[In the following essay, Thornton examines Edna Pontellier's growing awareness of politics in Creole society in The Awakening.]

          The food of hope
Is meditated action; robbed of this
Her sole support, she languishes and dies.

—Wordsworth, The Excursion

I

Anyone familiar with The Awakening knows that it echoes characters and events in Madame Bovary, but Chopin's indebtedness to Flaubert stops short of merely imitating the problems Flaubert imagined for his heroine. First of all, while Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary are both narcissists, Edna becomes aware of political crises related to her position within Creole society that sharply distinguish her from Emma, who responds to French provincial society only as a mirror of her romantic fantasies. Secondly, Edna's existential crisis lasts much longer than Emma's short and brutal confrontation with reality. In addition to her political theme, Chopin carefully and almost leisurely explores the shocks to the romantic consciousness which were briefly glimpsed at the end of Madame Bovary.

The similarities and differences in aims become immediately apparent through a comparison of two important passages. Twelve pages into The Awakening we encounter the well-known evocation of the sea that becomes a central motif in the novel:

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.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.¹

These sentences are reminiscent of the exchange of platitudes between Léon Dupuis and Emma Bovary which moves from shared clichés about reading to Léon's avowal of great passion for sunsets and the seashore:

“Oh, I love the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.

“And doesn't it seem to you,” continued Madame Bovary, “that the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, of which the contemplation elevates the soul, gives ideas to the infinite, the ideal?”²

The sea symbolizes imagination in both passages, but there is a considerable difference between Emma's superficial response to received ideas, and Edna's romantic but serious exploration of her own soul. Emma's naiveté is nowhere more evident than in this confession to Léon that the sea is a catalyst to the “ideal” world of sentimental Romanticism. In The Awakening, however, the emphasis falls on the seductive, isolating effects of “inward contemplation.” Whereas Flaubert is interested in exposing the dry rot of Romanticism, Chopin is concerned with a woman whose susceptibility to Romantic codes ultimately gives way to at least a partial understanding of the lie that animates her visions. Edna's knowledge of the deliquescent nature of Romantic ideals also informs her view of personal freedom, and thus takes her story in another direction from Emma's.

That direction leads to an irresolvable conflict between Edna's vision of herself as an independent woman and the social forces of Creole Louisiana near the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout The Awakening, Chopin shows how Edna is deceived both by her private vision and by the society she discovers during the summer on Grand Isle. The hopes she begins to entertain about a new life spring from a congeries of sentimental ideals galvanized by Robert Lebrun, a “blagueur” (p. 12) who devotes himself to a different woman each summer. Edna's friend, Adele Ratignolle, sees the danger Robert poses to someone as impressionable as Edna and asks him to “let Mrs. Pontellier alone” (p. 20), which he declines to do, even after Adele tells him that “she is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously” (p. 21). The deceptiveness Adele recognizes in Robert mirrors the deceptiveness of Creole society which seems to accord women greater latitude than it is willing to grant. That women could smoke cigarettes, listen to men tell risqué stories, and read French novels soon appears as only a veneer covering a solidly conventional society that titillated itself with flourishes of libertinism.³ For, despite their apparent standing within the Creole world (a standing, it should be noted, gained solely through marriage), women are presented as an oppressed class. Edna's gradual understanding of her oppression becomes part of the conceptual framework of her overall rebellion, and so, along with my analysis of the consequences of Romantic Imagination, I want to show how Chopin shapes her materials through detailed social description and social interpretation.

Because of the social conventions that prescribe behavior in her world, Edna has nowhere to go, succumbing to the promises of Romanticism while living in a society that will not tolerate the terms she sets for her own freedom. Although she manages by sheer force of will to free herself from the oppressive marriage with Léonce, Edna does not experience freedom; instead, she finds herself trapped by her romantic visions and by what Léonce calls les convenances. If The Awakening were only another examination of narcissism and the romantic predictions of a bourgeois woman, it would simply repeat the material Flaubert renders in his great novel. Chopin is not Flaubert, but within the range of her talent she treats questions about Romanticism, narcissism, and women's independence that are essentially political and thus considerably different from those raised in Madame Bovary. Moreover, we care about Edna Pontellier in ways that we cannot care about Emma Bovary because Edna's intimations of an autonomous life force us to consider the problems of freedom and oppression within society, while Emma's whole life revolves around sentimental fatuities. If Edna at times seems predictable and even tiresome, these characteristics are countered by Chopin's subtle rendering of the process of “inward contemplation” that leads Edna to an understanding of an insurmountable social dilemma which can only be escaped in death.

