[In the following essay, Wolff examines The Awakening in terms of nineteenth-century medical discourse on female sexuality.]

Because novelists are particular about beginnings, we should notice that The Awakening opens with two things: sumptuous sensory images and an outpouring of babble—words that resemble ordinary speech, but which really have meaning for no one, not even the speaker.

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:

“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!”

He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood.¹

Although an onlooker is able to enjoy this vivid scene, the parrot cannot; moreover, there is a sense of enigma (or fraud) about this bird who seems able to communicate, but is not. Indeed, the absolute discontinuity among the bird's “discourse,” its exotic plumage, and its feelings (whatever they may be) is even more significant to the larger themes of the novel than the fact that he is caged. Or perhaps this very disconnectedness (and the bird's consequent isolation) defines the cage.

Critics admire the “modernism” of Chopin's work, the strong spareness of the prose and the “minimalism” of a narrative whose absences are at least as important as its action and whose narrator maintains strict emotional and moral neutrality. What we may not fully appreciate is the relationship between these elements and Edna Pontellier's personal tragedy, a relationship whose terms are announced by the apparent disarray of the novel's brilliant beginning. This is a tale about not speaking, about disjunction—about denials, oversights, prohibitions, exclusions, and absences. Not merely about things that are never named, but most significantly about stories that cannot be told and things that can be neither thought nor spoken because they do not have a name.

After about 1849, the notion of a “woman's sexual awakening” became, by definition, an impossibility—a contradiction in terms—because the medical establishment in America began to promulgate the view that normal females possessed no erotic inclinations whatsoever (and one cannot awaken something that does not exist). William Acton, the acknowledged expert on the nature of women's sexuality and author of “one of the most widely quoted books on sexual problems and diseases in the English-speaking world,”² wrote:

I have taken pains to obtain and compare abundant evidence on this subject, and the result of my inquiries I may briefly epitomize as follows:—I should say that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their consequences.³

Acton's work elaborated a comprehensive system of women's “inequality” to men; and it was so universally respected that his sentiments can be taken to represent opinions that were held throughout much of America during the second half of the nineteenth century. Certainly they define the attitudes of that stem Presbyterian world in which Edna Pointellier grew to maturity.⁴

In fact, Edna's particular religious background could not have been chosen casually by Chopin, for a woman reared in this faith during the 1870s and 1880s (the years of Edna's youth) would have been preternaturally susceptible to the most crippling elements of Acton's strictures.

American Calvinism always preached that although the woman was to be “regarded as equal to man. in her title to grace,” she was nonetheless “the weaker vessel,” and was thus obliged to pursue all endeavors as a “subordinate to the husband.”⁵ During the later nineteenth century, Presbyterianism was generally regarded as a conservative bastion for such ideas, and many Presbyterians themselves construed their mission as one of upholding precisely these conservative-religious values. Not surprisingly, then, beginning in the 1870s and continuing through the end of the century, the Presbyterian church in America suffered a crisis over the role of women that might well be defined by the question, “Shall Women Speak?”⁶

The embroglio began when a Newark clergyman invited two women into his pulpit to speak in favor of the Temperance Movement. Seeing an opportunity to reaffirm the precedent of women's “naturally” subordinate role, the Presbytery of Newark brought formal charges against the minister. In the minds of the accusers, the issue was far from narrow:

“I believe the subject involves the honor of my God. … My argument is subordination of sex. … There exists a created subordination; a divinely arranged and appointed subordination of woman as woman to man as man. Woman was made for man. … The proper condition of the adult female is marriage; the general rule for ladies is marriage. … Man's place is on the platform. It is positively base for a woman to speak in the pulpit. … The whole question is one of subordination.”⁷

For both the Puritan Fathers and their late nineteenth-century Calvinist descendants, the specter of a woman speaking out was portentous: at best, it was unsettling to the male hierarchy; at worst, it augured chaos. Suffragists could also discern the importance of this case, and the dispute among Newark Presbyterians became a notorious part of “the record of their struggle” and was widely publicized.⁸

This kind of “woman-problem” had first arisen in America when Anne Hutchinson “stepped out of the role the community defined for her,” for “if a woman could instruct men, then all legitimate authority was in jeopardy.”⁹ The prototypical response had been formulated in Hutchinson's day: require women to assume their divinely ordained, subordinate position. Their failure to do so would result (so the argument ran) not merely in civil misrule, but in grotesque sexual misconduct. Thus in the Hutchinson case, the phantoms of both social turmoil and sexual license haunted the trial: “everywhere in the court examination, one finds the insinuation that Hutchinson is, like Jezebel, guilty of fornication.”¹⁰ Confronted with what they feared might become a similar provocation, the Presbyterian clergymen of Edna Pointellier's youth demanded that woman keep to their “natural sphere” of home, hearth, and motherhood. As for women's sexuality, William Acton was their more than sufficient spokesman.

