SOURCE: Radcliff, Douglas. “Literature of Deliverance: Images of Nature in The Awakening.” Southern Studies 1, no. 2 (summer 1990): 127-47.

[In the following essay, Radcliff-Umstead explores the sociopolitical aspects of The Awakening as illustrated by Chopin's nature imagery.]

Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of “literature of images” where description of nature relates to and advances the narrative's major themes and characterizations. The American novel shares with the works of authors like Chateaubriand, Balzac, Flaubert and Charlotte Bronte a similar emphasis on natural description as a primary instrument to express fundamental psychological and social conflicts.¹ As a female author portraying the revolt of her heroine against a restrictive society, Chopin employs nature to illustrate the entrapment of women under patriarchy and their battle to achieve deliverance.² Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of The Awakening, seeks to liberate herself from the traditional womanly roles of wife, mother or lover in order to experience an unbounded fullness of being. Rather than being a pictorial, decorative element, nature description in Chopin's novel is intrinsic to the development of plot, motives and point of view. Hers is a technique of focalization where images of nature convey the actual scene as physically viewed by certain characters and as mentally perceived by those same actors in the narrative. Behind the psychological portrait of the heroine in revolt against genteel bondage is a sociopolitical dimension to be represented in those focalizing natural descriptions. The goal of this essay will be to study the function of images of nature in The Awakening so as to explore the narrative's semiotic complexities.

Chopin builds the novel on the opposition between interiors and the exterior where the heroine struggles to escape an imprisoning reality. Doors, real or metaphorical, are always shutting to confine Edna (Toth, “Feminist Criticism,” 246). The protagonist comes to discover the Otherness of both the physical and social worlds apart from an inner self of which she was scarcely conscious before the start of the novel's events.³ Her spiritual awakening consists of gaining insight into a disquieting truth in her being while she recognizes in outer nature a sympathetic (although troubling) correspondence with her newly stirred emotions. There also arises an opposition in the cultural distance between Edna's Kentucky Presbyterian background and the values of the Louisiana Creole community where the central character is an uneasy member as a result of her six-year marriage to the New Orleans broker Léonce Pontellier. That Creole society founds itself on racism (the labor of quadroons and “darkies” as children's nurses, cooks, maids, and servant-boys) and sexism, reducing adult females to the status of “mother-women.” While Chopin records the racist situation without criticizing it, she makes of her novel a frontal assault on the male domination of women. Although Edna enjoys general acceptance and even sympathy among the Creoles, she considers herself a psychological and linguistic outsider in their Francophone company. As an anthropologist has analyzed the paradox of culture (Hall 87), the heroine is caught between her present status in a social system with its various demands (Tuesdays at-home for receptions, an air of solicitude in managing a household) and her past experience of Protestant self-reliance on a Kentucky horse farm and a Mississippi plantation. Edna would have to combat an image of the delicate and obedient Southern lady that had its origins in the rhetoric supporting slavery during the antebellum period when writers like George Fitzhugh upheld a social hierarchy where white women existed between white masters and slaves. According to Fitzhugh, “[A husband] ceases to love his wife when she becomes masculine or rebellious.”⁴ While conforming to the mores of Creole society does bring a sense of psychological security, the heroine rejects the spiritual desiccation caused by complying with custom, and she seeks to assert independence at the cost of being on the outside.

Even when the Creoles leave New Orleans for their summer vacations on Grand Isle (the setting at the novel's opening), they reproduce their urban environment there to make of the beach world a scene of social integration. Even amidst the apparently unlimited horizon and spaciousness of the seashore retreat, there predominates an impression of narrowness as vacationers must observe “les convenances.” Though living in cottages, the Creoles are connected to each other by narrow bridges linking the buildings together. They also dine at a common table where they practice their ceremonious rituals to complete their self-contained world. A spirit of remoteness also prevails on Grand Isle, a place so out of time that Sunday newspapers arrive late from town. But since the island stands between the restrictions of the city and the boundlessness of the sea, this enchanting setting on the Gulf of Mexico does stir in the protagonist feelings of revolt that no appeal to social convention will ever suppress. There by the sea Edna awakens for the first time to the contradiction between the outward demand for conformity and the inner desire to challenge convention: “the dual life—the outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions” (277). The restless waves of the gulf illustrate the conflicting character of landscape in the novel that correspond to the currents of unresolved emotions in the heroine's heart.

