desires but cannot represent. Concluding the novel by placing images that apparently exclude one another in a relation of mutual interdependence, Chopin refuses to satisfy the wish for a single or definitive interpretation of Edna's last act, and in so doing constructs a sublime in which there is no end of the line.

Notes

1. For a brief discussion of the text's authorship and history see “Longinus” on Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), x-xii. See also the introduction and notes accompanying Russell's edition of the Greek text “Longinus” on the Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). Following Neil Hertz, I have also consulted another recent translation, G. M. A. Grube's Longinus on Great Writing (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). Unless otherwise noted all further references to Longinus are to Russell's translation and occur in the text.

2. Sappho's famous ode is preserved only through inclusion in Longinus' treatise. For a discussion of Longinus' and Boileau's treatment of the poem, see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho: 1546-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 84-87.

3. The reader may wish to read Sappho's ode in the original Greek and then compare Julia Dubnoff's literal translation of it with those provided by Russell and Grube:

   φαίνεταί μοι κῃ̑νος ἴςος θέοιςιν
   εμμεν' Ὤνηρ, ὄττις ενάντιός τοι
   ἱςδάνει καì πλάςιον ἀδυ φωνεί-
   ςας ὺπακούει

   καì γελαίςας ἱμέροεν, τό μ' ῃ̑μὰν
   καρδίαν εν ςτήθεςιν επτόαιςεν,
   oς γὰρ ες ἴ' δω βρόχε' oς με φώναι-
   ς' οὺδ' εν ετ' εἴκει,

   ὰλλ' ἄκαν μεν γλω̑ςςα †εαγε λέπτον
   δ' αὔτικα χρω̑ι πυ̑ρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
   ὀππάτεςςι δ' οὺδ' εν ὄρημμ', επιρρόμ-
   βειςς δ' ἄκουαι,

   †έκαδε μ' ἴδρως ψυ̑χρος κακχέεται† τρόμος δε
   παι̑ςαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δε ποίας
   εμμι, τεθνάκην δ' ὀλίγω 'πιδεύης
   φαίνομ' †αι

   ἀλλἁπἁν τόλματον επεì †καì πένητα†

   That man to me seems equal to the gods,
   the man who sits opposite you
   and close by listens
   to your sweet voice

   and your enticing laughter—
   that indeed has stirred up the heart in my breast.
   For whenever I look at you even briefly
   I can no longer say a single thing,

   but my tongue is frozen in silence;
   instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;
   with my eyes I see nothing;
   my ears make a whirring noise.

   A cold sweat covers me,
   trembling seizes my body,
   and I am greener than grass.
   Lacking but little of death do I seem.

   But all must be endured since …

   I have relied upon the versions of Sappho that appear in Russell and Grube primarily because these are the translations Neil Hertz cites, and it is his particular reading of Sappho's lyric that is the object of this critique.

4. Peter De Bolla interestingly defines sublime discourse as discourse that produces the very excessiveness it purports to describe (The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 12): “the discourse of the sublime … is a discourse which produces, from within itself, what is habitually termed the category of the sublime and in doing so it becomes a self-transforming discourse. The only way in which it is possible to identify this newly mutated discursive form is via its propensity to produce to excess. … Hence the discourse on the sublime, in its function as an analytic discourse or excessive experience, became increasingly preoccupied with the discursive production of the excess.”

5. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-20. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

6. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), 15. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

7. Grube, Longinus on Great Writing, 4.

8. Suzanne Guerlac, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3. Guerlac emphasizes that the Longinian sublime is not “merely rhetorical” but “occurs as a force of enunciation determined neither by subjective intention nor by mimetic effect” (11). Thus, she argues, “the Longinian emphasis on the act of enunciation, and, in particular, the call for the dissimulation of figurative language, is incompatible with the mimetic structure of metaphor that is at the basis of the analyses of the romantic sublime” (194). Unlike Weiskel, for whom the sublime functions as a transcendent turn, Guerlac finds in the sublime “the site within the metaphysical tradition, and within the tradition of aesthetics, of resistance to mimesis, to metaphorical recuperation or ‘resolution’ and to aesthetics” (194-95); see 182-93 for Guerlac's discussion of Weiskel's Romantic Sublime (which I cite in note 12).