All of Acton's formulations are sweepingly comprehensive and inescapably normative, and in this respect he greatly resembles the Puritans. He does not admit of gradations among women; nor does he entertain the possibility that additional data—testimony from women themselves, perhaps—might contradict or even emend his pronouncements. Instead, he presents his ideas as nothing less than a description of both a divinely ordained condition and a condition for middle-class respectability. He clearly considers the absence of passion in “normal women” to be a good thing (for its presence in a decent female would “shock public feeling”); and he refers dismissively to “prostitutes” and “loose, or, at least, low and vulgar women” whose strong libidinous drives “give a very false idea of the condition of female sexual feelings in general.” In short, the innate frigidity of women signified a form of refinement and could be used as a touchstone for respectability.¹¹

The official “scientific” and “medical” view can be stated quite simply: an average woman (a “decent” woman) possesses no sexual feelings whatsoever. Thus it is not enough to say that The Awakening is a novel about repression (that is, about a situation in which a woman possesses sexual feelings, but is prohibited from acting upon them). It is, instead, a novel about a woman whose shaping culture has, in general, refused her right to speak out freely; this is, moreover, a culture that construes a woman's self-expression as a violation of sexual “purity” and a culture that has denied the existence of women's libidinous potential altogether—has eliminated the very concept of sexual passion for “normal” women.

The consequences are emotionally mutilating (in the extreme case, some form of mental breakdown would result). In such a culture, if a “respectable” woman supposes herself to feel “something,” some powerful ardor in her relationship with a man, she can draw only two possible inferences. Either her feelings are not sexual (and should not be enacted in a genital relationship), or she is in some (disgraceful) way “abnormal.” Moreover, because there is presumed to be no such entity as sexual feelings in the typical woman, a typical (i.e. “normal”) woman will literally have no words for her (nonexistent) feelings, will have access to no discourse within which these (nonexistent) passions can be examined or discussed, will be; able to make no coherent connection between the (unintelligible) inner world of her affective life and the external, social world in which she must live.¹² Finally, if she feels confusion and emotional pain, her culture's general prohibition against speaking out will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to discuss or even reveal her discomfort.

Of course there was an escape hatch (infinitesimal and insufficient). After all, men and women did marry, did have sexual intercourse, doubtless did (sometimes) enjoy their love-making, and did (occasionally) find ways to discuss the intimate elements of their relationship. Indeed, the range of actual situations for females in America at the end of the nineteenth century—among various cultural groups, among diverse regions—was undoubtedly rather great. Yet the normative pronouncements regarding women's “proper” behavior in this age of Anthony Comstock (founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the man who succeeded in having the Act which bears his name passed in 1873) were stringent—as were the assumptions about public behavior.¹³

The extent and resourcefulness of individual solutions to this situation must remain a mystery. However, the publicly approved forms of discourse for female desire are a matter of record. Medical and psychological experts concluded that although women had no sexual drives per se, they often possessed a passionate desire to bear children: such ardor was both “normal” and (inevitably) sexual. On these terms, then, sexual activity—even moderate sexual “desire”—was appropriate in “normal” women. However, a profound displacement or confusion was introduced by this accommodation: the language of feminine sexuality became inextricably intertwined with discourse that had to do with child-bearing and motherhood.

According to Acton (and others who followed his lead), nature itself had made the longing to have children the essential, causative force of a woman's sexual “appetite.” Thus men and women were essentially different: men have sexual impulses and needs (and these are quite independent of any wish to sire offspring); women crave children (and consequently they might be said—very indirectly—to “want” sexual activity). “Virility” and “maternity” were defined as parallel instincts that were nonetheless fundamentally dissimilar; and a woman's possessing sexual ardor independent of her yearning for babies became a defining symptom of abnormality or immorality or both:

It is to be expected, that, at the time when the man is physically in the fittest state to procreate his species, nature should provide him with a natural and earnest desire … to the commission of the act. … He now instinctively seeks the society of women. Intercourse with females increases his excitement, and all is ready for the copulative act. …

He feels that MANHOOD has been attained, he experiences all those mysterious sensations which make up what we call VIRILITY. …

This feeling of virility is much more developed in man than is that of maternity in woman.

If the married female conceives every second year, we usually notice that during the nine months following conception she experiences no great sexual excitement. …

Love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions [women] feel. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband's embraces, but principally to gratify him; and were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.¹⁴

Scholars have accepted almost as chiche the fact that in late Victorian America “motherhood” was exalted as an all-but-divine state. However, if we do not also understand the oblique (and contradictory) sexual implications of this cultural ideal, we may be unaware of the confusion and conflict it engendered.

