SOURCE: Giorcelli, Cristina. “Edna's Wisdom: A Transitional and Numinous Merging.” In New Essays on The Awakening, edited by Wendy Martin, pp. 109-48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Giorcelli argues the Chopin's ambiguities in The Awakening support both her own and her protagonist's “cyclical view of existence.”]

The human being who has a soul does not obey anyone but the universe,”¹ wrote the French poet Gabriel Germain. Readers of Kate Chopin's The Awakening keep asking themselves whether the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, abandoning herself to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the book, obeys the universe and therefore the needs of her soul; or whether, “idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided”—as she has lived for twenty-eight years—she simply lets herself be carried into the unknown “rapt in oblivious forgetfulness.” The question of whether Chopin intends Edna's disappearance to be regarded as a victory (the mythical apotheosis of her integrity, whatever its cost)² or a defeat (the inevitable outcome of her hubris, whatever its motivation).³

The ending is indeed ambiguous because it is “open” and technically “circular.” We do not actually “see” Edna drown but see her instead surrounded by and bathed in symbols of fertility and immortality (the sea, the sun, bees). To this extent, the ending is open. At the same time, it is technically circular because the narrative movement in the last chapter reverts to the very beginning of the book, which is set on the sensuous, promising Gulf of Mexico. The close thus presents an equivocal “solution.” There is the implied suicide, but Edna may have begun to live at another level of existence.

Since the critical discovery of the book in the 1960s, the elusiveness of its ending and the puzzling treatment of its protagonist's personality have caused critics to examine it mainly from two stances. From a feminist point of view, Edna's plight is that of a woman who finally begins “to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.” Although her spiritual and social quest is not represented as successful,⁴ it is regarded as attesting to the New Woman's awareness of her right to be herself and even, when necessary, to take her own life as the ultimate statement of self-assertion. From the point of view of stylistic coherence,⁵ however, the message of The Awakening is blurred by the dichotomies and ambiguities that pervade the entire narration. The author's wavering hold on surface and underlying meanings, ironic and serious tones, direct and indirect statements indicates a refusal to take sides and baffles judgment.

The Awakening escapes basic, clear-cut definitions from the viewpoint of both its technique and its theoretical allegiance to one or another literary mode (realism, naturalism, symbolism). Is it a novel or an extended short story? Does Chopin intend to deal with the spiritual growth and deep transformation of her protagonist, or does she intend to disclose the pitiful fatuity and inevitable failure of human aspirations? With regard to the more technical problem, the main character is psychologically, emotionally, and socially drawn in terms so stark as almost to oversimplify her case. Moreover, information about the other characters or the background situation is presented in an apparently casual and indefinite manner. As far as the more theoretical purposes are concerned, rather than either turning into a socially accepted self or helplessly suffering the insults of malevolent chance, Edna is steeped in ontological ambivalence. She seems only intermittently to be able to take a firm grasp of the world. If at times “she felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality,” at other times she is confused and hesitant. She muses, “if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”

The book's meaning and structure may be better recognized and valued if one takes a many-sided perspective and allows a number of options to coexist and play off against one another. Such a reading does not choose between or reconcile dualities, but holds them in what Richard Wilbur, in another context, calls “honed abeyance.” The conclusion would then acquire another, further significance. If the open and circular ending eludes our expectations as to the meaning of Edna's final plunge, it might be seen as purposely flexible. Chopin matches the structure with the thematic content of the book: a cyclical view of existence.

The complex and composite subject presented in the narrative is appropriately introduced by the linguistic features of its title.⁶ Syntactically, as it consists of an -ing clause, it is a blend of nominal and verbal functions. Semantically, it designates a border condition that, while linking two (or three) opposing ones (sleeping and/or dreaming versus waking up), partakes of both and points to a form of semisomnambulism, to living and acting in the dark. This vacillating, shady situation and action may be interpreted in terms of both its physical and its metaphorical (spiritual, intellectual, sexual) meaning. Since the narration centers on Edna, who is descended from Kentucky Presbyterians, a subtle (if partially blasphemous) religious reference might be inferred from the title as well. Edna's awakenings, from sleep to life and from dreams/reveries to rationality, endow the narration with a vague sense of transience. Her prevailing and pervasive characteristic is one of potentialities not wholly actualized, of stages not entirely reached, of thoughts not distinctly formulated, of emotions not openly recognized.

From the outset, Edna is described as possessing liminal features.⁷ She is difficult to figure in traditionally structured categories or even to be appraised by readers and fellow characters. Perhaps only Dr. Mandelet understands her. This wise and sympathetic old man invites her confidence (“I don't want you to blame yourself, whatever comes. Good night, my child”)⁸ and may be regarded as the foil to her self-centered and rigid father. If his paternalistic and positivistic outlook forces upon her an evaluation of reality that smothers her imaginative flutterings (“youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature, a decoy to secure mothers for the race”), he is also the only character who offers to comfort and assist her in her despair. Mandelet possesses “anointed eyes,” implying that he is gifted with a “divine” attribute: He sees far into the unseen. (His name, incidentally, sounds like and contains a pun on “Mandalay,” the mystic bay of Burma, a symbol of Eastern wisdom.) But Edna's distinctive condition is to be isolated and incapable of limiting (or unwilling to limit) the extent of her finally assumed independence.

All that concerns Edna is marked by an essential state of “inbetweenness.” She can be defined mainly by approximation and is not integrated into any milieu: neither in the one in which she was raised nor in the one in which she lives. Physically she is “rather handsome than beautiful”; her eyes are “yellowish brown,” “about” the color of her hair; her eyebrows are “a shade darker.” Her figure is characterized by a “noble beauty” and a “graceful severity,” where the chiasmus of the adjectives bridges distances and mitigates polarities. In short, Edna is “different from the crowd.” Religiously, as a child, she ran away “from prayers, from the Presbyterian service” and, as an adult, again on a Sunday, she leaves the “stifling atmosphere” of the Catholic mass. Intellectually she is caught between an “outward existence which conforms” and an “inward life which questions.” Emotionally she is torn by conflicting “impulses” and she feels either “happy” or “unhappy,” she is either “kind” or “cold” (Chap. 26). Although there were traces of French blood in her, we are told at the beginning of the narrative that they “seemed to have been lost in dilution”; ethnically and genetically, we might say, she is elusively complex.

In a society regulated by convention, dress and comportment are of utmost importance. It is revealing that, whereas the Creole women around her wear either white (Adele Ratignolle and Madame Lebrun) or black (the enigmatic “lady in black” and Mademoiselle Reisz) garments and ornaments, Edna, at Grand Isle, unites the opposites, wearing a white muslin “with a waving vertical line of brown running through it” and, in New Orleans, she puts on a blue dress with a red silk handkerchief around her head and a golden satin gown.⁹ The color symbolism is unmistakable: Edna's white, which points to a transfiguration of being, is brought down to “earth” by brown (her eyes and hair), which indicates matter and sadness; blue and red represent her countertendencies toward abstraction and sexuality; and gold is the symbol of the fully realized, supreme essense.¹⁰ As far as behavior is concerned, at the beginning of the story, although her Creole, “feminine” friend Adele is cautious about exposing her skin to the strong rays of the sun, Edna does not protect hers at all, disclosing her defiant disregard of southern womanly taboos (“You are burnt beyond recognition,” her husband had angrily exclaimed in Chapter 1, not realizing that a new, phoenixlike identity was about to rise out of her “ashes”). Above all, not fully understanding the Creole code, she makes the “unfortunate blunder” of falling in love with Robert, thus living out dramatically a relationship originally meant to be taken only as pleasantly courteous. Spatially as well, Edna cannot be surrounded by fixed, socially controlled, enclosed places. As a child, in her native Kentucky, she had walked “diagonally” (along the longest and thickest, the most toilsome but most exalting, route) across a field of bluegrass. As a grown woman in New Orleans she takes extended walks, preferring “to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places”—a mimesis of her conditions—rather than staying at home, the home of which she says: “It never seemed like mine.” She needs open, preferably vast, spaces: a meadow, the beach, the streets of a large city. Since it is the tendency of her nature to escape structured categories, her ambivalence is underlined by the characteristics of the places where events occur. She begins to understand her real self at Grand Isle, a summer resort between the city and the sea. When she feels the first “throbbings of desire” for Robert, she spends a day with him at a yet more distant and smaller island, Chenière Caminada as if she needed to retreat to a wilder, more secluded and separated area where fantasies might reign more freely and where the two of them might pose as the living characters of a revisited fairytale. After her return to New Orleans, viewing her neighborhood with the outlook of an outsider, she judges it “very French, very foreign.”

In all respects, Edna is a stranger who lives on the periphery of (in between) two ways of life—the American and the Creole, the strictly Puritanical and the sensuously Catholic—and two sets of conventions—the reserved and the exuberant. At the same time, Edna lives spiritually and logistically outside the social institution that tends to define her. She does not follow her husband to New York; she leaves her husband's house; she entrusts her children to the care of her mother-in-law. Presumably expressing the opinion of Creole society, Adele aptly observes, “She is not one of us; she is not like us.” Edna is considered to be and feels different; she finds the world around her not only “alien” but even “antagonistic.”