II

For roughly the first half of the novel Chopin subordinates the political implications of Edna's predicament to the solitude and tentative self-exploration that begins to occupy her heroine during the summer idyll on Grand Isle. In the opening scenes Edna's undefined sense of longing is symbolized by the voice of the sea, which encourages the soul “to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation,” so that the relationships between Edna's isolation, her Romantic sensibility, and the social significance of her situation do not emerge with any clarity until the guests at Madame Lebrun's establishment gather for an evening of entertainment. Even then, there is no specific statement to link the motifs together; what Chopin gives us instead is the motif of music, which indirectly leads to images of flight and escape. As Mademoiselle Reisz begins to play the piano, Edna recalls the pleasure she derives from listening to her friend Adele when she practices. One piece Adele plays Edna calls “Solitude”: “When she heard it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him” (pp. 26-27). The image of the bird does not assume its full significance as a unifying symbol for another sixty pages when Edna remembers a comment of Mademoiselle Reisz's as she and Alcée sit before the fire in the “pigeon house”: “When I left today,” she tells him, “she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. ‘The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong winds. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth’” (p. 82). As the reader knows, escape from the labyrinth of self or tradition demands a cunning Edna does not possess. This failure is made explicit on the final page of the novel when she returns to Chênière Caminada: “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (p. 113). Trapped in romantic longings whose objects are always vague and shifting in her mind's eye, and in a culture whose codes of duty and responsibility make escape impossible for even the most reluctant of “mother-women” (p. 10), Edna's fate is clearly foreshadowed in the imagery of defeated flight Chopin weaves into The Awakening.

At this point, we need to ask why, in a novel that addresses a woman's fate in society, Chopin chose a male figure to symbolize her heroine's solitude. The reason stems from Chopin's having realized that, on an unconscious level, Edna can only imagine a man in a position suggesting freedom and escape. His failure represents Edna's projection of herself onto the imagined figure. This view is consonant with the rest of the novel where we see that only men are free to act as they like and to go where they want: Robert to Mexico, Léonce to New York, Alcée from bed to bed. Whether it is Grand Isle, Chênière Caminada, or New Orleans, men escape, women remain. The New Woman Edna feels emerging from her “fictitious self” (p. 57) demands the prerogatives of men, but in making these demands she can only be destroyed by overreaching in a society that has no place for her.

But there are other reasons beyond the fact that there was little hope for independent women in New Orleans at the turn of the century that must be considered in an account of Edna's failure. Simply put, she cannot see beyond the Romantic prison of imagination. To illustrate her myopia, Chopin introduces Mademoiselle Reisz, whose clarity of mind offers a striking contrast to the essentially abstract nature of Edna's quest. Through music she discovers a kindred spirit in Edna, whose vision of the naked man occurs shortly before the musician plays a Chopin impromptu that arouses Edna's passions and brings her to tears. “Mademoiselle Reisz perceived her agitation … She patted her … upon the shoulder as she said: ‘You are the only one worth playing for. Those others? Bah!’” (p. 27). She realizes that for her young friend music is the correlative of passion just as it is for her, but once their relationship develops Mademoiselle Reisz discovers that Edna's sensitivity does not encompass the discipline or the clarity of vision requisite to either the artist or the rebel. This is made clear one afternoon when Edna explains that she is becoming an artist. The older woman responds harshly, saying that “you have pretensions, Madame,” pointing out that “to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul … that dares and defies” (p. 63).

Mademoiselle Reisz is to Edna what Marlow and Stein are to Lord Jim: a romantic who has found a “way to be” that does not compromise her ideals. Like Marlow and Stein again, she functions as a mentor who recognizes Edna's potentiality for independence while understanding that her impressionable young friend must learn to see more clearly in order to achieve what she wants and avoid disaster.