This definition of feminine sexuality radically displaced a woman's passionate desires: unlike males, who were permitted to “possess” their sexuality and were consequently allowed to experience passion directly and as a part of the “self,” females were allowed access to sexuality only indirectly—as a subsidiary component of the desire for children. It was literally unimaginable that any “decent” woman would experience sexual appetite as an immediate and urgent drive, distinct from all other desires and duties. In emotional terms, men “owned” their libido; however, women's libido was “owned” by their prospective children.¹⁵

Any woman would find this concatenation of denials and demands unbalancing; however, in Edna's case, the already vexed situation is heightened by a severe conflict of cultures. In a society where the actual experiences of women were diverse and the normative pronouncements were stringent, Chopin has constructed a novel where extremes converge to demonstrate the malignant potential of these normative attitudes, and she marks the summer at Grand Isle as the moment when crisis begins.

Reared as a Presbyterian in Kentucky, Edna has been married to a Creole for many years. Nonetheless, she has never-become “thoroughly at home in the society of Creoles; [and] never before had she been thrown so intimately among them” (pp. 27-28). It is not that these people do not have a rigorous sexual code: their customs follow the boundary conditions that Acton and his fellow theorists postulated. However, far from being Bible-bound, sober, and staid, so long as they remain within the rules of this code, Creoles permit themselves an extraordinary freedom of sensual expression. Thus a lusty carnal appetite in men is taken for granted. (Robert has his affair with the Mexican girl, everyone knows about it, and no one thinks to disapprove.) However, the case of Creole women is different, for their sexuality may exist only as a component of “motherhood.” Nevertheless, so long as they accept this model, women, too, may engage in a sumptuous sexual life. Mme. Ratignolle, the “sensuous Madonna,” embodies the essence of ardor and voluptuary appetite thus construed.

Such a system imposes penalties (Adele's accouchement is one specific marker for the price to be paid); however, within these limiting conditions, the Creole world is more densely erotic than any community Edna has encountered. It revels frankly and happily in the pleasures of the flesh—not merely enjoying these delights with undisguised zest, but discussing them in public with no shame at all. Edna can recognize the inherent “chastity” of such people, but their habits nonetheless embarrass her profoundly:

Madame Ratignolle had been married seven years. About every two years she had a baby. At that time she had three babies, and was beginning to think of a fourth one. She was always talking about her “condition.” Her “condition” was in no way apparent, and no one would have known a thing about it but for her persistence in making it the subject of conversation.

(p. 27)

A late twentieth century reader may innocently suppose that Adele's preoccupation is purely maternal. The full truth is quite otherwise: in the discourse of the day, Adele has elected to flaunt her sexuality—to celebrate both her ardor and her physical enjoyment. Robert enters the festive, flirtatious moment by recalling the “lady who had subsisted upon nougat during the entire—,” and is checked only by Edna's blushing discomfort.

All such instances of candor unsettle Mrs. Pontellier.¹⁶ This strange world, with its languorous climate and frankly sensuous habits, is a world where “normal,” “respectable” women openly vaunt pleasures that are unfamiliar to Edna Pontellier. She is fascinated, stimulated, eventually profoundly aroused. And although she is bewildered by these new sensations, once having been touched by them, she becomes unwilling to pull away. Much of the novel, theft, is concerned with Edna's quest for a viable and acceptable mode of owning and expressing her sexuality: first by locating the defining boundaries for these feelings and thus being able to define and name what she feels inside herself; second by finding some acceptable social construct which will permit her to enact what she feels in the outside world and to make an appropriate, vital, and affirming connection between the “me” and the “not-me.”¹⁷

Edna's easiest option is “collusion,” to become a “mother-woman”; however, she rejects this role violently because Of the displacements and forfeitures that it would impose. If, like Adele, she were willing to disguise her erotic drives in the mantle of “motherhood,” she might indulge the many delights of the body as Adele patently does. However, such a capitulation would not allow her really to possess her own feelings—nor even to talk about them directly or explicitly. It would maim the “self,” not unify and affirm it: like Adele, Edna would be obliged to displace all of her sexual discourse into prattle about “the children” or her (pregnant) “condition,” fettering her carnal desires to the production of babies; and part of what was really inside (that is, her sexual drive) would have been displaced on to something outside (society's construction of female appetite as essentially “maternal”). In the process, the authority and integrity of her identity would have been compromised, and instead of making contact with the outside world, she would be merged into and controlled by it. Edna loves her children and is happy to be a mother; however, she refuses to define her sexuality in terms of them.¹⁸

Thus Edna's rejection of this emotional mutilation lies behind the novel's many tortured examinations of her relationship to the children and informs such assertions as: “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” (p. 67). Edna's children make very few actual demands upon her time or energy (and she has all the “childcare” one might desire). Thus the emphatic quality of her renunciation addresses not a real burden, but the internalized social directive. Renouncing what she can clearly recognize as an unacceptable violation of her emotional integrity is Edna's most confident step toward freedom.