9. Ronald Paulson (“Versions of a Human Sublime,” New Literary History 16, no. 2 [Winter 1985]: 427) points out that while “studies of the sublime, from Burke to Monk and Hipple, used to focus on the enumeration of qualities in the sublime object or, more precisely, as they are reflected in the mind of the spectator … in the last decade, mediated by Nietzsche and Freud, by Harold Bloom and Thomas Weiskel, the focus has shifted to the agon between subject and object. The former is both/either a participant within a sublime confrontation and/or a spectator without.”

10. Longinus' assumption that the sublime entails a transformation of conventional power relations anticipates Burke's famous dictum: “I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power” (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 59).

11. See in particular Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). For Bloom the poet achieves sublimity only through overcoming the threat represented by the work of a “strong” precursor poet. In addition to Neil Hertz and Thomas Weiskel, recent proponents of this view include Marc W. Redfield who, in a provocative analysis of Fredric Jameson's notion of a postmodern sublime (“Pynchon's Postmodern Sublime,” PMLA 104, no. 2 [March 1989]: 152), argues that the sublime moves “from a threatening diffusion of signs toward a more structured conflict, which enables a self to prop itself up, so to speak, on its own anxiety, reading the confirmation of its existence in the image of its threatened destruction.” In the same issue of the PMLA, R. Jahan Ramazani reaffirms the view that the sublime entails confrontation and/or struggle between opposing forces (“Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime,” PMLA 104, no. 2 [March 1989]: 164). Drawing upon the accounts of Hertz and Weiskel, he interprets the sublime “as a staged confrontation with death” in which “the anticipation of death gives rise to a counterassertion of life.” For Ramazani “death precipitates the emotional turning called the sublime, although theorists of the sublime often refer to death by other names, or by what Kenneth Burke terms ‘deflections’: nothingness, castration, physical destruction, semiotic collapse, defeat by a precursor, and annihilation of the ego. Death is the recurrent obsession for these theorists, from Longinus to Heidegger and Bloom.”

12. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 5; Paul H. Fry, “The Possession of the Sublime,” Studies in Romanticism 26, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 188.

13. Fry, “Possession of the Sublime,” 189-90. See also Fry's discussion of Longinus' treatment of Sappho in “Longinus at Colonus,” in The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 47-86.

14. A discussion regarding Longinus' commentary on Sappho occurs between Suzanne Guerlac and Frances Ferguson in New Literary History 16, no. 2 (Winter 1985), the issue entitled “The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations.” Although their dispute does not directly engage Sappho's portrait of desire or Longinus' reaction to it, it does address a closely related topic: the status of the subject and the kind of subjectivity at stake in the Longinian sublime. Does the sublime as represented by Longinus threaten or uphold the “unified self-identity of the subject” (275)? Guerlac and Ferguson propose very different answers, but both explore the question by examining Longinus' reading of Sappho.

    In the article “Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime,” Guerlac argues that theorists who emphasize pure “force of feeling” and who read Longinus from an exclusively phenomenological point of view “obscure a more radical force at work in the Longinian sublime, one which threatens the very notion of the subjectivity, or the unified self-identity of the subject” (275). Guerlac proposes to read On the Sublime “in terms of a ‘rhetoric’ of enunciation, instead of expression” in order to show that in the Longinian sublime “the subject of feeling, or the ‘aesthetic’ subject, is disrupted as well as the subject of certainty or the theoretical subject” (275). The success of Guerlac's argument depends upon her discussion of Longinus' treatment of Sappho. She argues that what Longinus appreciates in the poem of Sappho “is clearly not a representation of unity, or of a unified body. The body is portrayed as broken, fragmented” (282). Rather, Longinus appreciates “the force of enunciation” through which Sappho is able to portray, and ultimately unify, the fragmented body. In Guerlac's view it is this “force of ennunciation which unifies these fragments, combin[ing] them into a single whole; embodying the text and the body—which now serves as a figure for the unity of composition of the text” (282). Although Guerlac appears to challenge the notion that the sublime implies (or helps construct) a unified subject, she does not question the prevailing view that the Longinian sublime entails the achievement of textual unity or dispute his reading of Sappho's lyric. Like Longinus', Guerlac's reading represses Sappho's emphasis on semiotic and erotic transport and reiterates the view that the sublime text functions as an antidote to division. Guerlac's “force of enunciation” repairs, not underscores, fragmentation and helps to maintain textual unity, if it is not indeed equivalent to it. For if the effect of figurative language is to give the semblance of unity, how can it follow that “there is no stable ground or truth or sincerity in the event of sublimity, which, through a force of enunciation, disrupts the stable identity of the subject” (285)? Unity remains the master trope whether the “force of enunciation” or the subject produces it; Guerlac now ascribes to it the unity and power previously ascribed to the subject.