Similarly, in the temporal dimension, the narration emphasizes the liminal time of day, the period of darkness between one day and another. In the first section of the book, situated at Grand Isle and consisting of sixteen chapters, events are grouped under six time sequences: The first (Chaps. 1-3) covers the period from one Sunday morning to Monday morning; the second (Chaps. 4-6) from an afternoon to the night of the same day; the third (Chaps. 7-8) from one morning to luncheon of the same day; the fourth (Chaps. 9-14) from a Saturday night (August 28) to Sunday night; the fifth (Chap. 15), one evening and night; and the sixth (Chap. 16), one morning in September (characteristically, a liminal month). According to the traditionally accepted¹¹ four divisions of the day cycle (morning, midday, afternoon, and evening/night), mornings and evenings/nights seem to be in balance (five recurrences each).¹² The most momentous events occur during the evenings/nights. On the first Sunday night (Chap. 3), Edna is abruptly awakened and upset by her husband, thus disclosing the discontent beneath the smooth surface of her married life. On the occasion of Edna's late afternoon swim in the ocean, Chopin comments fervently on Edna's quest (Chap. 6). On a Saturday evening, Edna swims far out alone for the first time and feels she is “reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself,” thus realizing her potential for autonomy. Later that night, for the first time since her marriage six years before, she resists her husband's “compelling wishes” with determination. On the following late Sunday afternoon, at Chenière Caminada, she wakes up like Sleeping Beauty, after a long sleep (of “a hundred years,” as Robert/Prince Charming tells her), to live a few hours of perfectly idyllic harmony (the most extended period in the book) in a magic atmosphere. On an evening, finally, Edna learns that Robert is leaving for Mexico and realizes that, through him, she is losing “that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.”

In this first section of the book, the actual time covered by the narrative is about four unconsecutive days between the middle of August and the middle of September. Semantic and thematic linguistic references link the sequences to one another;¹³ each sequence (except for the fourth) starts with the day subdivision following the one that ends the previous sequence.¹⁴ The impression of a fluid, languorous, but compact stretch of time is thus effectively created. Only the fourth sequence stands out from the third and fifth, and breaks this contiguous and predictable succession of the day cycle phases: It begins and ends at night, whereas Chapter 8 ends at luncheon and Chapter 15 starts in the evening. Covering a very important lapse of time, in which Edna learns how to swim—that is, how to enter the fluid element itself—and her feelings for Robert coalesce into a deep infatuation, it fits her character that this sequence is circumscribed by darkness.

The second section of The Awakening is situated in New Orleans and contains twenty-two chapters. The actual time span covered by the narrative is about five months—roughly from the end of September to the middle/end of February, which is the end of winter in this region. Since this second section runs approximately only one-third longer than the first one, time is often fragmented into sporadic but significant events, which are rarely temporally tied to the preceding or following ones. No succession of the day's four solar subdivisions is to be consistently found between one chapter and the next. Darkness prevails throughout. The section starts on an evening (Chap. 18) and ends at night (Chap. 38). The critical events that affect the protagonist happen in the evenings/nights: the third (and last) quarrel with her husband (Chap. 17), her first visit to Mademoiselle Reisz, the pianist, who plays a crucial role in the story (Chap. 21); dinner during which Dr. Mandelet realizes that Edna vibrates with life and is ready for change, and in which she recounts the just invented (and “open”) anecdote of the two lovers who disappeared in a pirogue; the sense of absolute freedom and rest she experiences when everybody (the four men in her life: her father, husband, and two sons) leaves her and, alone, she reads Emerson (Chap. 24); Alcée's kiss, which affects her like “a flaming torch”; her regret that “it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her” (Chap. 28); her sumptuous dinner party in which, as will be shown, so much is revealed (Chap. 30); the beginning of her affair with Alcée that very night (Chap. 31); her first kissing of Robert (Chap. 36); her assistance during Adele's childbirth and her realization that a woman's independence is hindered by the existence of her children (Chap. 37). Finally, that very night, there is the shattering of all her dreams and illusions by the farewell note from Robert. In ten chapters the main action occurs in the evenings/nights (Chapters 17, 21, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38) and in six (Chapters 20, 24, 25, 26, 33, 36) it starts in the afternoon. Only in Chapters 18, 22, 29, and 35 do events occur in the mornings, and in two chapters (19 and 32) they cover diverse days and times.

In the third section, which consists only of Chapter 34, the action rapidly returns to Grand Isle for the span of half a day and the time is toward noon, the moment of fullest sun and splendor.

Edna's inner crisis comes to a head because of her infatuation/love for Robert, who shares some of her physical and psychological characteristics, which are achieved both by making her more masculine and him more feminine. “In coloring he was not unlike his companion,” writes Chopin. “A clean-shaved face made the resemblance more pronounced.”¹⁵ Psychologically, too, Robert tends to be passive and “childish.”¹⁶ A gallant with a reserved and delicate personality, he is so affected by the world around him that his eyes, rather than possessing a color and an expression of their own, “gathered in and reflected the light and languor of the summer day.” Affinities between them—if one wants to push speculations beyond the text—date from long before their first meeting at Grand Isle: Edna and Robert were both orphans (of mother and of father, respectively) and had been brought up by the one parent who—from the evidence given in the case of the former and from what we learn in the case of the latter—did not seem to have much in common with or to have a preference for them: Edna's older sister, Margaret, is pictured as being as stern as their father, the colonel (Chap. 7 and, in passing, Chap. 22); Mademoiselle Reisz says that Aline Lebrun loves Robert's brother, Victor, more than him.

At the outset of their relationship at Grand Isle, Edna and Robert share a similar way of amusing themselves (Chaps. 1 and 2) and, above all, a propensity to conjure up and become attuned to fairy-tale situations (Chaps. 12 and 13). In Chapter 1 Chopin shows them facing each other while sitting on the step of a porch (a liminal place), and again in Chapter 4 they hold the same position. They are indeed mirror images—or doubles—of one another, thus disclosing both their haunting death instinct and their desire for immortality. When Edna sees and confronts Robert after his return from Mexico, she repeats almost verbatim¹⁷ the sentence with which he summarizes his past months' experiences. She does this in order for him to realize (although he does not) how in harmony they have been, notwithstanding their separation. Only apparently, however, are her additions to his sentence minor specifications (“Caminada,” “sunny,” “with a little more comprehension than”) or reservations (“still”). In effect, they indicate how attentive she has been to the events that stirred her life from the summer on. In particular, when talking of their fairytale interlude, she gives the magic little island (Grand Terre) its complete name to emphasize its importance in her life. She describes the old fort as “sunny” to convey to him some of her own feelings of that memorable day when she had thought that “she would like to be alone there with Robert, in the sun,” the symbol of plenitude. Informing him that in the city she had tried to give her life meaning by working, she asserts that the occupation she had undertaken was not just “mechanical.” But immediately afterward she has to admit that she has not succeeded in her intent, possibly because—as we know from previous authorial comments—she is “devoid of ambition, and striving not toward accomplishment.” Even if they share many characteristics, then, Robert, after five months and a sojourn abroad, is very much the same man he was when he left: timid, tied to the rules of his milieu. Edna, on the other hand, has tested herself in new personal as well as professional directions and has begun to realize that dreams and fantasies should not be fettered by institutional forms. At their second encounter she can “maternally” reproach him by saying: “You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things. … I give myself where I choose.”

Their state of in-betweenness is further exemplified by Edna's and Robert's being the middle members of a feminine and a masculine triad. (Three is a recurrent number throughout the narration.)¹⁸ Edna is both pulled toward and repulsed by Adele Ratignolle—the devoted mother, the Madonna, the Queen—on the one side, and, on the other, by Mademoiselle Reisz—the devoted pianist, the disagreeable and ugly spinster. As a girl, Edna had been caught between two very dissimilar, strongly defined, assertive sisters: Margaret, who was “matronly and dignified” and Janet, who was “a vixen.” Now she is attracted by Adele and Mademoiselle Reisz for different reasons. Dissimilar as they are, Adele, sensuous and placid, helps Edna think of herself as a “woman,” whereas Mademoiselle Reisz, malicious and imperious, “seemed to reach Edna's spirit” through her “divine art,” thus helping her to think of herself as an “individual.”

Robert stands between and is juxtaposed to both Leonce Pontellier, the acquisitive businessman and boring husband, and Alcée/Victor, the physically attractive and morally unscrupulous men about town. Robert shares features with and is different from both: Like Leonce, he is dependable and conventional, but he is also imaginative and agreeable. Like Alcée/Victor, given his resemblance to Edna, he is handsome (though his physical aspect is never fully described) and successful with women, but he is also a tactful gentleman.

Both Edna and Robert represent transitional states of being, states marked by ontological mobility and epistemological vagueness. Edna is often defined by negations (or, as we have indicated, by approximations). Psychologically, her husband thinks that she is “not a mother-woman.” She feels “not thoroughly at home in the society of Creoles” because she is “not accustomed to an outward and spoken expression of affection.” Deprived of a mother, Edna could not fully be a daughter and is not moved by any sisterly affection. She refuses to attend her younger sister's wedding. She is also prone to abandon her responsibilities as a wife: After the third quarrel with her husband, she flings her wedding ring upon the carpet and stamps her heel upon it (Chap. 17); she is intensely, but even in her own eyes only occasionally, a mother, “fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way” and “It was with a wrench and a pang that Edna left her children. … All along the journey homeward their presence lingered with her like the memory of a delicious song. By the time she had regained the city the song no longer echoed in her soul.”