Edna's movement toward self-realization becomes evident on a Sunday excursion to the small island Chênière Caminada in the company of her young admirer Robert Lebrun. One of the customs of Creole society that always astonishes the protagonist with her Calvinist prudery is the chaste gallantry between married women and younger single males. As long as those relationships are conducted within the bounds of New Orleans propriety, no husband objects to the innocent attentions paid to his wife. But Chopin's novel studies exactly the psychological need to transcend arbitrary limits and the role that nature plays in promoting the escape from confining conditions. The passage by water to Chênière Caminada is a rite of liberation: “Sailing across the bay …, Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast” (299). As the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard demonstrates in his text Water and Dreams, the principle of water is an ambivalent source of renewed life and menacing death. For freedom at sea also bears with it the danger of a bewildering sense of being lost, of drifting aimlessly. Here the seascape shows life's duality. The protagonist's break from a past of bondage to institutions and customs occurs when she hastily departs from the suffocating interior atmosphere of morning mass at the island's parish church. Society and the church are here fused to stifle genuine feelings of rebelliousness. Edna must flee the company of worshipers like the symbolic “lady in black” forever holding her velvet prayer-book in an attitude of deathlike mourning usually associated with the woman's closely following after two insouciant young lovers as if to suggest Thanatos in pursuit of Eros (Wolff 454). The hours that Edna and Robert spend wandering the Chênière Caminada and enjoying the hospitality of a humble cottage renew the pastoral tradition of the locus amoenus: the pleasant shelter of seeming eternal peacefulness (Curtius 195). But instead of suspending the novel's principal action, this pastoral interlude advances the heroine's sensual transformation. Although the landscape initially appeared caught in an unchanging sameness, upon Edna's “awakening” from slumber in the white purity of Madame Antoine's cottage she sees the island as if turned into a land of enchantment. Significantly the sheets of the white bed in Madame Antoine's rustic cabin are made fragrant by laurel, sacred to Apollo in this novel whose heroine will briefly be elevated in the brilliance of a fatal dawn to a state resembling that of a pagan goddess. The opposition between inner and outer vanishes magically (but only momentarily) in this bucolic episode where nature gently pervades the protective and nourishing shelter.

Upon awakening the protagonist brings to mind Sleeping Beauty having rested for a century in the guard of a faithful knight. For here Robert Lebrun, unlike Edna's husband, can share the radiance of the country setting because of his sensitive character. Whereas Léonce Pontellier thinks of land as a commodity to be exchanged for profit or to stand as a sign of material success, young Lebrun joins the heroine in appreciating the wondrousness of the island. While Edna earlier felt compelled to run from the artificially instituted church services, here she celebrates a natural mass by taking bread and wine (Casale 79). Going outside the cottage, the protagonist plucks an orange that she throws to Robert in a rite that leads to his illumination as he comes to her under the orange tree. The ambrosial fruit with its sweet fragrance and pungent taste is part of a moment of glowing light when nature calls Edna and Robert to the dream of a romantic union that will never be realized. In what began as a flight across a long line of gray, weather-beaten houses on a “low, drowsy island” (301) culminates in a meeting of souls during the sun's resplendent descent:

It was very pleasant to stay there under the orange trees, while the sun dipped lower and lower, turning the western sky to flaming copper and gold. The shadows lengthened and crept out like stealthy, grotesque monsters across the grass.

(304)

Stylistically the rather abstract “It was” construction serves to veil the slow movement of time and the advance of luminosity (Treichler 241). But with the coming of nocturnal shadows the reader of this landscape grows aware of a possible menace of bizarre monsters letting loose previously repressed and socially forbidden emotions. For Edna life itself will be the ultimate monster of beauty and brutality. The wondrous magic of the pastoral moment will pass to the fairytale nightmare of illicit and finally fatal romance. Reading an episode such as the outing to Chênière Caminada is never an isolated act since Chopin will later have Edna refer to Madame Antoine's tale of pirates on the Baratarian Islands. The excursion will forever stay with Edna, not only as a promise of love to be fulfilled but also as a vision of lovers lost sailing among those Baratarian Islands surrounded by treacherous currents.

Gardens also serve in this narrative as miniature examples of the locus amoenus, areas that can mediate between inside and outside, between city and country. The Lebrun townhouse on Chartres Street at first appears prison-like due to the iron bars before the front door and lower windows, but a side gate opens into a garden enclosed by a high fence. Even in late autumn the Lebrun garden remains a welcoming enclave with its civilized furnishings of wicker chairs, chaise lounge and table for refreshments in the afternoon. The immured garden is a zone of protection and repose. Although Edna ordinarily regards the Pontellier home as a place of alienation, her husband's most conspicuous possession, at certain moments when the other members of her family are away, she delights in strolling the damp garden walks and attending to trimming the plants: “The garden smelled so good and looked so pretty in the afternoon sunlight” (339). Fragrance and glowing light stimulate in her the vibrant sensations of a being first awakening to the earth's beauty. In this novel of emancipation the protagonist eventually assumes that attitude of sensuous availability to the outer world (instead of passive receptivity) that Chopin's contemporary André Gide called “disponibilité” in his poetic tract Les Nourritures Terrestres. But because the house on Esplanade Street seems to be a “forbidden temple” (352) erected in Léonce's idolatry of financial prosperity, Edna takes advantage of her husband's prolonged absence on a business trip to New York to rent a small dwelling in the immediate neighborhood as a refuge from her social obligations. Ironically the heroine never comes to know in the tiny garden of her own home the ecstatic promise of a passionate rapport with Robert that she at last experiences by a chance meeting with him at a modest suburban garden restaurant:

… a small leafy corner, with a few green tables under the orange trees. An old cat slept all day on the stone step in the sun, and an old mulatresse slept her idle hours away in her chair at the open window, till some one happened to knock on one of the green tables.