    Guerlac fails to notice precisely what Ferguson remarks in her elegant article, “A Commentary on Suzanne Guerlac's ‘Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime’”: “the capacity of rhetoric to produce what we might call ‘a subjectivity effect’” (292). Ferguson argues that although Guerlac substitutes rhetoric for subjectivity and ascribes to the former the function previously reserved for the latter, nothing has really changed. What difference, Ferguson asks, does it make if the subject is divided when language is not? “Figurativity thus comes in aid of the notion of unity, in substituting for the shattered bodily unity a figurative wholeness. What is thus disconnected in one register is unified in another” (293). While it would be extremely interesting to know Guerlac's response to Ferguson's remarks, particularly noteworthy in this context is that their debate centers on Longinus' reading of Sappho.

15. See Hertz, The End of the Line, 59.

16. For a study that explores the relation between gender, narrative, and a blocking agent or obstacle, see Theresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 103-57. De Lauretis not only argues that narrative structure depends upon a certain sadism but holds that the subject of narrative, or mythical hero, is invariably gendered as male, while the obstacle he encounters is female. According to de Lauretis, “the hero must be male regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female and indeed, simply, the woman” (118-19). By its very nature, then, “representation works to support the male status of the mythical subject” (140).

17. Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (1935; rpt., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 6. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

18. According to Hertz, Weiskel locates in “the pre-Oedipal phases … the motivating power of the mathematical sublime, then sees them as rejoining a secondary system that is recognizably Oedipal and more clearly manifested in the dynamical sublime” (The End of the Line, 52).

19. Writing seven years after “The Notion of Blockage,” Hertz concludes The End of the Line with an essay entitled “Afterword: The End of the Line” in which he returns to the previously unexamined question of gender that haunted his discussion of Longinus. Here Hertz inquires: “What comes after the end of the line … at the end of the line, who pays? and why?” (223). His afterword, however, enacts the very pattern of scapegoating he has already described. A discussion of the relation between gender and scapegoating in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda prompts Hertz to ask “how her [the Princess'] gender, her being ‘The Mother,’ [is] linked to her serving as scapegoat?” (229). His response is that exorcism of the princess allows Daniel to put “a pre-Oedipal mother aside when he enters the symbolic order and takes his place under the sign of his Jewish grandfather” (230). Pursuing the discussion of the pre-Oedipal stage that he had raised all too briefly in connection with Weiskel, Hertz interprets Julia Kristeva's “L'abjet d'amour” in a way that parallels his readings of Longinus and Kant. Just as Hertz interprets Kant's mathematical sublime through a Wordsworthian grid of blockage and release, now he reads Kristeva's concept of the non-object or “abjet” in terms of the mechanism of scapegoating he finds at work in Daniel Deronda. Whereas Kristeva's formulation of the abjet might have been understood not only as abjection but as the more “radical flux and dispersion of the subject” that Hertz describes in the essay on “The Notion of Blockage,” he interprets it as a triumphant staving off of chaos, an instant in which the infant links itself with the paternal function. The casting out of the vide, of “that which could have been a chaos and which now begins to become an abject” (232), enables the infant's first sense of selfhood, and the movement Kristeva traces becomes a corollary to that at work in Daniel Deronda: “the casting out of the Princess, her abjection, is intended not to collapse the distance between author and surrogate, but to stabilize it as a chosen separation and thus to ground the multiple gestures of mimesis that make up the novel” (233). The Oedipal moment of casting out differences and achieving an identification with the father, previously described as identical to the structure of the sublime, Hertz now locates at the heart of Kristeva's description of the pre-Oedipal stage. In Hertz's reading of Kristeva, the mother comes to serve the name and law of the father, recreating the same “end of the line scenario” that characterizes Hertz's treatment of Sappho. Once again Hertz evokes the possibility of an excess that cannot “be brought back home to the Father” but does so only the better to return it to him.