Only “half” of Edna is where the whole person should be: She is often “half-awake”; she feels “half-hearted”; she traces “half remembered experiences”; she cherishes the “half-darkness” of her garden; she can at times only “half comprehend” what is said. She is also “absent-minded” and lacking in “forethought,” because she acts upon impulses and whims, which she only “half” knows. In this, too, she differs greatly from the Creole attitude toward life which seems to be marked by a monotonous consistency (Leonce's devotion, Chap. 3) and an annoying persistence (Adele's conversation, Chap. 4). Further, Edna possesses only half of what, according to Mademoiselle Reisz, is needed to be an artist: the natural talent but not “the courageous soul. … The soul that dares and defies.” She seeks a total (spiritual, intellectual, sexual) love relationship, but is torn between a romantic fantasy (Robert “had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico”) and an erotic liaison (after sensuously responding to Alcée's first kiss, she regrets that “it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips”). Stamped by ambivalence, she is portrayed in her final act as still both dying and alive.

Edna's mind and body are literally trying to catch up with each other. Following the exaltation provoked by her first solitary swim, walking home, she feels “as though her thoughts were elsewhere—somewhere in advance of her body, and she was striving to overtake them.” Upon leaving Adele's house, before her final plunge into the sea, she again feels “as if her thoughts had gone ahead of her and she was striving to overtake them.” At the beginning and toward the end of the narrative, these two comments underline Edna's still unachieved completeness of being. Only in the water does she experience a fusion of body and soul, because in the formal-informal element she loses her principium individuationis and her physical self seems to become as light and free and “weightless” as her spiritual self.

Edna's “symbol” is the maze suggested, first, by the depths of the sea (Chap. 6) and, later, by the “deep tangle” of the garden outside her New Orleans house. In Chapter 7, and briefly again in Chapter 34, the sea is specifically related to the “green” Kentucky meadow of “blue grass.” After her last quarrel with her husband, she finds solace in looking out at “the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half darkness which met her moods.” Through the adjectives, “green” and “blue,” two expanses (the blue sea and the green garden) are connected with the third one (the green meadow of blue grass): It is only when these two colors (the natural and the spiritual) merge that Edna feels happy (“entertained”) and would like to remain in that situation, as in a labyrinth, “forever.”

Linguistic structures underscore the thematic ambiguity of the book. An adverbial clause is often used to approach, albeit tentatively, Edna's inner self: “as if” (or “as though”). In trying to define what Edna thinks or, more frequently, what Edna feels,¹⁹ Chopin often reverts to this hypothetical, circuitous, basically unreal adverbial clause to relate her character's inner world to the outside one. “As if” establishes, according to Vaihinger's analysis, “an apperceptive construct under which something can be subsumed and from which deductions can be made,” although what is stated in the conditional clause is considered unreal. This formula posits the “subjective” validity (and not the objective significance) of judgment, since the assumptions are presented as only imaginary.²⁰ Thus, for instance, Chopin informs us that Edna's eyes would be held on an object “as if lost in some inward maze of contemplation or thought.” Edna tells Adele that on that momentous summer day in Kentucky, when walking through the meadow of blue grass, she threw her arms out “as if swimming.” The day she goes to Chenière Caminada with Robert, she acts “as if she had placed herself in alien hands.” When she visits Madame Ratignolle with her sketches and drawings, she confesses that she feels “as if I wanted to be doing something,” and, when alone in her husband's house, she is overcome by exultation and walks through it “as if inspecting it for the first time.” On melancholy days it seems to her “as if life were passing by, leaving its promise broken and unfulfilled.” After her reaction to Alcée's kiss she feels “as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes.” When by chance she meets Robert for the second time in New Orleans, in the cafe in the little garden, she reacts “as if a designing Providence had led him into her path.” After kissing Robert, she looks into his face “as if she would never withdraw her eyes more.” Edna's epistemological self is presented as so frail in its relationship with reality that she cannot conceive real analogies or draw actual equivalences; she can articulate only hazy, tentative comparisons that seem to have no objective significance and to be rooted in no objective reality. The validity, the expediency of such significances and such realities, is, however, admitted by the very possibility (or necessity) of the comparisons themselves. Edna's cognitive process is thus based on fiction; she approaches reality through a potentially rich but dangerously indirect method. She yearns for abstractions, for illusions created by her “mythical” impulse: “the abiding truth,” “the unlimited in which to lose herself,” “life's delirium,” “the unattainable.”

Transitional states are inevitably states of inner and outer ambiguity. In her quest for her true self, Edna loses, or enhances with the addition of the opposite ones, her original gender connotations and social attributes. At Grand Isle she becomes so attached to Adele Ratignolle—who possesses “grace and majesty” and speaks “the law and the gospel”—that she looks at her “like a faultless Madonna,” with the feeling with which, in Provençal times, a man would have looked at a woman. Adele is even described as “the fair lady of our dreams,” with “spun-gold hair,” blue eyes that resemble “sapphires,” and lips “so red one could only think of cherries.” To such a goddess or fairytale figure, Edna cannot but be tied by the subtlest of bonds, or what “we might as well call love.” As Edna conquers areas within and outside herself for the expression of her individuality (she goes out freely, she paints, she shuns her obligations, she lives alone, she takes a lover whom she does not love, she is ready to start an affair with another one whom she loves), she gradually abandons the prescribed “womanly” manners. She talks “like her father,” she drinks like a man (“She drank the liquor from the glass as a man would have done”), she twice defines her own attitude as “unwomanly,” and, taking the initiative, she kisses her beloved Robert. Symbolically, at the end of the narrative, she stands alone in the nude, on the seashore, like the man whose figure her mind had once evoked when listening to a piece of piano music: “There came before her imagination the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him.” Becoming independent and living freely entails, for Edna, possessing and developing androgynous characteristics. Chopin seems here to imply that an up-to-date goddess and a fairytale or romance protagonist should be both feminine and masculine (not like Adele, who, being only “feminine,” is a “bygone heroine”).

In her first published short story, “Wiser Than a God” (1889), Chopin had pitted the artistic profession against family life. Paula Von Stoltz,²¹ the main character, thinking of these two vocations as mutually exclusive, chooses to become a famous pianist, that is—paraphrasing the words of the epigraph²²—to “be wise” rather than “to love.”

In The Awakening, to love/to be in love is a means toward becoming wise, a stage toward realizing one's “position in the universe,” toward metamorphosing into the “god” who is possibly the only being capable of matching these two faculties. Having started her quest with the desire to love and to be loved, Edna ends it by subsuming her capacity to live and becoming wise. In her last moments, when she is back on the beach at Grand lsle, she realizes that, although she would like to have Robert near her, “the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone.” But her love is, at last, directed to the prime sources of being: the sea and the sun, that is, both to the ambivalent, mediating agent that includes the formal and the informal and to the all-encompassing spirit of creation. In this final scene she is indeed both the real woman and the imagined man. And since she feels like “some new-born creature opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known,” her/his plight becomes that of reconciling opposites, of coming to terms with mysterious essences (a “familiar” and yet “never known” reality), by achieving plenitude. By overcoming gender restrictions, by breaking all barriers, by identifying life and death, Edna attains, at the very end, a precarious, quasi-divine wholeness.

Symbols of negative meaning are interspersed with positive ones. Edna is not, like Paula Von Stoltz, wiser than a god, but for a short while she is as wise as the gods/goddesses who might also love. First by emphasizing Edna's similarity to Robert and then by making her drop all social, “feminine” niceties, Chopin creates an androgynous being whose dynamic tension must be kept in balance. Such a complex and compound entity alone can master, in her/his awareness (and with the complicity of the indeterminate ending), inner and outer limits. Through her androgyny Edna succeeds in achieving the wholeness of a composite unity, both integral and versatile, both necessary and free. Triumphing over sex and role differentiations ontologically implies subjugating that which substantiates but curtails, and ethically it entails mastering the grim unilaterality of responsibility. The bourgeois crisis²³ that Edna endures—the discrepancy between duty toward others and right toward herself, between social demands and personal yearnings, between repressive order and chaotic freedom—may be overcome in the grasped fullness of her dual being.

If we are tempted to regard Edna's last gesture as narcissistic (the drowning and the water symbolism imply as much), the fact that she abandons her self points rather to a reaching out for, an attainment of, more self. She merges with that supreme reality and other cosmos that has “no beginning and no end,” in which opposites are not so much reconciled as potentially summed up, and birth, death, rebirth are endlessly recycled in the Heraclitean flux. At this point she can cast “the unpleasant pricking garments from her.” Although “faded,” these garments stand for the worn-out social rules and the hypocritical allure behind moralistic conventions, and even for the illusion of completeness through sexual encounters (“pricking”). On the verge of attaining wholeness, Edna can throw aside “that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.” These garment metaphors take on greater drama from the fact that clothes metaphors play so large a role in the narration. After Robert's departure for Mexico, her existence had already appeared to her “like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.” And after having assisted Adele—when she still believes that Robert is waiting for her at home—she regards the turmoil of her fierce emotions as “a somber, uncomfortable garment, which she had but to loosen to be rid of.” By divesting herself of all her garments—her bathing suit, but also her “outer” fictitious self, her past experiences and her wrenching emotions—she frees herself from her physical life, logical thoughts, and subconscious perceptions, as well as from external hindrances, in order to enter a condition of authenticity and joy in the water under the sun. Through a baptismal immersion in the sanctifying waters of inner grace, and in the face of immortality symbolized by the bees and sun, she is platonically recapturing that lost innocence that is her soul,²⁴ cloaked and hampered by the body and its trappings. The scene and the imagery recall those at Christ's baptism on the Jordan (Matt. 3:16-17). Unlike the episode in the Gospel, however, there is here no saintly witness, no official recognition, to testify to Edna's essence, and the bird hovering above has “a broken wing” and is therefore not an adequate symbol of the divine. Once again, Edna retains her ambiguity by being alone to intuit and interpret the cosmic event of which she is the protagonist: her super-natural awakening.