(373)

Many of the elements of the episode at Madame Antoine's cottage are present here: orange trees, an atmosphere of slumber, checkered sunlight filtering through quivering leaves. Here as elsewhere in the novel the setting responds to Edna's tremendous need for nourishment and rest.⁵ Both the cat and the rustic cook are somnolent guardians of this suburban oasis midway between the city and the country. Whereas other gardens have permitted Edna the privilege of communicating with her innermost thoughts, the restaurant garden offers her the opportunity for intimate directness with her beloved Robert to clear away the tensions caused by his abrupt departure during the summer at Grand Isle for a commercial venture in Mexico. The orange trees become emblematic of the forbidden love that they at last are about to acknowledge to each other. While one's private garden may be a site for establishing control over the physical world through horticultural labors, this garden restaurant in a public but relatively secluded location permits Edna and Robert to achieve briefly a loving closeness through the understanding that they finally reach. The refreshing enclosure of gardens verdant with hope makes possible the transparent immediacy of formerly repressed sentiments.⁶

Gardens and open fields both display the flowers whose bright colors and sweet fragrances arouse Edna to an awareness of her hidden self. Borders of yellow camomile mark the limit between the vacationers' cottages on Grand Isle and the seashore as if to indicate the dividing point between urban culture and the endless gulf. The heroine frequently picks flowers to decorate the interior of her home with their beauty, a blossoming loveliness with which she can be identified in her awakening and opening to new, powerful sensations.⁷ Edna's closest female friend, the Creole Adèle Ratignolle, in the ebullient fullness of her role as a traditional mother-woman expecting still another baby, resembles the great, sweet roses adorning the hearth of her salon. Red and yellow roses also embellish the twenty-ninth birthday party that the heroine celebrates on the eve of her moving away from her husband's house. On that festive occasion a female guest crowns Robert's younger brother Victor with a garland of those roses as if he were Eros incarnate until Edna removes the wreath and flings it away:

There was a graven image of Desire
Painted with red blood on a ground of gold.

(357)

The crown of victory truly belongs to the protagonist, not to any male pretender among her guests.

Of all the flowers mentioned in the novel the one most closely associated with the heroine is jessamine with its seductive fragrance that becomes the emblem of her “sensual development” (Dyer 192). Sprays of jessamine grow on the trellis by the front verandah of her townhouse for Edna to inhale the perfume and thrust the blossoms into the bosom of her white morning gown. That same, heavy fragrance predominates at the birthday party, engulfing the dining room through open windows. Shortly after the celebration the roué Alcée Arobin, soon to be the heroine's adulterous lover, offers her a sprig of jessamine that she refuses in continuing hesitation before erotic involvement. But Arobin fully recognizes how Edna is opening to sexual fulfillment: “He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirement like a torpid, torrid sensitive blossom” (373). For flowers symbolize in ambivalent fashion not only sensual awakening but also the protagonist's vulnerability to temptation that could compromise and destroy her. The polysemic role of flowers is evident within two pages of the text at the end of Chapter 17 and the start of the following chapter. As Edna gazes out at the garden of her home one bewitching night, she beholds:

… 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.

(318)

Amidst the flowers the heroine is becoming an “I” independent of her husband or any other man. Out in the flowering garden she might elude the prison of her domestic life (White 103). But also here emphasis falls on the entanglement of the plant life that threatens to endanger her in a new existence. On the very morning that Edna plucks the jessamine, a sense of alienation passes over her:

The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic.

(319)

Chopin's narrative art consists in recapturing all the conflictual nature of the protagonist's being torn between the hope of enriching but menacingly entangling vital relationships. Like flowers, Edna possesses alluring beauty but also a fragility of being.

One of the few persons who perceived the heroine's vulnerability and encouraged her in facing herself and society is the often irascible pianist Mlle Reisz. When Edna informed the musician of her intentions to become a painter, Mlle Reisz cautioned her, “… to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul” (330). The flower that is associated with the pianist is violets, that she wears in a bunch on the side of her head. One critic finds violets to be emblematic of “rites of protection” since artists must be solitary creatures defending their absolute and original gifts from a Philistine world (Dyer 192). But Chopin also wishes to stress the shabbiness of the pianist's willful retreat from company by noting that the violets are artificial and well-worn. Not until Edna sends Mlle Reisz a fresh bunch of violets with black lace trimming for the birthday party does the lonely artist yield ever so slightly from her spiritual isolationism. In her small apartment the pianist tries to overcome the drabness of her private life by filling her windowframe with pots of rose geraniums. It is there by that window, when the apartment's tenant is away, that Edna is occupied with picking dry leaves from the geraniums just as in total surprise Robert enters there two days after his return from Mexico. The scene between the two has a quality later to be realized in films where the heroine tensely repeats Robert's elliptic and elusive answers to her probing questions while the reader seems to see a camera close-up shot of her nervously playing with the flowers: “… the reality was that they sat ten feet apart, she at the window, crushing geranium leaves in her hand and smelling them, he twirling around on the piano stool” (366). The anxious strain in their not-as-yet-confessed love for each other reveals itself in her angry hand movements with the flowers. Through color, fragrance, and leafy texture, flowers provide a varied imagery of temptation, menace, tension, disappointment and artistic aloofness.