She shrugs away from marriage for many of the same reasons, declaring that she will “never again belong to another than herself” (p. 100). The problem is neither immediate nor personal: it is not Leonce, per se, that Edna repudiates, but the warped forms of intimacy that he represents.¹⁹ Like Adele, Leonce is acquainted with no discourse off eminine sexuality other than some variant on the language of “motherhood.” This conflation is revealed in the first intimate scene between Leonce and Edna (Chapter 3). Leonce has returned from an evening of cardplaying, jolly at having won a little money—“in excellent humor … high spirits, and very talkative” (p. 23). To be sure, he does not “court” his wife; yet he is scarcely brutal or coarse, and his gossipy, somewhat preoccupied manner as he empties his pockets might be that of any long-married man. Indeed, it is Edna's unapproachable manner that disrupts the potential harmony of the moment. There is nothing peculiar about the “action” of this scenario, nor is it difficult to read the subtext: Leonce would like to conclude his pleasant evening with a sexual encounter; his wife is not interested.

The real oddity has to do with language. Although the couple falls into a kind of argument over their differing inclinations, sex itself is never mentioned. Instead, when Leonce chooses to rebuke his wife (presumably for her passional indifference to him), he employs a vernacular of “motherhood” to do so. “He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it?” (p. 24). With this alienated discourse, neither party can talk about the real source of unhappiness, and sexual harmony within the marriage is threatened or compromised. Leonce at least has “acceptable” alternatives (for example, we should probably not suppose that he is celibate during his long absences from home). Edna has none—not even the satisfaction of being able to define the exact nature of her despondency.²⁰

She generally shuns the effort to assert herself, and to a remarkable degree she has detached herself from language altogether. As Joseph R. Urgo has observed, “For the first six chapters of the novel, she says all of four sentences.”²¹ Moreover, although she has lived among the Creoles for many years, “she understood French imperfectly unless directly addressed” (p. 56). On this occasion, then, it is not surprising that she “said nothing and refused to answer her husband when he questioned her” (p. 24). This is her customary reaction. Although Chopin's narrator refrains from moralizing about Edna's predicament, she does give the reader information from which it is possible to extrapolate Mrs. Pontellier's reason.s for avoiding speech.

After her minor disagreement with Leonce, Edna begins to weep: “She could not have told why she was crying. … An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her conscious, filled her whole being with a vague anguish” (pp. 24-25). At the most literal level, Edna is absolutely unable to “tell” why she is crying: her deepest passions have no “true” name. Society has given them only false names, like “maternity”; and such a discourse of feminine sexuality both distorts a woman's feelings and compromises her authority over them. Thus Edna's recoil.from language—her refusal to comply with this misrepresentation—is a primitive effort to retain control over her “self.”

Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

(p. 32)

She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.

(pp. 66-67)

Nor is it surprising that Edna has always been deeply susceptible to fantasies—to her inward “dreams” of the cavalry officer, of the engaged young man from a neighboring plantation, of the “great tragedian.” A person can and does entirely possess the products of his or her own imagination because (like the passions which infuse them) they are a part of the self. Thus falling into fantasy becomes another way by which Edna seeks to maintain the integrity of self.

In some primitive way, silence also is Edna's only appropriate reaction to society's way of defining female sexuality: for if women were imagined to have no sexual feelings, not to speak would (ironically) be the way to “communicate” this absence. Yet not to speak has an annihilating consequence: it is, in the end, not to be—not to have social reality. One can never affirm “self” merely through silence and fantasy—can never forge that vital connection between the “me” and the “notme” that validates identity. (Even the “fantasy” of art is embedded in an act of communication between the “me” and the “not-me?”) A “self can mature only if one strives to articulate emotions; learning to name one's feelings is an integral component of learning the extent and nature of one's feelings, and what is undescribed may remain Sways “indescribable”—even to oneself—“vague” and even “unfamiliar.” Moreover, without some authentic, responsive reaction from another, no one can escape the kind of solitude that increasingly oppresses Edna during the summer of her twenty-ninth year.²²

Indeed, the dispassionate tone of Chopin's novel may be related to the complexity of Edna's quest, for Edna cannot “solve” her problem without an extraordinary feat of creativity. She must discover not merely a new vernacular with which to name her feelings—not merely a new form of plot that is capable of containing them—but also an “audience” that both comprehends and esteems the story she might ultimately tell. Thus the true subject of The Awakening may be less the particular dilemma of Mrs. Pontellier than the larger problems of female narrative that it reflects; and if Edna's poignant fate is in part a reflection of her own habits, it is also, in equal part, a measure of society's failure to allow its women a language of their own.

Most immediately personal is Edna's enchantment with forms of “communication” that do not require words. She is entranced by the ocean because its “language” neither compromises nor distorts her most intimate passions. Yet it cannot allow her to assert and confirm “self”; for ironically, like society, the sea requires an immersion of “self” (and this is, perhaps, the reason Edna has feared the water for so long).

Seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

(p. 32)

Music, also seems to have “spoken” to Edna, most often conjuring primly conventional emotional “pictures” in her mind. However, as soon as she stirs from her sensual torpor and discards the prim and the conventional, music begins to conjure something more violently demanding: “no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions themselves were aroused with her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body” (p. 45). Without the customary “pictures” to contain them, these emotions clamor for expression with an intensity that is all but unbearable.

It is troubling that the narrative formulations to which Edna is habitually drawn are so formulaic, that they decline to attempt some model of feminine initiative or some assertion of, explicitly feminine passion. She configures her outing with Robert as “Sleeping Beauty” (“‘How many years have I slept?’ she inquired” [p. 57]). Her dinner-table story is passive—the romance of a woman who was carried off “by her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back” (p. 90). And if, as Sandra Gilbert has argued, Edna presides over a “Swinburnian Last Supper” just before her death, this moment when the “old ennui” and “hopelessness” overtake her once again must be read not as a new birth of Venus, but as a poignant prefiguration of her return to that sea whence she came (p. 109).²³

Yet troubling as Edna's habits of mind may be, Chopin also makes it clear that it would have taken more than daring ingenuity to alter her situation. The demand for women's rights alarmed sexual theorists, who construed all changes in the accepted paradigm as portents of anarchy:

“The tendency of our generation [is] to break up old associations, and to be emancipated from the beliefs of our fathers. … This feeling crops out in publicly ridiculing marriage, dwelling on its evils … demanding ‘women's rights.’”

Their response was to reaffirm the conventional life-story by insisting that women's dissatisfactions could be readily dismissed as nothing but an evidence of their innate inferiority.

“In medical colleges, in medical books, in medical practice, woman is recognized as having a peculiar organization, requiring the most careful and gentle treatment. … Her bodily powers are not able to endure like those of the other sex.”²⁴

When Leonce begins to discern the differences in Edna's manner and takes his concerns to Dr. Mandelet, their conversation is uncannily similar to these nineteenth-century discussions of woman's nature.

“She's odd, she's not like herself. I can't make her out … She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women.” …

“Woman, my dear friend,” [the Doctor responds,] “is a very peculiar and delicate organism—a sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar. … Most women are moody and whimsical.”

(pp. 85-86)

It would take invention and resolution indeed to counter such a confident weight of received opinion—more than most women (most people) possess.

If the power of Edna's narrative ability is insufficient to retaliate against such fettering force, her primary choice of “audience” merely recapitulates her other problems. Instead of perusing Robert's true nature, she fancies him to be the lover of her dreams. She does not heed the conventions within which their flirtation begins; instead (as Addle observes), she makes “the unfortunate blunder of taking [him] seriously” (p. 35). Nor does she very much attend to Robert's conversation; for although he has spoken enthusiastically of going to Mexico, his untimely departure catches her entirely by surprise. Thus the exact nature of their intimacy is always best for Edna when it must be inferred (because it has not been put into words):

[Robert] seated himself again and rolled a cigarette, which he smoked in silence. Neither did Mrs. Pontellier speak. No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire.

(p. 49)

Neither the reader nor Edna herself can know whose “desire” has been felt nor precisely what the object of this “desire” might be. However, the (almost overtly ironic) use of “pregnant” suggests that it is Edna, and not Robert, who has suffused this moment with unique intensity—and, most important, that she has not yet escaped all of those conventional constructions of female sexuality that bind it to maternity.

Mlle. Reisz and Alcee Arobin (characters in Edna's nascent narrafives and audiences for them) both hold out the possibility that Edna might resolve her dilemma by usurping the prerogatives of men. Yet each offers a “solution” that would constrain Edna to relinquish some significant and valued portion of herself.

Ivy Schweitzer has observed that Mlle. Reisz, “a musician and composer, represents one extreme possibility; she exemplifies the artist with ‘… The soul that dares and defies’ conventionality, transgresses boundaries, and transcends gender.”²⁵ Mlle. Reisz also holds out the independence that men can achieve in a career. Yet Edna chooses not to follow this avenue; and Mlle. Reisz's admonition that the artist “must possess the courageous soul” (p. 83) may have been less of a deterrent than a statement about the example of that lady's own life. Fulfillment through aesthetic creativity appears to offer authontic expression to only one portion of the self. Mlle. Reisz “had quarreled with almost everyone, owing to a temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample upon the rights of others”; having no sensuous charm or aesthetic allure (“a homely woman with a small weazened face and body and eyes that glowed” [p. 44]), she presents a sad and sorry prospect of some future Edna-as-successful-artist. What woman seeking sexual fulfillment would willing follow the pathway to such a forfeiture of feminine sensuous pleasure as this?