Only twice before, in the first section at Grand Isle, had Edna been shown on the beach in the morning: in Chapter 7, in which she discloses moments of her inner life to Adele for the first time, and in Chapter 16, in which, under Mademoiselle Reisz's eyes, she plunges and swims “with an abandon that thrilled and invigorated her.” In both cases the combination of water and sun prompts important insights into herself: By recalling an episode of her childhood, she realizes her propensity to abandon herself to a vast natural solitude (the meadow of bluegrass). By reacting with a plunge in the water to an unpleasant piece of gossip (in the past, Robert had been interested in Mariequita, the pretty and spontaneous, “natural” Spanish girl), she again abandons herself to another vast natural solitude (the sea). At the end, not only does she identify sea and meadow (“the water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. … She went on and on … thinking of the bluegrass meadow”), but she lets herself be seduced by the sensuous “touch of the sea” under the sun, that is, under the most powerful symbol of intuitive knowledge, of the spirit in its highest individual realization, in its “illumination.”²⁵ Since, moreover, the sun, like the sea, symbolizes the beginning and the end of all, we are confronted with a scene in which each distinct element and their combination underscore the notion of an eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. No longer under the influence of the moon, the passive and “feminine” symbol²⁶—and, incidentally, also a symbol of death—Edna is here in conjunction with the sun, the golden divinity, the symbol of eternal life. The influence of the moon, which had presided over her gradual development, is thus overcome. In this final scene, at the “mercy” of the sun, if her body will die, her Life will not perish.

Encircled by the night, she for a while arises to the sun's level during her farewell dinner party (Chap. 30). Wrapped in the golden “shimmer” of her satin gown, at the head of a table covered with pale yellow satin and adorned both by “massive brass candelabra, burning softly under yellow silk shades” and by yellow roses, with champagne glittering in the crystal glasses, Edna suggests “the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.”²⁷ In the profusion of gold that is the sun's basic attribute, one may say that she represents the sun/Apollo's nightly counterpart (the moon/Artemis). In the crucial Chapter 10, while going to the beach the night in which she learns how to swim, she already misses Robert “just as one misses the sun.” Not in juxtaposition to, however, but in merging with those parts of being that compose her unity will Edna finally attain a sense of completeness.

In the last scene, no longer attached to ephemeral life, Edna enters a love relationship with the sun and the sea, the primal elemental factors; after experiencing “how delicious” it feels to stand naked under the sky, she lets herself be embraced by the water. In the process of attaining fulfillment with Nature, with the Emersonian Not-Me, with the universe, the reality of her life is left behind and the people she was related to (sons, husband, friends, relatives, beloved one, and even her secretly treasured first love) become distant and meaningless. Back at Grand Isle, finally rejecting both absolute renunciation (in the first section of the book represented by the lady in black) and juvenile fulfillment (previously incarnated by the two young lovers), she opts for absolute fulfillment.

It is consistent with what we regard as the author's deliberate decision not to propose definitive answers and not to assign precise and restricting qualities to Edna that the book ends when she is achieving the wholeness for which she craves. For this reason, although in the last scene Edna is imbued with a mystic aura, negative or deathly forces are also at work: Mademoiselle Reisz's sneer, her father's and her sister Margaret's (undoubtedly harsh) voices, the barking of an old dog (the animal psychopomp), the sycamore tree (which traditionally protects the souls of the dead),²⁸ the metallic, hideous clang of the cavalry officer's spurs. To the end Edna must remain poised between contrary visions, messages, and meanings in order to retain her polyvalent nature. Her wanderings do not end because the maze, her symbol, has led her into the cavern where she undergoes a change of heart and where a superior being emerges. The only “cavern” she had been familiar with is one “wherein discords wailed.” In this last scene, therefore, in the composite center of her being, Spirit and Nature, Reason and Understanding, I and Not-I do merge for a chronologically brief, but symbolically infinite, time. In this merging, Edna joins the source of Being. She lives and dies within the twisting labyrinth, which stands for the perennial cycle of life—death—rebirth. The process of becoming—following the two main patterns of the labyrinth—is, indeed, infinite like the spiral, and perpetually returning on itself like a braid.²⁹ The ambiguous ending permits an open and intersected interpretation: Death and life may be regarded as phases of a single existence, either of which will be superseded by the other.

From a rationalist outlook, by presenting both of these possibilities concurrently, Chopin has courted misunderstanding. Her transcendentalist influences, however, justify her diffidence toward ordinarily accepted standards of judgment and solely rational explanations. In her epistemological relativism, she allows neither naturalistic conditions nor purely logical procedures to account for the mysterious complexities of life. As she had once written: “truth rests upon a shifting basis and is apt to be kaleidoscopic.”³⁰

Whitman's impact on Chopin has already been analyzed, particularly on her imagery and symbolism.³¹ What must be noted is her debt to Emerson and the transcendentalists with respect to her sense of human beings as intermediaries between myth and consciousness, between the projections of their “divine” unconscious (dreams, visions, intuitions) and their interpretations of such projections, by which “Feeling is converted into thought; intuition, into insight.”³² In this perspective, human beings serve a dynamic function of intercommunication and interchange, and perform a role that shuns the law of conceptual logic as well as the gratifications that come from strict definitions. This inner potential connects the individual with those dried-up (“shrunk”) powers that, as Emerson claims in Nature, had once peopled the cosmos with gods born of his/her unconscious “overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and the moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externalized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons.”³³

In a very unobtrusive and apparently unconscious manner, Chopin appears to have seized upon mythic figures to help unravel both the complexity and the mystery of human existence. As with so many artists, gods and goddesses are thus employed by her as hypostases of a higher unity. Writers often resort to myths not as ways to escape history, but as structures “for dealing with shared crisis of self-definition in the face of the unknown”;³⁴ in such cases, myths offer them the opportunity of “naming the unknown.”³⁵ Chopin may have kept a related group of myths (and of gods and goddesses) more or less intentionally³⁶ in mind—without meticulously following them in every detail—to depict her protagonist's mystifying identity. The mythical content may also account for the open ending.³⁷

Edna's spiritual tendencies are hinted at from the beginning of the book. The first thing we know about her is that she possesses a physical emblem of spirituality, “strong, shapely hands.” (One recalls Mandelet's “anointed eyes”: His name may refer also to the French word for hand.) Leonce Pontellier, who considers his wife “a valuable piece of personal property,” regards his possessions as “gods.” Furthermore, the images of portals and of a temple are employed to convey what marriage was for Edna: “As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her” (Chap. 7). And again: “Within the precincts of her home she felt like one who has entered and lingered within the portals of some forbidden temple.” But she, the pantheistic goddess, suffocates “inside” the reality of married life, conceived of as a temple that entombs her. She has to fling open the portals onto realities of dreams to be herself, to capture her divinity: “Edna began … to feel again the realities pressing into her soul.” Her dreaming and daydreaming indicate a preference for the inner world and are conducive to tearing down those barriers that, in the “awakened” state, do not allow her archetypal models to surface. Thus, mythic and fairytale figures perfectly suit Edna, who has become the heroine of her dreamed about, compelling romance from the moment when the “mystic spirit” brought her to the “realms of the semicelestials.”

In the languorous tempo and hazy atmosphere of the first section of the book, and in the fragmented tempo and tense atmosphere of the second section, there are two moments (Chapters 13 and 30) in which the protagonist is not only different from but “above” all the other characters.

In Chapter 13 Edna acts and speaks like fairytale princesses—like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White: “The whole place was immaculately clean, and the big, four-posted bed, snow-white, invited one to repose. It stood in a small side room. … Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes. … [She] stretched herself in the very center of the high, white bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed.” Later, she speaks like Sleeping Beauty: “How many years have I slept?” she inquired. “The whole island seems changed. A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics.” “You have slept precisely one hundred years.” In both fairytale heroines, the awakening to individuality (and to sexuality) occurs after a period of withdrawal from active life.

At another time (Chap. 30) Edna takes on attributes of Persephone, the queen of the underworld, the goddess who crosses continuously the threshold of life and death: the sceptre (suggesting the regal woman who rules), a tiara of diamonds (“Something new, Edna?” exclaimed Miss Mayblunt, with lorgnette directed toward a magnificent cluster of diamonds that sparkled, that almost sputtered, in Edna's hair, just over the center of her forehead”), the pitcher (Edna does not actually pour the libations, but cocktails and champagne enrich and brighten her table), the color yellow.

The most important connection between the two fairytale princesses and the mythic queen is that both Snow White/Sleeping Beauty and Persephone share the motif of the long sleep, similar to death (for the Greeks, Sleep and Death were divine brothers). Edna sleeps and often takes naps even during the day, as if to balance her sleeping and waking hours. The two princesses and Persephone, after a period of sleep and isolation, will awake (be reborn) and experience joy and completeness, either with the prince or with the mother. In the last scene, after her long phase of semiactivity and narcissistic “contemplation of the self”³⁸—of semisomnambulism—Edna is finally enjoying ecstasy in Nature. The two fairytales may be regarded as the popular version of the myth of Persephone,³⁹ who lives, in some variants, six months on earth (from March—approximately the month in which Edna returns to Grand Isle—to August—the month in which Edna first appeared at Grand Isle) and six months in Hades (from September to February, the time Edna spends in New Orleans). In both the fairytales and the myth, the theme is that of cyclical birth—death—rebirth.