Once they have begun to meet in New Orleans, the musician's misgivings about Edna's ability to find her way in a new Romantic world are expressed in another kind of music. Edna demands to see a letter Robert has written to Mademoiselle Reisz, hoping that she will find some mention of herself. That she is overwhelmed by Robert and misled by their relationship troubles the older woman, and her sense of impending disaster leads her to weave fragments of Wagner's Liebestod into the Chopin piece she has been playing. This double theme of Romantic life and death becomes part of the atmosphere of the city, floating “out upon the night, over the housetops, the crescent of the moon, losing itself in the silence of the upper air” (p. 64). Like Stein's great speech on the destructive element that presents the positive and negative aspects of Romanticism, Mademoiselle Reisz's music symbolizes the antithetical modes of Romance represented by Chopin and Wagner, and her evocation of Tristan and Isolde becomes an important part of The Awakening's imagery of destruction.

Mademoiselle Reisz functions as the only example of a free, independent woman whose hardiness Edna must emulate if she is to succeed and soar above “tradition and prejudice.” There is no question that the older woman provides Edna with a more viable model than Adele Ratignolle who is, after all, trapped without even knowing it. Mademoiselle Reisz's apartment becomes a refuge for Edna and the pianist comes closer than anyone else to making contact and supplying advice that could be helpful as Edna tries to find a place for her new self in the world. Nevertheless, her role in the novel is problematic, for she is an imperfect model whose positive qualities are balanced by abrasiveness and egocentrism. Chopin calls attention to the musician's idiosyncrasies when she introduces her into the story. Robert has gone to ask her to play for his mother's guests and finds her in one of the cottages: “She was dragging a chair in and out of her room, and at intervals objecting to the crying of a baby, which a nurse in the adjoining cottage was endeavoring to put to sleep. She was a disagreeable little woman, no longer young, who had quarreled with almost every one, owing to a temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample upon the rights of others” (p. 26). Later, at Edna's dinner party, “Mademoiselle had only disagreeable things to say of the symphony concerts, and insulting remarks to make of all the musicians of New Orleans, singly and collectively” (p. 87). While Edna instinctively rebels against the larger social dictates of Creole society, those social graces that express less overwhelming convenances are still important to her, so that her amusement at her friend's disdain of conventions does not mean that she intends to imitate her. More subtly, Mademoiselle Reisz fails as a model because at this point Edna's passions, unlike her friend's, cannot be sublimated to music, but need physical expression. Like all her friends, Mademoiselle Reisz is eventually left behind as Edna increasingly dissociates herself from society and moves further into the mazes of solitude.

The musical motif in The Awakening provides specific dramatic referents to Edna's emotional states, but her imaginative life belongs to the realm of fantasy. Following her swim in the Gulf, Edna wants to think about her double experience of freedom and the “vision of death” (p. 29) that came to her in the water. Robert suddenly appears and Edna finds herself explaining that she has been overwhelmed by powerful experiences she does not understand: “There must be spirits abroad tonight,” she muses, half-seriously. Picking up the cue, Robert invents a Gulf spirit who has searched for “one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into the realms of the semi-celestials” (p. 30). Robert does not understand Edna's experiences, nor does he particularly care to; his interests are in the direction of establishing himself in Edna's imaginative life. Whether by intention or pure chance, his words do enter her consciousness so that the Gulf spirit becomes a symbolic presence for Edna on Grand Isle and later in New Orleans.

In fact, the next section of the novel is given over to an elaboration of the fantastic. In the course of exposing the structure of fiction devoted to the unreal, Tzvetan Todorov cites the following comment by Olga Riemann: “The hero (of a fantastic tale) continually and distinctly feels the contradiction between two worlds, that of the real and that of the fantastic, and is himself amazed by the extraordinary phenomena which surround him.”⁴ What Edna experiences during the next few days approximates this situation very closely, for Robert's invention of the Gulf spirit and Edna's vigil before the sea that night lead to an awareness of a “contradiction between two worlds,” particularly when she wakes up the next morning:

She slept but a few hours: They were troubled and feverish hours, disturbed with dreams that were intangible, that eluded her, leaving only an impression upon her half-awakened sense of something unattainable. The air was invigorating and steadied somewhat her faculties. However, she was not seeking refreshment or help from any source, either external or from within. She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility.