In communicating from the interior to the exterior, windows can serve in the novel as symbols of expectation or of frustration (Brombert 57-61). Not only do windows permit a view to the outside, but they also allow light and nature's perfumes to pervade inner spaces. Through their exposure of the outer world, windows relieve the cluttered atmosphere of rooms full of ostentatiously expensive furnishings, as at the Pontellier house where in a rebellious mood Edna breaks a vase purchased by her husband and she calms down by looking out into the night. Sometimes a solitary window observation post offers a sense of peace and an impression of gaining control over circumstances, as with Dr. Mandelet, the family physician that Léonce Pontellier consults in husbandly concern over his wife's erratic behavior. This neutral but deeply reflective character enjoys his semi-retirement reading by his study's window and gazing out to the garden whose long expanse shelters the doctor's home from street traffic. The meditative serenity achieved by the physician at his window watch enables him to peer objectively but sympathetically into the hidden emotions of his troubled patients.

Windows also illustrate the ambivalence typical throughout this narrative. Mlle Reisz' top-floor apartment reveals a contrasting dinginess and almost transcendent feeling of release:

There were plenty of windows in her little front room. They were for the most part dingy, but as they were nearly always open it did not make so much difference. They often admitted into the room a good deal of smoke and soot; but at the same time all the light and air that there was came through them. From her windows could be seen the crescent of the river, the masts of ships and the big chimneys of the Mississippi steamers.

(328)

This whole passage rests on a series of oppositions: shabbiness versus enthralling perspective, grime versus the bright glow of daytime, the anti-social seclusion of an apartment reached by steep stairs versus the immediate contact with the vast outlying world of rooftops and river, the stasis of the interior setting and the dynamism of sea and river vessels. As an emancipated woman the artist Mlle Reisz controls her environment, where at her keyboard she nearly hypnotizes the protagonist by interweaving Wagner's “Liebestod” with an “Impromptu” by Frederic Chopin to express the destructiveness of passionate desire (Thornton 55). The light that the windows provide functions as a positive force, causing the heroine on her many visits to be invaded by a feeling of repose. While window views from on high may grant an aesthetic appreciation of present time and space, Chopin's art of ambiguity also represents how a window post can be a scene of frustration as already demonstrated by the strained reunion of Edna and Robert in Mlle Reisz's apartment upon his return from Mexico. Although characters may temporarily ease the anxiety in their hearts by looking beyond their narrow, closed existences, the privileged view from windows does not always liberate them from imprisonment.

Foremost among the spectacles seen from windows is the progress of the seasons, the major structuring device of this novel. More than from its formal arrangement into thirty-nine chapters, the narrative gains coherence from the underlying structure based on the change of seasons. Seasonal time, because of its cyclical rhythm, surpasses chronological time to take part in eternity (Poulet 377). But the round of seasons in The Awakening will never achieve its completion on account of the heroine's suicide. The seasons as qualities of human experience rather than an objective recounting of temperatures and climatic conditions prevail to express the drama of a woman coming alive to a physical world that she must quit rather than accept the daily compromises of society. At the novel's start summertime is more than a period of exhausting heat and biting mosquitoes but a state of mind full of undefined yearning and conflict:

An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day.

(270)

Here Chopin not only describes the Louisiana summer in the manner of a regional realist (the one degree of critical recognition that she received for many decades), but she also makes summer a metaphor of Edna's psychological turmoil. The heroine becomes an object passed across by the Southern summertime (Treichler 241). Marriage is the oppressive force obscuring the soul's bright summer day (Thornton 59, 62). A transparent existence in conformity with social conventions ends with the darkness of troubling inner questions. Seasonal moods point to the transformation taking place in the protagonist, who will never know another summer with its sultry hope for liberation from deadening customs.