In Chapter 30, however, a number of reticulated suggestions are offered to give substance and depth to the mythical figure of Persephone. At Edna's dinner party, oriental refinements are conjured up to create a voluptuous setting: the music of mandolins (an instrument that derives from the oriental lute and, incidentally, contains another reference to the hand, and therefore to spirituality), the perfume of jessamines (the Arabic flower), the splash of a fountain (the heart of the Arabic garden).⁴⁰ In this context, Victor, Robert's younger brother, a “tête montée,” is expressly depicted as Dionysus, the oriental-Greek god of “intoxicated delight.”⁴¹ On his black curls, in fact, is laid a garland of roses (not of ivy, however—but roses are possibly more suggestive) and “his dusky eyes glowed with a languishing fire.” One of the women guests drapes a white silk scarf “across the boy in graceful folds,” and another one makes him sip champagne from a glass brought to his lips. At this moment of the night, a “mystic cord” seems to pass around Edna's guests and “jest and laughter” bind them together in a sort of repressed bacchanal. (By these hints Chopin suggests a Swinburnean atmosphere.)⁴²

Through his physical appeal and the impetuousness of his nature, Victor gains Edna's and the other women's sympathies. Up to that point in the narrative he has played a minor role: He has mainly been shown bickering with various people: his mother, Mr. Farival (Chap. 15), and—as Madamoiselle Reisz recounts—with Robert (Chap. 16). Victor is now at the center of everybody's attention and turns into “a vision of Oriental beauty.” The oriental (sensual, exotic, even cruel)⁴³ role is so well enacted by him that in the last chapter of the book, at Grand Isle, he teases Mariequita and makes her jealous of his acquaintances and deeds in the city by telling her that the women at Edna's feast were “youthful houris.”

Dionysus is the chthonian god of oriental origin who, like Persephone, stands for the two main cycles of nature: death and rebirth, winter and spring, barrenness and fertility. Indeed, in the Orphic tradition, he was believed—as Dionysus Zagreus—to be the son of Zeus and Demeter, Persephone's mother. He, the divine child, the twice born, belongs to both the world and the underworld; he is the god of duality. Dionysus is, in his masculine and feminine nature, a formidable synthesis of opposites⁴⁴ and a link between disparate realities. He represents paradox and the embrace of mad ecstasy that occurs when death and life meet.⁴⁵ One of his familiar settings is the sea, and the sea is Victor's special domain, since he spends most of the year at Grand Isle. Dionysus/Victor has, therefore, affinities with Persephone (and the “semicelestial” Ariadne)/Edna.

It has been stated before that Robert and Edna share important psychological and physical traits and that they function in similar ways within the narrative. If Edna possesses and brings into play characteristics usually considered masculine, Robert possesses feminine ones. He is youthful and attractive, but he is also endowed with self-control and balance. In a phrase, he represents the man of conscience. From the mythological point of view, Robert (whose name in German etymology means “bright”) is thus comparable to Apollo, the ambidextrous god of circular completeness (symbolized by the sun disc). Confronted with Dionysus, Apollo stands as his opposite, but also as his complement. They epitomize “the eternal contrast between a restless, whirling life and a still, far-seeing spirit.”⁴⁶ At Delphi the two gods were celebrated as juxtaposed divinities: Apollo during the solar months, Dionysus in the winter. Moreover, Dionysus excites some of the very faculties that Apollo guards: prophesying, singing, playing musical instruments. Robert confesses that in Mexico “Something put into my head that you cared for me, and I lost my senses,” thus guessing the truth, and after the trip to Chenière Caminada, he sings the melody “Si tu savais” with a voice that is “not pretentious” but “musical and true.” In the summer, at Grand Isle, we see little of Victor; in the winter, except at the end, when spring is advancing, Robert is away in Mexico.

Dionysus is often represented as accompanied by processions of Maenads and satyrs; on three occasions (Chaps. 9, 15, 30) Victor is portrayed at the dinner table, surrounded by a big, vociferous company of men and women. Victor is the only man, in addition to Robert, to walk with Edna under her sunshade (Chap. 20), thus showing a certain degree of possible intimacy with her.⁴⁷

The bond that unites Victor, Robert, and Edna is subtle but so strong that when, at the party, Victor kisses the palm of Edna's hand, she is moved because “The touch of his lips was like a pleasing sting.” Robert will react in a similar way when Edna kisses him: “She leaned over and kissed him—a soft, cool, delicate kiss, whose voluptuous sting penetrated his whole being.” The “sting” of a wasp or bee, combined with “pleasing” and “voluptuous,” suggests a masochistic combination of pain and delight, Thanatos and Eros. The bee, incidentally a solar symbol, is identified with Persephone's mother (Demeter), and represents the resurrection of the soul and the sacred Word (significantly, the bee reappears at the very end of the book). Victor, Edna, and Robert, therefore, share the same divine substance, the Spirit.⁴⁸

Victor (Latin, “winner”) is the youngest of the men to flirt with Edna: He is nineteen, Alcée's age when he was wounded in a duel in Paris. The two men personify, in fact, the impetuous roué, the “wicked, ill-disciplined boy,” who completely fulfills the demands of his temperament (the number nineteen, as the result of the sum of ten and nine, indicates both a complete cycle and full human satisfaction).⁴⁹ “Alcée” may refer to Alcaeus, the Greek poet who celebrated convivial and physical pleasures, and his surname, Arobin, sounds like “Arab” and points toward exoticism and sensuality.

In Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) (1872), Nietzsche had ascribed the conditions of great art (as those operative in Greece in the fifth century B.C.) to a blending of the Apollonian and the Dionysian principles, the former described as the world of visions and rapt repose and the latter as the world of voluptuousness and strenuous becoming. Even if Chopin did not know Nietzsche's work,⁵⁰ these mythological dichotomies were widely discussed,⁵¹ and indeed seem to be incarnated in the two Lebrun brothers. (Their surname refers to matter and sadness, to earth and death.) One may also hazard that in the serene contemplation and joyful ecstasy of her final musical⁵² and dramatic merging, Edna symbolizes their union.

Dionysus and Persephone are like the children of Demeter, and Dionysus and Apollo are, respectively, a chthonian and a solar double. In our context, if Victor and Edna are similar because both are defined as impetuous (Chaps. 30 and 32), Robert and Edna are more than just doubles of one another. They are similar and almost coeval: We are obliquely informed⁵³ that he is twenty-six, whereas, when the narration starts, Edna is twenty-eight. They may thus bring to mind the famous divine twins, Apollo and Artemis, who were born of Leto under a palm tree. When, in the first scene of the book, Edna and Robert are together, she is fanning herself with a palm leaf (Chap. 2).

In several traits Edna may be linked to Persephone, the queen of Hades. In her beauty and fertility she is a chthonian Aphrodite, who, in turn, is an immortal Ariadne (even the name of the daughter of Minos of Crete is associated with that of the love goddess).⁵⁴ In other traits, however, she may be regarded as being analogous to Artemis, the virgin goddess. Artemis is associated with the moon and has a virginal, independent nature. Edna is represented mainly during the dark times of the day and declares that she will not be hampered by her children: “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.” Artemis, moreover, delights in wild nature and performs the function of protectress of childbirth. Edna likes open, solitary, “uncivilized” places and rushes to assist Adele at the end, notwithstanding the presence of Robert in her house. Not being a mother-woman, Edna's two past experiences of childbirth seem to her “far away, unreal, and only half-remembered” (Chap. 36). It is as if, like most goddesses (Hera, for instance), after her own childbirths, she had returned to a virginal state: She tends toward a life of complete independence and craves “solitude” (Chaps. 4, 6, 9, 10, and 34). Artemis loves dogs; at the beginning of her experience of marital independence Edna plays with her children's little dog (Chap. 24) and at the end she hears the barking of an old dog (Chap. 39). In her desire to cast manners and obligations aside, Edna may thus be considered wild and ruthless, like Artemis. Finally, Artemis, the Lady of Clamors, is associated not only with Apollo but also (like Ariadne) with Dionysus,⁵⁵ thus bringing Edna, Robert, and Victor mythologically even closer together.

In trying to account for all the aspects of such an elusive character as Edna, we realize that neither Persephone nor Artemis entirely encompasses her. Yet another goddess, the one who completes the triad of the virginal ones, is necessary: Athene (who, being present with Artemis at Persephone's abduction, indicates her affinity with them). To adopt Richard Ellmann's term, Chopin does not proceed “singlemythedly.” The reference to so many contiguous archetypes may be justified by the composite nature of Edna's personality, which, to be fully accounted for, needs a plurality of figures. But they are tightly connected to one another, notwithstanding their particularities.