20. The phrase “language of the unsayable” derives from the title of the book edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

21. “Selections from The World As Will and Idea,” Book 111, section 39, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York: The Modern Library, 1964), 464.

22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 29, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 130. Subsequent references are to this edition and will appear in the text, along with German terms from the original (Kritik der Urteilkraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974]) that I add to show that Kant talks about sacrifice and uses concepts of power and subordination to explain the function of the imagination. For an intriguing discussion of this passage, see Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 132-35.

23. For an insightful discussion of the oceanic sublime, see Steven Z. Levine, “Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling,” New Literary History 16, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 377-400.

24. Gerald L. Bruns, “Disappeared: Heidegger and the Emancipation of Language,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 127-28.

25. Theodore W. Adorno, cited in Bruns, “Disappeared,” 144.

26. Edna's “flash of terror” of course recalls Burke's dictum that “terror is in all cases whatsoever either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (Enquiry, 54). We focus upon Burke's sublime and his notion of terror in the following chapter.

27. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Sex Changes, vol. 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 98. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

28. Some of the influential readings of The Awakening that do not discuss the ocean's role or “voice” include Margaret Culley, “Edna Pontellier: ‘A Solitary Soul,’” in her edition of The Awakening, 224-28; Anne Goodwin Jones, “Kate Chopin: The Life Behind the Mask,” in Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 135-82; Susan J. Rosowski, “The Novel of Awakening,” Genre 12 (Fall 1979): 313-32; George M. Spangler, “Kate Chopin's The Awakening: A Partial Dissent,” Novel 3, no. 3 (Spring 1970): 249-55; Margit Stange, “Personal Property: Exchange Value and the Female Self in The Awakening,” Genders, no. 5 (July 1989): 106-119: Ruth Sullivan and Stewart Smith, “Narrative Stances in Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” Studies in American Fiction 1, no. 1 (1973): 62-75; Lawrence Thornton, “The Awakening: A Political Romance,” American Literature 52, no. 1 (March 1980): 50-66; Paula A. Treichler, “The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening: A Linguistic Analysis,” in Women And Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 239-57; Otis B. Wheeler, “The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier,” Southern Review 11, no. 1 (1975): 118-128; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Thanatos and Eros,” in Culley's edition of The Awakening, 206-18. For a reading that considers Chopin's treatment of Whitman, see Elizabeth Balken House, “The Awakening: Kate Chopin's ‘Endlessly Rocking’ Cycle,” Ball State University Forum 20, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 53-58. For an overview of critical responses to The Awakening prior to 1977, see Priscilla Allen, “Old Critics and New: The Treatment of Chopin's The Awakening,” in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 224-38.

29. Dale Bauer, “Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Having and Hating the Tradition,” in Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 148. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

30. Patricia Yaeger, “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening,” Novel 20, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 204. Subsequent references will be in the text.

31. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1961), prop. 7, 151.

33. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition, trans. Regis Durand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. See also Lyotard's discussion of aesthetic pleasure and the sublime, “Complexity and the Sublime,” in Postmodernism: ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 19-26. Here Lyotard emphasizes that “with the idea of the sublime, the feeling when faced with a work of art is no longer the feeling of pleasure, or not simply one of pleasure. It is a contradictory feeling, because it is a feeling of both pleasure and displeasure, together. … With the sublime, the question of death enters the aesthetic question” (22).

34. For Lyotard's discussion of the relation between an aesthetics of the sublime and questions of representation, see “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, trans. Lisa Liebmann (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 196-211. Lyotard's most comprehensive discussion of Kant's sublime occurs in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). On Lyotard's notions of representation and postmodernity, see Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), 53-85; and David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987), 155-84.

35. Walter Benn Michaels, “The Contracted Heart,” New Literary History 21, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 498. Subsequent references will be in the text.

36. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81.

37. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land, 97.

38. Jane P. Tompkins, “The Awakening: An Evaluation,” Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1976): 24.