Summer reaches its climax with the outing to Chênière Caminada, with a swift decline following upon Robert's sudden departure to Mexico and the subsequent breaking up of the vacationing colony for the return to New Orleans. Autumn settles gently upon the city, not as a season of natural crisis and deepening coloration but as a period of lingering warmth that permits entertaining on the verandah into November while giving pause to reflect on fundamental changes in attitude. In the eyes of acquaintances Edna appears a totally transformed being, made radiant in the glow of autumn afternoons (Ch. 20). Then winter strikes as a time of frigid invasion “when treacherous drafts came down chimneys and insidious currents of deadly cold found their way through key-holes” (272). Adjectives like “treacherous” and “insidious” represent the ethical qualities of a time of deceit and entrapment. Winter mists are perceptual screens that obscure reality and diminish hope. The gloom of winter skies causes Edna's artistic creativity as a painter to languish in the dark improvised studio at the Pontellier townhouse. Darkness objectifies the despair in the protagonist's heart during Robert's visit to Mexico. But the clouded atmosphere lifts at the thought of Lebrun's imminent return: “The murky, lowering sky, which had depressed her a few hours before, seemed bracing and invigorating as she splashed through the streets on her way home” (349). From swimming at Grand Isle during the summer Edna's principal recreation changes to walking throughout the autumn and winter in New Orleans (Treichler 246). Edna's radical changes in reacting to the wintry weather reflect the novel's basic stylistic ambivalence in the play of emotions from disappointment to expectation.

Wintertime proves to be a season of extreme decisions for Mme Pontellier, with her move from Léonce's house occurring in late January or early February (Ch. 32), the ensuing sexual liaison with Arobin, and the definitive departure of Robert after their confession of reciprocated love. Just before Edna learns of Lebrun's second flight from her, nature seems to smile at her with a deceptive spirit of hope:

… the stars were blazing. The air was mild and caressing, but cool with the breath of spring and the night.

(379)

For by the penultimate thirty-eighth chapter the early warmth of the southern springtime can be felt in the stellar brilliance of the night, yet with a tinge of coolness to restrain ardent emotions. On that delightful night Edna's strolling companion is Dr. Mandelet, on their way back from Adèle Ratignolle's delivery. The physician cautions Mme Pontellier that nature remains indifferent to the moral consequences of human decisions and actions. Although the point of view of Chopin's protagonist toward nature is to project her own emotions in its phenomena, outward physical nature pays no heed to the ardent sentiments and passions of the heroine or any other character. Then on coming to recognize the emptiness of false dreams of happiness with her beloved Robert, the heroine drowns herself at Grand Isle in the indifferently roseate dawn of an early spring day when the sun's heat belies the icy cold of the waters where she vanishes. Just as nature's dormant energies are about to burst forth in renewed vitality, Edna Pontellier elects to withdraw from its ceaseless round of promise and betrayal.

Throughout this narrative the heroine is constantly attempting to establish a space of her own. The move to the rented house constitutes just such an effort to define a sphere where she might be in full control, but the move represents a decline in the social hierarchy along with the opportunity for increased freedom of action. There are two episodes, however, in Chapters 23 and 25, when visits to the race track fire Edna with an enthusiasm that transforms her from morbid sullenness to vibrant animation. The equestrain setting is an environment of intermediate nature: outdoors with powerful and beautiful animals in competition, but absolutely human-made in construction and purpose with horses trained for the sport of humans. As a child of the Kentucky blue grass country Edna displays a close bond to the Confederate colonel father against whom she is usually in rebellion. Nearness to horses arouses an intense libidinal energy in her, to be associated with her adulterous lover Arobin and his high-spirited steeds (Dyer 195). In the thoroughly social arena of the race track Edna's expertise in equine matters puts her at an advantage over everyone else, men and women alike who struggle to hear her excited comments in the hope of emulating her good fortune in betting on the horses. Like some of the fastest running and most independent horses, the heroine has become full of mettle and somewhat unmanageable, to her husband's regret. Ambivalently the race track is a zone for the unleashing of primitive forces and at the same time an artificial showcase setting for the social elite to divert their idleness with gambling. Edna knows to the supreme degree the total sense of power and possession of her social group only when she is in that racing milieu.⁸ When Dr. Mandelet sees Mme Pontellier at an intimate dinner party after the first visit to the race track, the physician marvels at her metamorphosis into an impassioned creature: “She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun” (336). Through horses Edna comes into contact with the ultimate source of vital energy.

It is in fact the sun which in the novel symbolizes the warm release of sexual forces within the heroine. To overcome the chilly darkness of psychological conflict the protagonist seeks the illumination of both the sun and the moon. On rainy days she cannot pursue her painting, feeling deprived of the mellowing sunlight. To her the sun signifies hope, and she views Robert's absence for even a brief period as similar to a cloud's darkening a sunny day. During the time of her most intense activity as a painter Edna would occasionally conquer feelings of alienation and experience a state of spiritual transcendence:

She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day.