Dumezil has maintained that a tripartite system representing the three functions of productivity, force, and sovereignty is to be found in Indo-European myths.⁵⁶ In our text, productivity would be embodied in Persephone, force in Artemis, and sovereignty in Athene. Athene is characterized by a complete independence of humanity. Edna says to Robert, “I give myself where I choose,” and in the last scene she thinks, “Today it is Arobin; tomorrow it will be someone else.” Athene, like Artemis, performs the role of protectress of childbirth, but, above all, of the arts. Edna is endowed with gifts as a painter. Furthermore, Athene embodies the inner tension of being both a virgin and a mother. Such an anti-thetical condition is well represented by Edna's split between the psychological and the physiological levels of her existence. Masculine maiden and virgin mother, Athene is essentially androgynous and, as such, all the more similar to Edna. The goddess is often associated with the snake or serpent, a symbol of autochthony and a messenger between the underworld and human reality.⁵⁷ This reminds us of Edna's first swim, when the sea “swelled lazily in broad billows that melted into one another and did not break except upon the beach in little foamy crests that coiled back like slow, white serpents.” In the final scene too, “The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles.” The serpent represents rebirth, renewal, and spiritual enlargement in the inner world.

Another animal sacred to Athene is the horse, which is also one of Apollo's attributes (a further, indirect connection with Robert). Chopin writes that “There were possibly a few track men out there who knew the race horse as well as Edna”; and when Dr. Mandelet compares her to “some beautiful sleek animal waking up in the sun,” he may be thinking of a horse. Athene has connections both with Dionysus, to whom according to one tradition, she was related,⁵⁸ and with her half-brother Apollo, who, according to another secret tradition,⁵⁹ was thought of as her son by Hephaistos. In the richness of her multiple aspects, Athene is thus involved with the two main mythical figures behind the two most important male characters in the novel.

Athene is intimately bound to Persephone. In fact, the owl, a symbol of wisdom, is an animal they share.⁶⁰ After her first quarrel with her husband at Grand Isle, when Edna goes out on the porch and first becomes aware of “some unfamiliar part of her consciousness,” all is silent around her “except the hooting of an old owl.” The similarity between Athene and Persephone is attested to by still another symbol of fertility: the pomegranate for Athene and the orange (the internal structure of which is similar to that of the pomegranate) for Edna. On two eventful occasions she is pictured among the orange trees. First, in Chap. 13, she appears four times among or under the orange trees, to emphasize the abundance of feeling that takes hold of her at Chenière Caminada (the first part of the island's name may recall the oak and its mushroom, symbols of longevity and of regeneration through death).⁶¹ Later, in Chap. 36, while sitting under the orange trees of the small cafe in the garden, Edna meets Robert just before their reciprocal declaration of love in her pigeon house.

The plurality of mythical figures needed to portray such an elusive character as Edna points to the discontinuities of the self that, according to Bloom,⁶² typically characterize American romanticism. At the same time, however, Chopin seems to direct attention to the most discerning elements that link these figures to one another in order to lend Edna her many-sided uniqueness. Athene is, for instance, the protectress of feminine handiworks, in patriarchal times represented by the spindle or the needle. In popular fairytales these are often fairies' or witches' tools. In “Sleeping Beauty,” the princess pricks her finger with the old woman's spindle in the tower and falls asleep. At the opening of “Snow White,” after pricking her finger with a needle, the queen longs for a child to whom she indeed gives birth not very long after. The sexual implications of these tools⁶³ stress the role of Athene and of middle-aged or old women as go-betweens (midwives) in a psychological (as well as a physical) sense. Such females may display either the positive or the negative sides of womanhood, like the seven good fairies versus the eighth, wicked one in “Sleeping Beauty” or the queen mother versus the wicked stepmother in “Snow White.”

In The Awakening, two women without men (a widow and a spinster) are invested with a similar function. Aline Lebrun and Mademoiselle Reisz live in high, tortuous, dark, gothic eyries. Madame Lebrun's room at Grand Isle “was situated at the top of the house, made up of odd angles and a queer, sloping ceiling” and Mademoiselle Reisz's apartment in New Orleans is under a roof and is full of “dingy” windows, which admit “a good deal of smoke and soot”; from them “the crescent of the river” and “the masts of ships and the big chimneys of the Mississippi steamers” can be seen. These two women are the benevolent fairy and the malevolent witch, respectively: Madame Lebrun is always dressed in white, works at her sewing machine with the determination with which Mademoiselle Reisz practices her piano art, and is still “a fresh, pretty woman.” Although of little importance in the narrative, Madame Lebrun is the mother of the two most important men and the one who, by providing Edna with Mademoiselle Reisz's address, indirectly favors Edna's and Robert's meeting in New Orleans. Mademoiselle Reisz, by contrast, is always dressed in black and, without being malevolent (although her surname rhymes with “vice”), is certainly wry, critical, and prophetic. Soot and chimneys belong to witches as well as to her, as does the shining crescent. But it is “the crescent of the river” and not of the moon. This shift underlines the fact that Mademoiselle Reisz cannot be associated with the most pregnant symbol of woman's fertility. Witches' horror of water (therefore of the spiritual element) is also characteristic of her: “Mademoiselle Reisz's avoidance of the water had furnished a theme for much pleasantry.” Her physical aspect, moreover, is rather grotesque: “Her laugh consisted of a contortion of the face and all the muscles of the body,” her hands have “strong, wiry fingers.” She is so small and deformed that at Edna's dinner party she has to be “elevated upon cushions,” and when she sits at the piano, “the lines of her body settled into ungraceful curves and angles.” She always wears “a batch of rusty black lace with a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the side of her hair.” Like witches, Mademoiselle Reisz is ageless and might be as old as her furniture, “dingy and battered from a hundred years of use” (the number underlines the mythic time in which she, like a character in a fairytale, lives).⁶⁴ Everything in her points toward the magic being who stirs up hidden forces. It is, for instance, after Reisz's playing of the piano that Edna, passionately moved by it, swims for the first time alone. It is she who quiets Edna's troubled soul with her music. She is the first to tell Edna that Robert is in love with her and, finally, she sharply conveys to her that Robert is not the person whom she should love: “If I were young and in love I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion.” Conversely, it is to Mademoiselle Reisz that Edna first discloses both her desire to leave her husband's house and her resolution “never again to belong to another than herself”; moreover, it is to her that Edna first confesses her love for Robert (Chap. 26).

Mademoiselle Reisz is thus a conjurer and a ficelle, a necessary link that accounts both for Edna's gradual awareness of her aspirations and for the progress of the action. (Edna will meet Robert again in Mademoiselle Reisz's apartment.) She may be connected to Athene (and Edna) because, in her dark side, the goddess wears the head of one of the gorgons, the terrible Medusa, on her aegis, her shield. Mademoiselle Reisz's head is obviously not covered with serpents, but the author insists on her unusual millinery, her only characterizing ornament.⁶⁵ If, with her talent and her dedication, Mademoiselle Reisz stands for the spiritual urge forward, this urge, as in the case of the gorgon, is perverted by an excessive, presumptuous, ultimately self-destructive turning on itself.⁶⁶

Since the pursuit of a rigid coherence is advocated by Chopin neither in professional nor in family life, Adele, too, takes on for a while the semblance of Medusa in the last scene in which she appears—that of the delivery of her child: “Her face was drawn and pinched, her sweet blue eyes haggard and unnatural. All her beautiful hair had been … coiled like a golden serpent.” Even Adele, the tender mother, the sweet and sympathetic Madonna, who, as Demeter tried to protect Persephone, would like to protect Edna (“In some way you seem to me like a child”), shows her dark side. Demeter, too, becomes Demeter Erynnis.⁶⁷

In Athene/Medusa, therefore, the three different characters of Edna, Mademoiselle Reisz, and Adele merge, at least temporarily. So that if we might have been tempted to detect in the characterization of Mademoiselle Reisz and, to a lesser extent, of Aline Lebrun traces of the old patriarchal prejudice that rejects women without men as anomalies, with Adele as Medusa as well, another subtle indication can be inferred: In a repressive society,⁶⁸ sooner or later, continuously or occasionally, womanhood as such is destined to be regarded, even by a woman artist, as frightening (possibly because the female Medusa forces men and women to look at themselves and realize their true nature). By drawing a many-sided character like Edna, Chopin has bridged the gap between the two more stereotyped opposing figures of Adele and Mademoiselle Reisz, while imbuing them with unexpected, linking attributes.

Other evidence throws light on the controversial meaning of the book. Pallas Athene is the moon⁶⁹ (and, as such, is connected with Artemis) and represents the lunar cycle. The Panathenaea Festival, which every four years celebrated magnificently the protectress of Athens, could begin on the twenty-eighth of the month dedicated to her.⁷⁰ When The Awakening begins, Edna is twenty-eight, and the only precise date in the whole narration is that of Edna's first swim: August 28. Twenty-eight is the number that indicates the lunar months and is closely related to the female. It is the arithmetic sum of the first seven numbers and represents a complete cycle, totality, eternal life, thus fitting the etymology of Edna's name, which means “rejuvenation” in Hebrew⁷¹ (and is close to Erda, the German earth goddess). Through a perennial cycle of birth-death-rebirth she is, therefore, true to her name. What is of special interest to us is that twenty-eight points to a dynamic perfection.⁷²