Arobin offers the opposite. Something simpler, but equally wounding. Lust. Sex divorced from all other feelings. The expression of that raw libido that was presumed to be part of men's nature (as “virility”), but categorically denied as a component of the normal female. Yet Edna finds that limiting sexuality to this form of expression imposes a distortion fully as destructive as society's construction of “maternity.”

Paobin pursues Edna by pretending that casual sexuality is some fuller, more “sincere” emotion (he is careful never to mention love). And although his practiced style invites “easy confidence,” it is also filled with “effrontery” (p. 96)—with the desire to treat her as no more than a “beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun” (p. 90). His manher could seem “so genuine that it often deceived even himself”; yet “in her cooler, quieter moments,” Edna recognizes that it would be “absurd” to take him seriously (p. 98). This form of eroticism explicitly excludes the integral complexity of Edna's unique “self”: she might be anyone, any “sleek animal waking up in the sun,” any woman whose “latent sensuality [would unfold] under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, torrid sensitive blossom” (p. 126). Thus the aftermath of their consummation is not an affirmation of identity for Edna, but another form of maiming—a cascade of simple sentences in largely parallel form to configure alienation and disintegration—the novel's shortest, most mutilated chapter. Less than half a page. These lay bare the harsh realities of existence, “beauty and brutality,” and conclude with nothing but a “dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her” (p. 104).

By the time Robert returns, Edna has all but exhausted the limited possibilities of her world; and if her first preference is once again to construe him as dream-like—“for he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico” (p. 124)—she has gained the courage to speak forbidden discourse in the hope of inventing a new kind of narrative. “I suppose this is what you would call unwomanly,” she begins, “but I have got into a habit of expressing myself. It doesn't matter to me, and you may think me unwomanly if you like” (p. 127). They return to her little house, and when Robert seems to doze in a chair, she rewrites the sleeping beauty story by reversing their roles and awakening him with a kiss, “a soft, cool, delicate kiss, whose voluptuous sting penetrated his whole being. … She put her hand up to his face and pressed his cheek against her own. The action was full of love and tenderness” (pp. 128-29).

Reality is the realm into which Edna would lead Robert: a complex kingdom of sensuous freedom commingled with “love and tenderness,” a place where man and woman awaken each other to share the “beauty and brutality” of life together in mutual affirmation. Each owning sexual appetite; both sharing the stem burdens of brute passion.

Edna is shocked, then, to discover Robert continuing to speak a language of “dreams”: “I lost my senses. I forgot everything but a wild dream of your some way becoming my wife” (p. 129). Even worse, Robert's “dream” retains the confining accounterments of the narrative Edna has journeyed so far to escape. She wants a new paradigm; he merely wants to rearrange the actors of the old one, and Edna firmly rejects his falsifying, custom-bound notions: “You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things. … I give myself where I choose” (p. 129). When Robert responds with perplexity to this new assertion of autonomy, Edna is offered the opportunity to show him what fortitude might mean.

Female sexuality had been falsified by the construct of “maternity”; however, there was one barbarous component of femininity, one consequence of feminine sexuality, that even the mother-woman could never evade.

In the nineteenth century, with its still-primitive obstetrical practices and its high child-mortality rates, she was expected to face severe bodily pain, disease, and death—and still serve as the emotional support and strength of her family. As the eminent Philadelphia neurologist S. Weir Mitchell wrote in the 1880s, “We may be sure that our daughters will be more likely to have to face at some time the grim question of pain than the lads who grow up beside them. … To most women … there comes a time when pain is a grim presence in their lives.”²⁶

Having confronted the harsh “masculine” fact of unmitigated sexual desire, Edna entreats Robert to comprehend the inescapable pain and danger of the “feminine” by acknowledging the reality of childbirth. Having risked the scorn of being judged “unwomanly” by speaking her feelings and by awakening Robert with an act of love and passion conjoined, she asks him to demonstrate comparable courage. He, too, must leave dreams and half-truths behind, must comprehend the full complexity of her experience—both the brutality and the beauty—if he is to share in the creation of this new narrative of ardent devotion. “Wait,” she implores, as she leaves to attend Adele; “I shall come back” (p. 130).

After the delivery, Edna's still-fragile emergent self is shaken. In response to Dr. Mandelet queries, she once again shrugs away from language: “I don't feel moved to speak of things that trouble me.” Her desires continue to trail a fairy-tale hope of absolute happiness: “I don't want anything but my own way” (p. 132). Still her anticipated reunion with Robert fortifies her. She foresees the opportunity to resume their love-making: and she believes there will a “time to think of everything (p 133) on the morning to follow, a chance to fashion the story of their life together. However, she has refused to consider his weakness and his fondness for illusions. Thus she is unprepared for the letter she finds: “I love you. Good-by—because I love you” (p. 134). In the end, Edna has discovered no partner/audience with whom to construct her new naftative, and she cannot concoct one in solitude.