(324)

The sun plays an instrumental role in elevating her soul to know harmony with the physical universe. As the consequence of her struggle to win freedom she at times acquires a solar radiance that causes others like Mlle Reisz to associate her with the comforting rays of the sun: “Ah! Here comes the sunlight!” (346). But just as the myth of Hyacinth illustrates, the protective Apollo also possesses the power to destroy with his merciless heat. The adjective that in this novel most usually describes the sun's intense summer heat is “biting,” to represent the star's ferocious force. As a model of urban circumspection Léonce scolds his wife for allowing the sun at Grand Isle to burn her beyond recognition,⁹ and Robert is always trying to shield Edna with a sunshade. A parasol also serves to protect her from the intense light, but such “accessories” as sunshades and parasols block her view and cut her off from desired physical sensations (Toth, “Feminist Criticism,” 245). The heroine's suicide will occur at the dynamic moment of sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico where in dying she will be spiritually reborn in the renewing solar rays.

Edna is just as much a creature of the night as a luminous figure of daylight. During that fateful summer on Grand Isle she learns to swim, taking lessons from Robert by moonlight. Both the moon and the swimming symbolize her initiation into an authentic eros that she never knew in her conjugal life. The moon constantly tempts the heroine to swim out into distant and strange waters whose mystery veils any threat of danger. When the moon casts its clarity over the restless gulf, it also brings Edna a sense of peace: “There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and softness of sleep” (291-92). The impression here is that of the gentle, soft quality of the brilliant nocturnal scene that frees the world and its sensitive inhabitants of feelings of oppressiveness. The sun and moon are two vital principles of cosmic direction to guide the protagonist in her path of liberation. In The Awakening the moon is never that placid sphere described by the early nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi as being indifferent to the sufferings and aspirations of humans trapped on earth. Instead, the moon restores Edna to the realm of romance and dreams that the spectacle of marriage took from her.¹⁰ Under the mystic lunar rays bayou legends relate how spirits haunt the gulf's shores and cast their spells on elect souls like the protagonist. But in this novel's ambiguous moods even gentle moonlight may mark the sadness and pain of separation, as on the night of Robert's departure from Grand Isle when his boatsman waits for the moon to illuminate their sailing back to the mainland. As various critics have noted (Dyer 199), the moon in Chopin's writings is an emblem of Woman and also here of enlightening truth. In the soft nocturnal light of the moon, as in the sun's biting rays, Edna Pontellier yearns to know the mystery of the infinite.

This novel emphasizes the horizon of the apparently boundless sea that forever lures the heroine in daylight and at night. Images of enclosure alternate with visions of infinity to characterize Edna's battle to escape the sterile stasis of life as mother and wife. The sea in this narrative possesses contrary human qualities of being restless, serene, inviting, endangering, invigorating and enervating. Its waters are always calling enticingly to the protagonist:

The voice of the sea is 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.

(277)

Stress here falls upon the sound instead of the sight of the Gulf that insists in speaking in its multi-modulated voice to the just awakening heroine. Throughout the novel Chopin uses the refrain of the sea's voice with subtle variation to depict the “oceanic” yearnings of the protagonist toward a totally engulfing experience (Wolff 469). The image of “mazes” suggests the menace of labyrinths and caverns to annihilate Edna if she loses herself in the quest for deliverance. Her constant sleeping takes her to wander in mazes of romantic dreams away from mediocre waking reality. But in Edna's intense longing to end her social bondage the sea represents a vision of endless freedom.

For the protagonist her immersion in the waves of the Gulf not only leads to knowledge of the infinite but also of that solitary self that until the summer at Grand Isle she unconsciously repressed in conformity to the mores of late nineteenth-century American society. The sea does not just speak to Edna, but it also touches her quivering body with a sensuous caress that awakens her formerly dormant passionate spirit. The very person who teaches her to swim and who arouses dreams of romance in her, Robert Lebrun, shares her awareness of the sea's capacity for passion, recalling an earlier infatuation of his for Mme. Ratignolle one summertime vacation when the very waves sizzled at the contact with his body burning from frustrated desire. Only one character in the novel displays an aversion for the sea—Mlle Reisz, whose disliking for the water others attribute to her artistic temperament but whose private keyboard performances for Edna excite the most powerful emotions: “… the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body” (290). The association between the sea and the arts continues during the protagonist's pursuit of painting. Sometimes when working from an attractive female model, Edna would be stirred by a subtle narcissism inspired by the classic lines of her subject's body, her singing the haunting song “Ah! si tu savais!” and above all by remembering the sea: “She could again hear the ripple of the water, the flapping sail. She could see the glint of the moon upon the bay, and could feel the soft, gusty beating of the hot south wind. A subtle current of desire passed through her body, weakening her hold upon the brushes and making her eyes burn” (324). Painting, music, the whole range of sensations made available by the Gulf merge in a synaesthetic experience of a supreme jouissance joining orgasm and artistic creativity. Chopin's heroine anticipates that ecstasy which the present-day feminist writer Hélène Cixous celebrates when women learn to write with their bodies:

I … overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard of songs. Time and again … I have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst …

(876)