August 28 is also, however, the day on which the Christian calendar celebrates Saint Augustine, the Church doctor who would have agreed with the Holy Spirit in not vouchsafing to any woman a significant amount of wisdom (to paraphrase Chopin's words in Chapter 6). Augustine, as we know, was deeply influenced by Plotinus's Enneads, which identified the content of true wisdom in self-direction and self-awareness in knowledge of the Good. In Plotinus's thinking, when man reaches freedom in the One, he is freed from all dependence, from all individuality: The return to unity marks his return to transcendent independence when he is finally alone with the Alone,⁷³ when he attains “self union.” Only by transcending oneself, by becoming all things, through a pantheistic union with the Universal Being does one attain infinity, perfection. Augustine insists on the gulf (the word, so rich in metaphorical meanings, makes us think of the Gulf at Grand Isle) between man and God, but retains the neoplatonic belief that redemption as well as regeneration proceeds by turning inward upon oneself and that obligation to God entails a desire for self-fulfillment. He maintains that duty and self-interest ultimately coincide, because love of self and love of God, even if they exist separately, are coextensive.⁷⁴

In the mystery surrounding Edna's last act, one may detect concepts and posit hypotheses that afford a multilateral dimension to her instinctual decision, especially since, when walking toward the sea, “She was not dwelling upon any particular train of thought.” Even the fact that the narrative ends with Chapter 39 may offer a subject for speculation. The result of thirteen multiplied three times, this number symbolizes a dynamic, limited, and relative system tending to the acquisition of a more forceful potentiality. Being elevated to the third power, the system strives toward perfection, totality.⁷⁵

With her inner and outer liminality, her search for existential fulfillment and her multifaceted, goddesslike traits, Edna entices us, moves us. Whatever judgment we will pass on her struggle for independence and self-realization—that is, no matter how doomed from the start is this bourgeois myth propounded by a society that then denies it for women—through her final sensuous and mystic ecstasy, seeking immersion in her environment, she either purges herself of her narrowly conceived individualism or exorcises the isolation into which she was cast.⁷⁶ Rather than living as under a “narcotic”—etymologically associated with “sleep” and with Narcissus—she breaks the isolation of her existence, sublimates her instincts by directing them toward the Ideal, and joins the universe.

Edna's plight is constrained by neither social circumstance nor obstacle. She is left free to do as she pleases: She has no husband, no children, no relatives, no acquaintances, no society either, overtly to malign or brutally to hamper her. From the aesthetic point of view, the writer neither attempts to project an intriguing situation by adopting involuted narrative structures nor does she care to reveal to the fullest extent her characters' deepest psychological instincts and motivations. Yet we are conquered by Edna's naiveté⁷⁷ and by the sheer honesty of her timeless, solitary quest.

Notes

1. Gabriel Germain, Chants pour l'Ame de l'Afrique (Paris: Debresse, 1956), p. 89: “L'homme qui a une âme n'obéit qu'à l'Univers.”

2. In Chapter 32, the protagonist feels that “She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to ‘feed upon opinion’ when her own soul had invited her.”

3. In Chapter 38, Edna says: “I don't want anything but my own way.”

4. Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).

5. George M. Spangler, “Kate Chopin's The Awakening: A Partial Dissent,” Novel 3(3) (Spring 1970):249-55; and Jane P. Tompkins, “The Awakening: An Evaluation,” Feminist Studies, 3(3-4) (Spring-Summer 1976):22-9.

6. The title of the book was actually meant to consist of both the present one and the one that the author had originally proposed to the publisher: A Solitary Soul. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), p. 221, n. 38.

7. See Victor W. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), and also “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974). To be liminal entails achieving a new state of being, a new spiritual communitas, whereas to be marginal implies being permanently excluded, an absolute “other.” It is the aim of this chapter to try and demonstrate that Edna belongs to the liminal.

8. For instance, Edna thinks of herself as a child and as childish (Chaps. 7, 19, 35, 39), and is defined as a child by Adele Ratignolle (Chap. 33), by Doctor Mandelet (Chap. 38), and by the author (Chap. 10).

9. Edna wears the red silk handkerchief on her head after having kissed Alcée, that is, after having begun to break the moral code of her class. The sexually free Spanish girl, Mariequita, is the only other character to wear a red piece of clothing, in fact, a red kerchief on her head (Chap. 12).

10. For a discussion of the meaning of these colors, see Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles (Paris: Laffont, 1969), pp. 107-9, 126, 111-12, 663-5, 564-6, respectively.

11. Ibid., p. 436.

12. Five mornings are expressly mentioned: the Sunday morning at the beginning of the story; the following Monday morning (Chap. 3); one morning (Chap. 7); one Sunday morning (Chap. 12); one morning (Chap. 16). Five evenings/nights are accounted for: the first Sunday night (Chap. 3); one evening (Chap. 5); one Saturday night, August 28 (Chaps. 9, 10, 21); one Sunday night (Chap. 14); one evening and night (Chap. 15).

13. The first sequence is connected to the second one by both a linguistic and a thematic reference [“A few days later a box arrived for Mrs. Pontellier from New Orleans” (Chap. 3), and “She was sitting there the afternoon of the day the box arrived from New Orleans” (Chap. 4)]. The second sequence is connected to the third one by the use of an identical background: the sea at Grand Isle. (At the end of Chapter 5 Edna swims in the sea, and in Chapter 6 the author comments on her swimming. At the beginning of Chapter 7, while contemplating the sea, Edna starts thinking about herself, thus beginning to realize the nature of her personality.) The fourth sequence appears to be tenuously connected to the one that precedes it (at the beginning of Chapter 9 the author informs us that the time is a Saturday night “a few weeks after the intimate conversation held between Robert and Madame Ratignolle,” which occurred in Chapter 8). This sequence is not linked to the following one. The fifth sequence is tied to the sixth one by a thematic reference—in Edna's flashback—to Robert's leaving “five days ago” (Chap. 16).

14. The first sequence ends (Chap. 3) in the morning (and an afternoon is anticipated); the second sequence starts (Chap. 4) in the afternoon and ends (Chap. 6) at night; the third sequence starts (Chap. 7) in the morning and ends (Chap. 8) at luncheon; the fourth sequence, instead, starts (Chap. 9) at night and ends (Chap. 14) at night; the fifth sequence starts in the evening and ends at night (Chap. 15); the last sequence (Chap. 16) starts in the morning.

15. Edna notices that his hair is “the color of hers” (Chap. 33).

16. Adele Ratignolle says to Robert: “You speak with about as little reflection as we might expect from one of those children down there playing in the sand” (Chap. 8). The author comments, “He was childishly gratified to discover her appetite” (Chap. 13). Later Edna defines him as “a foolish boy” (Chap. 34). When Robert is not in the company of women, he likes to be with children (Chaps. 2 and 7).

17. Robert says: “I've been seeing the waves and the white beach of Grand Isle, the quiet, grassy street of the Chenière, the old fort at Grand Terre. I've been working like a machine and feeling like a lost soul. There was nothing interesting.” Edna says: “I've been seeing the waves and the white beach of Grand Isle, the quiet, grassy street of the Chenière Caminada, the old sunny fort at Grand Terre. I've been working with a little more determination than a machine, and still feeling like a lost soul. There was nothing interesting.”

18. For instance, three are the quarrels between Edna and her husband (Chaps. 3, 11, 17); three are her visits to Mademoiselle Reisz (Chaps. 21, 26, 33); three times the lady in black appears with the lovers (Chaps. 7, 8, 15); three times she appears with the lovers and Mr. Farival (Chap. 12). Three times the twins play the piano (Chaps. 1, 2, 9). Before marrying, Edna had experienced three infatuations (Chap. 7). Robert speaks three languages (Chap. 2). Linguistically, too, the narration is dotted by triads: When Edna is shattered by the news that Robert is going to Mexico, she desperately wonders how he could leave so suddenly, “as if he were going over to Klein's or to the wharf or down the beach.” The colonel reproaches Edna for her “filial,” “sisterly,” and “womanly” wants (Chap. 24); Arobin may be met at “horse courses,” “operas,” or “clubs” (Chap. 25). Robert sweetens his coffee with three lumps of sugar (Chap. 36). Celina's husband is defined as “a fool, a coward, and a pig” (Chap. 39). Three is the first perfect number, which represents totality, the achievement of divine Unity, the participation of humanity in the invisible world. It is also associated with the search for one's biological and sexual identity.

19. In several cases the adverbial clause, when referring to Edna, is preceded by the verb “to feel.” For instance: “I felt as if I must go on forever” and “I feel this summer as if I were going through the green meadow again” (Chap. 7); “a feeling of exultation overtook her as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul” (Chap. 10); “Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast” (Chap. 12); “she felt as if she were thoroughly acquainted with him” (Chap. 23); “I feel as if I had been wound up to a certain pitch—too tight—and something inside of me had snapped” (Chap. 31).

20. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As if” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 93, 95.

21. This young woman, whose vocation is to become a concert pianist, and Mademoiselle Reisz do not bear French surnames. Perhaps on account of their exacting calling, the author prefers to assign them ancestry different from that of most of the other, more “easygoing,” characters.

22. “To love and be wise is scarcely granted even to a God.”

23. In Adorno's dialectical analysis, the narrowly conceived principium individuationis is one of the myths of bourgeois ethics that, distancing “truth” and “freedom” from the social context and imbuing authenticity with “religious authoritarian pathos without the least religious content,” further alienates the “monadological” individual. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 152-5. These Marxist observations may be of help insofar as they emphasize how tightly The Awakening is connected to the bourgeois tradition and culture.

24. The word “soul” occurs more than twenty times in the narrative, four times in each of the following chapters: 6, 21, 39; in this last, the contexts in which the word was used in the previous two chapters are repeated.

25. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, pp. 710-14.