Nonetheless, she concludes with a narrative gesture of sorts—a concatenation of the parlance of “maternity.” Perhaps it is a tale of the son, Icarus, defeated by overweening ambition: “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (p. 136). Perhaps a tale of babies: “Naked in the open air … she felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (p. 136). Most likely, it is a tragic inversion of the birth of Venus: “The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace (p. 136).

So Edna has failed. Or rather, being a woman with some weaknesses and no extraordinary strengths, Edna has chosen the only alternative she could imagine to the ravaging social arrangements of her day. (Only seven years earlier, “The Yellow Wallpaper” had attracted wide attention to the same stifling, potentially annihilating constructions of “femininity.”) However, we must not overlook the fact that if her heroine faltered, Kate Chopin fashioned a splendid success. The Awakening is the new narrative that Mrs. Pontellier was unable to create: not (it is true) a story of female affirmation, but rather an excruciatingly exact dissection of the ways in which society distorts a woman's true nature. The ruthless contemporary reviews leave no doubt that Kate Chopin had invented a powerful (and thus threatening) discourse for feminine sexuality. And although the novel was forced to languish (Like yet another “sleeping beauty”) largely unread for three quarters of a century, the current respect it enjoys is a belated affirmation of Kate Chopin's SUCCESS.

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Nancy A. Walker (New York: St. Martin's, 1993) p. 19. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

2. Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in American from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), P.250.

3. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1875), 162-63. We might be tempted to suppose that this attitude was in some essential way “Puritanical.” However, since Carl Degler makes it clear that these explicit notions of women as totally devoid of passion entered American culture rather late, it is important to understand the distinction between the two attitudes. Puritans believed that women possessed sexual inclinations, but that these were a remnant of humankind's innate depravity. “Cases of adultery in 18th-century America also reveal the acceptance of the idea that women's sexuality could be strong,” Degler points out, and “advice books of the early 19th century could also be quite explicit in describing women's sexual anatomy” (Degler, pp. 251-52). The late nineteenth-century theorists believed that women did not possess passion at all. In his book on prostition, Acton focuses entirely upon the urgency of the male's sexual desire and the absolute necessity of providing an “outlet” for it. William Acton, Prostitution, ed. Peter Fryer (New York: Praeger, 1968), pp. 198ff.

4. In depicting Edna's repressive background, Chopin identifies this Presbyterianism with Edna's suppression of overt, real-life sexuality. “During one period of my life,” Edna tells Adele, “religion took a firm hold upon me; after I was twelve and until—until—why, I suppose until now, though I never though much about it—just driven along by habit” (p. 35). It is significant that the age Edna mentions is both the age at which girls begin to mature sexually and the age at which Carol Gilligan has found that many women “lose their voice.” Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 12ff. Acton's views were not universally accepted, however. The aspiring middle and upper classes of urban areas were more inclined than others to accept his paradigm. See Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic, 1984), pp. 87-177.

5. William Hailer, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 121.

6. Lois A. Boyd, “Shall Women Speak?” The Journal of Presbyterian History 56 (1978), 281-94. See also Lois A. Boyd and Douglas Brackenridge, Presbyterian Women in America (Westport: Greenwood, 1983): “During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the inherent conservatism of the Presbyterian church caused social customs and traditions to be modified only slowly and not without tension and turmoil” (p. 108).

7. Boyd, “Shall Women Speak?” p. 287, quoting from the proceedings of the case against Isaac McBride See in December 1876.

8. Boyd, “Shall Women Speak?” p. 291.

9. Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 42-43.

10. Lang, P. 43.

11. Acton's discussion of “nymphomania” reveals the era's obsessive need to control women's sexuality whenever it might be manifested—and especially to surpress any inclination toward masturbation (On Organs, 162-63). It is difficult to understand why anyone would suppose masturbation to present a problem in the “normal” woman (or girl) if a complete absence of sexuality is the “natural” condition for females. This entire discussion is interesting because it reveals the inherent confusions and contradictions of Acton's theories (and perhaps the contrary data provided by his actual medical practice).

12. Smith-Rosenberg's description of the treatment of “hysteria” gives a chillingly graphic account of society's need to subdue sexuality in women. See Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), pp. 206-7, 211. Society's conviction that the irrational elements in women's nature (including her sexuality) must be controlled is everywhere evident in the contemporary discussions that Smith-Rosenberg cites. However, an even more urgent anxiety can be found (almost never entirely articulated)—namely, that if women really expressed sexual desire and achieved sexual pleasure, their demands might exceed the capacity of the relevant males to satisfy them.