In learning to swim the protagonist moves on those very luminous torrents as her body becomes part of the natural flow in the Gulf's expanse. Mastering how to swim signifies her acquiring physical and spiritual strength (Spacks 74). But gaining the skill to swim deludes Edna into defying the power of the sea by going out alone far into the waters, although without her knowledge Léonce observes her patronizingly and protectively. For the threat of integration with the liquid whole is loss of self (Treichler 245). The sea's true invitation that Edna will eventually accept is death, the final spiritual elation that the heroine senses late at night when the waters sing a mournful lullaby to her. Leopardi's poem “The Infinite” similarly relates how thought is drowned in immensity and the soul undergoes a sweet shipwreck in the sea's infinity (cf. Ringe 583). In Chopin's novel the gulf is more than a decorative border or limit, more than a privileged state of containment (Jameson 210). The sea is the fatal challenge of the siren's song promising the deliverance of sweet annihilation.

Though an adult, Edna Pontellier must undergo a form of infantile regression in order to recapture a child's receptivity to physical experience. The ability to swim does not come easily to her, and she often thrashes about in the waves like a clumsy infant lacking basic motor skills. What the adult is seeking to know again is that impression of the infinite which she once felt as a child wandering in the high and spacious blue grass fields of her native state:

… a summer day in Kentucky, … a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water.

(280)

The third-person reference to the little girl indicates a schizoid divisiveness menacing the heroine as she contemplates her past (Roscher 295). The image of the Kentucky meadow remained with Edna all her life, so that the effort of mastering how to swim compels her to reexperience the boundlessness of the grassy fields before a child struggling to make her way across vast spaces. Just as the high grass seemed to close in upon the child, the sea with the turmoil of its waves can engulf the adult swimmer. Both the grass in childhood and the sea in adulthood can overwhelm the solitary individual. The abysses of the sea's seductive invitation loom as womb-like enclosures for an infant or for the dead. That passionate “unity of emotions and will” (Treichler 244) achieved in learning to swim bears a deadly threat. As the heroine descends to the darkness of her desires, undefined caverns menace to entrap her. Death by drowning will take Edna back to the childhood moment in the meadow without beginning or end.

Suicide would lift Mme Pontellier out of the dark abysses of physicality to fly on the sunlit breezes of the infinite. Throughout the novel the image of birds symbolizes either captivity or the striving toward freedom. The book begins with the description of a caged parrot calling out to a Whitmanesque mockingbird an order of separation and resignation: “Allez-vous-en! Allez-vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!” (265). In her marital condition Edna resembles a caged bird at first accepting the bars imprisoning her but longing to escape. Confined to the “cage of marriage” (White 98), initially she barely suspects a way of freedom. From time to time the plaintive refrain of an owl hooting amidst sheltering oak trees creates a haunting nocturne that expresses spiritual inquietude. On hearing a melancholy musical composition entitled “Solitude,” the protagonist envisions a lonely young man standing naked on a shore and looking desolately at a distant bird flying out of sight. Neither the naked youth nor the heroine possess the wings to bear them to freedom.

Ironically the mother-women appear as bird-like angelic creatures whose wings flutter protectively around their young (Fletcher 123). When Edna tells Mlle Reisz of her decision to act freely of the opinion of others, the artist warns her about the problems involved in defying conventions: “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth” (350). The heroine never rises to that declaration of inalienable human rights that Jane Eyre once stated in forceful reply to her being compared to a bird tearing its plumage in the imprisonment of a cage: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will” (Jane Eyre, 270). When Edna does flee from Léonce's home, she calls her small rented dwelling the “pigeon house.” It is in that tiny building where she holds her carnal liaison with Arobin and where she and Robert go to exchange a kiss and embrace of mutual love after their reconciliation at the suburban garden restaurant. But the “pigeon house” also becomes the site for the protagonist's disillusionment on returning there from Adèle's delivery to discover Lebrun's note of farewell in order to safeguard her reputation. On the morning of her suicide Edna sees a bird reeling in the air with a broken wing and moving slowly down to the sea. For while men can dream of birds with strong wings to take them to faraway shores, a solitary woman must seek another form of flight.

Throughout the novel Edna's increasing availability to sensations of the physical world finds expression in the adjective “delicious,” the key seme for this narrative of discovery and deliverance. Not only are foods and beverages delicious, but so are the picture of the bay at Grand Isle, the refreshing waves of the gulf, the countryside for small children eager to be away from the monotonous pavements of the city, February days warm with the promise of summer, a scribbled note from one of Edna's infant sons, the memory of a familiar song and the dream of an impossible desire to taste life's delirium. Even a mother-woman like Adèle Ratignolle with her cherry lips looks delicious. Sometimes the adjective occurs three times on one page, only to be repeated on the following page. When the heroine returns to Grand Isle and stands naked at dawn before the sea, in her divestment of artificial garments and customs Edna knows the absolute deliciousness of rebirth to nature. Her dying in the bay recalls the ocean's final summons in Whitman's “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking” where the sea at daybreak whispers “the delicious word death.” For a woman who once beheld with aversion the sand and slime between the toes of the sensuous Spanish servant-girl Mariequita, Edna now arrives at her own total contact with physical reality on that fatal shore with the delicious touch of her bare feet on the sand before she walks out into the water. Her cosmic yearning reaches its passionate consummation as she discovers what Rimbaud in Une Saison en Enfer calls eternity in the merging of the opposed forces of the sun and sea. Edna's willful death causes her to transcend the solely political implications of woman's revolt from social constrictions which only Dr. Mandelet with his sage detachment perceived as inspiring her flight from Léonce's control. She acquires the negative power of an awakening unto death by refusing to return to that shore of patriarchal reality (Watson 118). Woman's free role in or outside society must acknowledge that She is part of a natural order with birds, horses, the ocean, the sun, moon and waving meadows. Chopin's novel employs a narrative syntax based on images of nature to represent a heroine's delicious realization of her struggle for deliverance.