26. Ibid., pp. 474-8.

27. In Sandra M. Gilbert's “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire,” Kenyon Review 5(3) (Summer 1983), Gilbert argues that Chopin is portraying in Edna a fin-de-siècle Aphrodite, thus “exploring a vein of revisionary mythology allied not only to the revisionary erotics of free love advocates like Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldmann but also to the feminist theology of women like Florence Nightingale … and Mary Baker Eddy” (61).

28. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, pp. 197-201, 728.

29. Ibid., pp. 445-7.

30. Kate Chopin, “Emile Zola's ‘Lourdes’” (1984) in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted, 2 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), Vol. 2, p. 697.

31. See Seyersted, Kate Chopin, pp. 86, 151; Lewis Leary, “Kate Chopin and Walt Whitman” in Southern Excursions: Essays on Mark Twain and Others (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), p. 170; Joan Zlotnick, “A Woman's Will: Kate Chopin on Selfhood, Wifehood, and Motherhood,” Markham Review 3 (October 1968):1-5; Gregory L. Candela, “Walt Whitman and Kate Chopin: A Further Connection,” Walt Whitman Review 24(4) (December 1978):3.

32. Jeffrey Steele, “Interpreting the Self: Emerson and the Unconscious,” in Emerson, Prospect and Retrospect, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 102.

33. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. I, p. 42.

34. Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers, Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 8.

35. Albert S. Cook, Myth and Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 1.

36. A. Pratt maintains that women writers often resort to myths as acts of discovery prompted by imagination and intuition. Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). In the plan of studies of Chopin's convent school, mythology was one of the subjects taught. Louise Callan, The Society of the Sacred Heart in North America (New York: Longmans, 1937), pp. 735-6.

37. Myth has, among its features, that of being an “expanding contextual structure.” Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 177.

38. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 226. Chopin is obviously indebted to the romantic tradition on sleep and dreams. She could not have known Freud's Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), which appeared in 1900 and was not translated into English until 1913, yet her work shows a profound sensitivity to the nature of the unconscious.

39. Marie L. von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales (Irving: University of Dallas, 1972), pp. 18-43. The following Jungian analysis is based on the conviction that—as Bickman observed—Jungian psychology completes the movement of American romanticism and turns “metaphysics into a phenomenology of consciousness. The most striking activity in American Romanticism is that … of the imagination exploring those areas where ideas are felt as well as thought, and where spiritual aspirations and sexual desires are discovered to spring from the same inner dynamics.” Martin Bickman, The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 39.

40. Curiously, when looking at the garden earlier (Chap. 17), Edna had not mentioned this fountain. Chopin's narrative method is often based on reticence and understatement. For example, one learns the names of Edna's children (Raoul and Etienne) in Chapters 3 and 14, respectively; again, only in the last chapter does one first learn that during the previous summer, Edna had always tripped over some loose planks in the porch.

41. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus, Myth and Cult (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1981), p. 65.

42. Margaret Culley, “Edna Pontellier: A Solitary Soul,” in The Awakening, An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. M. Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 227. See also Gilbert, “The Second Coming of Aphrodite,” 61.

43. Victor, who insists on singing the song Edna does not want to hear, provides the disruptive climax of the party.

44. Otto, Dionysus, Myth and Cult, p. 136.

45. Ibid., p. 137.

46. Ibid., p. 208.

47. Edna appears under the sunshade twice with Robert (Chaps. 1 and 12) and once with Adele (Chap. 7).

48. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, pp. 1-2.

49. Ibid., pp. 292-3, 531-3.

50. In Kate Chopin, A Critical Biography, Per Seyersted never mentions Nietzsche as a possible influence on Chopin. But Daniel S. Rankin in Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932, p. 174) suggests that this novel may have been indebted to Gabrielle D'Annunzio, as well as to other representatives of European aestheticism. Specifically, he mentions The Triumph of Death (translated into English in 1896), which shows the impact of Nietzsche and of Wagner. In both novels there is indeed a strong emphasis on the power of music to move and to reveal the inner world of every human being. Incidentally, in a book published posthumously in 1901, Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power), Nietzsche writes that Dionysus is the epitome of “transitoriness” and declares that he can be interpreted “as enjoyment of productive and destructive force, as continual creation.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 539, sects. 1049, 1885-6. It is, of course, too early to speak of a Nietzschean influence here. Although Nietzsche's books began appearing in the 1870s, his influence on Anglo-American culture did not commence until 1896, when, newly translated in Britain, his works started to be known. Patrick Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972), p. 150. For further reference, see Stephen Donadio, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Nietzsche is linked to American culture through his devotion to Emerson. From 1862 and for more than a quarter of a century, “Emerson was the object of Nietzsche's continuing interest.” Herman Hummel, “Emerson and Nietzsche,” New England Quarterly 19 (1946):73. It is possible that the occasional Nietzschean theme in Chopin is actually Emersonian and one acquired on native ground.

    Note that Walter Pater, too, had studied the figure of Dionysus as the expression of a power that is “bringing together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human body a soul of waters.” W. Pater, “A Study of Dionysus,” in Greek Studies, A Series of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 29.

51. For a complete bibliography of Nietzsche, see Herbert W. Reichert and Karl Schlechta, International Nietzsche Bibliography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).

52. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. with an introduction by Lewis Leary (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1970), pp. 12-13.

53. In Chapter 5 the author gives us his age indirectly: We have to make an addition (fifteen plus eleven) in order to know it. Edna's age, instead, is stated twice (Chaps. 6 and 30).

54. Otto, Dionysus, Myth and Cult, pp. 181-8.

55. Ibid., p. 92. Incidentally, Ariadne (who, like Persephone, Artemis, and Aphrodite, belongs to the element of moisture, Becoming, and death) had, like Edna, two sons.

56. Georges Dumezil, Myths et Epopée, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

57. Karoly Kerenyi, Athene, Virgin and Mother in Greek Religion (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1978), pp. 17, 55-7. Given Chopin's familiarity with the poetry of A. C. Swinburne, see his “Erechtheus.”

58. Ibid., p. 47.

59. Ibid., p. 54.

60. Ibid., p. 32.

61. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, p. 169.

62. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 255. The critic maintains that “The Emersonian or American Sublime … differs from the British or the Continental model not by a greater or lesser degree of positivity or negativity, but by a greater acceptance or affirmation of discontinuities in the self.”

63. Von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, p. 38.

64. The number ten (or its multiples: one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand) is frequently employed in the book. Ten designates a totality in movement, a return to unity, an alternation, or better, a coexistence, of life and death. Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, pp. 292-3.

65. To signify the alliance between rationality and vital powers, all pagan mother-goddesses carry the serpent as an attribute (Isis, Demeter, Athena, Cybele). In Christian iconography, the serpent is, instead, crushed under Mary's foot. In Medusa the serpents stand for perverted power. See S. Freud's essay “The Uncanny” (1919) and Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

66. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, pp. 388-9.

67. Carl G. Jung and Karoly Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, Bollingen Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 126. Edna and Adele are designated as “cruel” by Robert (Chap. 36) and Doctor Mandelet (Chap. 38), respectively.

68. A. Goodwin Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 173-7.

69. Kerenyi, Athene, Virgin and Mother in Greek Religion, p. 59.

70. Ibid., pp. 40-1. Incidentally, the month dedicated to Athene corresponds to our mid-July-mid-August period, roughly both the month in which The Awakening begins and the “eighth” one in our calendar.

71. A similar meaning (rejuvenation, cyclical restoration) is involved in Edna's desire to eat fish. In fact, by taking her last “swim” she may become like a fish, and further, take on the nature of the supreme christological symbol. On the other hand, the fish may also symbolize her sensitivity, inconstancy, and desire to let herself go. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, pp. 617-19.

72. Ibid., pp. 806-7 and 411-12. Twenty-eight, being also the sum of twenty and eight, stands for God, the primary Unity, and for resurrection and transfiguration. Twenty-eight is also the sum of the years of the Farival twins, who seem to be perfectly symmetrical (Chap. 9) and, therefore, indicate the possibility of surmounting multiplicity by attaining unity through a balanced duality. Twenty-eight, finally, designates Adam Kadmon, the Universal Man.

73. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. B. S. Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), particularly Enneads IV and VI.

74. See Oliver O'Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980). Such concepts may have been handed down to Kate Chopin through Emerson, or she may have absorbed them through her Catholic unbringing. To the impact of Augustine's doctrines (and of Plotinus's pantheism) on Puritan theology and, through it, on transcendentalism, Perry Miller has devoted numerous essays. His “From Edwards to Emerson” is precious, even if it studies a chronologically more limited span of theological thought. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956).

75. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles, pp. 766, 772-5.

76. Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa, pp. 57-86.

77. See Ruth Sullivan and Stewart Smith, “Narrative Stance in Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” Studies in American Fiction 1(1) (Spring 1973):62-75; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening.” American Quarterly 25(4) (October 1973):449-71; and Allen F. Stein, “Kate Chopin's The Awakening and the Limits of Moral Judgment,” in A Fair Day in the Affections: Literary Essays in Honor of Robert B. White, Jr., ed. Jack D. Durant and M. Thomas Hester (Raleigh, N.C.: Winston Press, 1980).

Cristina Giorcelli, a gradute of Bryn Mawr, is Professor of American Literature at the University of RomeThree. She has written extensively on W. Irving, E. A. Poe, H. Melville, H. James, S. Crane, E. Wharton, G. Stein, W. C. Williams, L. Zukofsky. Since 1980, she directs the Anglo-American section of the quarterly journal Letterature d'America. She is also editor of a series on Abito e Identita (Clothing and Identity).