13. Perhaps it is not surprising that during this extremely oppressive period, there was an equally extreme reaction; see Louis J. Kern, “Stamping Out the ‘Brutality of the He’: Sexual Ideology and the Masculine Ideal in the Literature of Victorian Sex Radicals,” ATQ 5 (1991), 225-39. Yet the normative impact of the sex-radicals was negligible by comparison with the prudish impact of people like Comstock and Acton.

14. Acton, On Organs, pp. 123, 138, 164. Nancy Chodorow's observations concerning the consequences of this particular social construction of the “feminine” are pertinent to Chopin's novel; she ties no small portion of women's unhappiness to the fact that they are forced to “live through their children.” Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), p. 44.

15. It is interesting that the mores of this code did not make the woman's sexual drive some part of her husband's “property.” Even Acton is clear that men should not engage in marital excesses and that a wife's reasonable reticence should be respected; this was one reason for his defense of legalized prostitution. Patricia Yeager discusses notions of property and ownership in this novel, tying them to linguistic problems. See Yeager, “A Language Which Nobody Understood,” in Walker, esp. pp. 282ff.

16. “[She would never] forget the shock with which she heard Madame Ratignolle relating to old Monsieur Farival the harrowing story of one of her accouchements, withholding no intimate detail. … A book had gone the rounds of the pension. When it came her turn to read it, she did so with profound astonishment. She felt moved to read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so. … It was openly criticized and freely discussed at table” (p. 28).

17. See R. D. Laing, Self and Others (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 17-53. Laing's analysis of “false-naming” illuminates how very little in Edna's life experience has facilitated the development of an authentic, socially confirmed sense of self.

18. Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an essay on this novel, “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening” (repr. in Walker). What I am attempting here is not a fundamentally different reading of this novel (which still seems to me to present the tragic plight of a woman whose “identity” is never forged into a coherent, viable “self”), but a reading that traces the social or cultural origins of Edna's problem. In an interesting discussion of Edna's reading of Emerson, Virginia Kouisdis discusses Edna's determination to achieve a “unified self” from a somewhat different critical perspective: see Kouisdis, “Prison into Prism: Emerson's ‘Many-Colored Lenses’ and the Woman Writer of Early Modernism,” in The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul, ed. Daniel Peck (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 115-34.

19. Leonce is a literal-minded, rather dull man—too preoccupied with his business and too fond of his material possessions. Nonetheless, he is scarcely a tyrant; and if he regards Edna with an unduly proprietary air, he at least cares enough about her to seek help from Dr. Mandelet when their relationship is clearly foundering. A great many critics have focused upon his tendency to regard Edna as a piece of property. John Carlos Rowe's “The Economics of the Body in Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” in Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis, Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1992), 117-42, is one of the most arresting and interesting of these. Rowe asks: “What does it mean to have a body? For Edna, and for Mme. Ratignolle, it is always someone else who possesses your body, and such ‘possession’ already signifies something other than your body: a ‘wife,’ a ‘lover,’ a white sunshade, a sunbonnet, children, heirs. In short, the body is exchangeable for something else, has been transformed into something else, has entered an economy in which it can be so changed” (p. 120).

20. Although Chopin's focus is on Edna, she allows the reader to see that Leonce is also maimed by this system; and in his case, too, the problem is one of distorted language. Presumably, he knows at least some of what he wants (more enthusiastic sexual response from his wife); however, he is prohibited from asserting his desires directly because no “decent” or “sensitive” husband would make explicit sexual demands of his wife (who presumably only tolerates his advances because she has an interest in bearing children). Leonce's dilemma has nothing at all to do with children; however, a discourse of “mothering” is all he is allowed if he wants to voice his disappointment. “It would have been a difficult matter for Mr. Pontellier to define to his own satisfaction or any one else's wherein his wife failed in her duty toward their children. It was something which he felt rather than perceived, and he never voiced the feeling without subsequent regret and ample atonement” (p. 26). The sad impasse between the couple is developed most fully in Chapter 11.

21. Joseph R. Urgo, “A Prologue to Rebellion: The Awakening and the Habit of Self-Expression,” SLQ 20 (1987/88), 23.

22. Dale M. Bauer and Andrew M. Lakritz present an excellent discussion of the social and cultural dialogues whose presence and power inform this novel. They recognize the quasi-medical terminology that lies at the root of the problem, although they do not trace its origins. “The Awakening and the Woman Question,” in Bernard Koloski, ed., Approches to Teaching Chopin's The Awakening (New York: Modern Language Association, 1988), pp. 47-52.

23. Sandra M. Gilbert, “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire,” KR 5 (Summer 1983), 44.

24. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper, 1976). pp. 206, 200, quoting John Todd, Woman's Rights (Boston: Lee and Shephard, 1867) and John Todd, Serpents in the Dove's Nest (Boston: Lee and Shephard. 1867).

25. Ivy Schweitzer, “Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Selt-Possession in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, “Boundary 2 17 1990), 172.

26. Smith-Rosenberg, p. 199.