Notes

1. My methodological guide here is Doris Kadish's work on the relational reading of nineteenth-century European novels. The primary difference between Chopin's style and that of authors like Balzac, Chateaubriand and Flaubert (among those studied by Kadish for their development of images of nature as narrative strategy and not stylistic decor) is that the American writer uses greatly condensed descriptions in comparison to the lengthy and complex nature description of the European novelists. The first important attempt to relate Chopin to major European novelists was Emily Toth's doctoral dissertation.

2. Kristeva analyzes imprisonment in these terms, “The difficulty a mother has in acknowledging (or being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm—in other words, the problem she has with the phallus that her father or her husband stands for—is not such as to help the future subject leave the natural mansion” (13). Edna Pontellier originally rebelled against her father by marrying a Roman Catholic, and she will fight against her husband's attempts to reduce her to one of his precious possessions. In her Jungian analysis Marina Roscher attributes a demon of death to the animus that Edna's father imprinted upon his daughter (295).

3. Although I have reservations about his use of Erikson's rather sexist distinctions between “male outer space” and “female inner spaces,” White's essay convincingly probes the polaritiies on which Chopin's novel is constructed. Lattin asserts that, “Chopin's characters cannot know themselves until they understand their surroundings” (225). May sees Edna as becoming a victim of the sensuousness of the Louisiana setting (1037). Ringe notes how Edna must become aware of what is not-herself: the physical world and other persons (582).

4. Leslie cites Fitzhugh in her study of pro-slavery rhetoric (42). White comments upon the continuity of patriarchal thought about woman's role by Southern writers well past the Civil War until the end of the century when Wilbur Fisk Tillett asserted in The Century Magazine that, “The Southern woman loves the retirement of her home …” (99). Walker argues that Edna's plight arises from her daily contact with the Louisiana Creole setting (97).

5. Arms comments how Edna's frequent sleeping reduces her “reawakening” to a form of death (219-20). In a psychoanalytical approach, Wolff sees the heroine's sleeping and eating patterns as part of her orally destructive personality (461-64).

6. Starobinski in studying Rousseau's narrative calls transparent those sites that lead to intimacy and immediacy (14).

7. Zlotnick views Edna as a newly blossomed flower, with dead leaves as remnants of a past time without meaning (no pagination). Dyer regards flowers as symbolic of carnal awakening in the heroine (72), as well as in other characters in Chopin's short stories. The novel ends with Edna's drowning and reliving the “musky odor of pinks” (384).

8. Gerrard observes how the protagonist associates Arobin with the strength and sensuality of horses (136).

9. Casale views Léonce as an inhabitant of the land, most at ease in New Orleans (79). Mr. Pontellier, who spends only weekends on Grand Isle where he frequents Klein's hotel to play billiards and talk about business with male friends, does swim, usually early in the morning before the sun bites. For Treichler the heroine in swimming becomes both active subject and simultaneously passive object (256).

10. Zlotnick speaks of the moon's sexual-mystical influence on nature and compares the lunar role in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers (no pagination).

References

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Toth, Emily. “The Outward Existence which Conforms: Kate Chopin and Literary Convention.” Diss. Johns Hopkins, 1975.

———. “Comment.” Signs, 1 (1976), 1005.

———. “Kate Chopin's The Awakening as Feminist Criticism.” Louisiana Studies, 15 (1976), 241-51.

Treichler, Paula A. “The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening.” in Women and Language in Literature and Society. Ed. S. McConnell-Ginet, R. Borker and N. Furman. New York: Praeger, 1980, pp. 239-57.

Walker, Nancy. “Feminist or Naturalist: The Social Context of Kate Chopin's The Awakening.” Southern Quarterly, 17 (1979), 95-103.

Watson, Barbara Bellow. “On Power and the Literary Text.” Signs, 1 (1975), 111-18.

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Zlotnick, Joan. “A Woman's Will: Kate Chopin on Selfhood, Wifehood, and Motherhood.” The Markham Review, 3 (October 1968), no pagination.