(P. 33)

Like a princess in a fairy-tale, Edna awakens to an enchanted world where the old rules of reality no longer seem valid.

The immediate result of her new perspective is to propose taking a boat trip to Chênière Caminada with Robert, and from the moment of their departure to the island the day contains experiences suggesting that reality had been altered. For example, as they sail toward the island, “Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which held her fast, whose chains had been loosening—had snapped the night before when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails” (p. 35). Soon after they reach the island Edna takes a nap. When she awakens, she tells Robert that “the whole island seems changed. A new race of beings must have sprung up. …” (p. 38). Later that afternoon she and Robert listen to one of Madame Antonie's stories about the Baratarian pirates. As she speaks, “Edna could hear the whispering voices of dead men and the clink of muffled gold” (p. 39). The fantasy continues during the return trip to Grand Isle, for Edna believes that “misty spirit forms were prowling in the shadows and among the reeds, and upon the water phantom ships [were] speeding to cover” (pp. 39-40). Edna recreates the atmosphere of these imaginary encounters at the dinner party she gives for her father when she tells the story “of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back. They were lost amid the Baratarian Islands, and no one ever heard of them or found a trace of them from that day to this” (p. 70). It should be clear that the day Edna and Robert spend on Chênière Caminada is filled with examples of “extraordinary phenomena.”

The fantastic is implied in Chopin's early evocation of the sea, just as it is in Edna's visions of the unbinding of chains, pirate ships, and the lovers who disappear somewhere in the Baratarian Islands, freed forever from the mundane world of responsibility. Taken together, these events establish the atmosphere of Edna's mind, the mood of her thought. In this regard, it is important to see that The Awakening does not force the reader “to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described”;⁵ only Edna hesitates between the fanastic and the real. The reader becomes increasingly aware of the ironic presentation of events, as well as the distance opening between Edna and reality.

Edna cannot actualize the self that increasingly absorbs her attention because that imagined self has no substance. Even when she is most deeply immersed in her newly discovered world, none of her visions of her self, or of a future, achieve clarity. In this respect, there is a distinction between Edna and Emma Bovary that should be explored. Emma constructs extremely detailed imaginary worlds for herself and Léon, Rodolphe, and Largardy from the raw materials of sentimental literature, images of Parisian social life, and the drama that unfolds before her on the stage of the Rouen Opera House. But her world begins and ends in that matrix of images, which to her are “pictures of the world.” While Robert, in the guise of demon lover, appears in several of Edna's visions, she does not create detailed alternatives to the dreary life she has shared with Léonce. The reason should be clear enough: Edna's awakening corresponds with the attentions she receives from Robert who reifies the “realms of romance” anesthetized by Léonce, but her ultimate desire is for freedom to do as she likes, not, like Emma's, to find the man of her dreams. Thus, the journey into the Baratarian Islands she imagines with a demon lover is less important than her perception that she is “free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails.”

III

The motifs of music and fantasy that I have discussed so far shape The Awakening's themes of marriage, sexuality, and liberation. For the moment, I want to consider these themes separately in the order I have just mentioned, since that order corresponds to the direction of Edna's growth. Later, I will discuss them as a synthesis, a single perspective on the conditions of Edna's life, and by extension, that of women in Creole society.

All of these themes are announced in the first scene of the novel. Edna and Robert have just returned from a walk on the beach when Léonce remarks on Edna's tan, looking at her as “at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage” (p. 4). At the same time, Edna surveys her hand “critically,” remembers her rings given over to Léonce for safekeeping, and takes them back. The conflict between freedom and oppression, the problem of narcissism, and Edna's retreat from and return to the symbols of marriage are neatly set out in three sentences. But there is more here, for marriage already appears to be incompatible with Edna's solipsistic character. From this muted beginning, marriage becomes the great fact of the novel, inescapable and monolithic, repeatedly described as oppressive, the source of ennui, and the means by which women are brought to suffer the pain of childbirth, the “torture” of nature as Edna perceives it while watching over Adele Ratignolle's accouchement.

We encounter a complex manifestation of Edna's feelings about marriage later that night after Léonce has returned from billiards at Klein's Hotel. She and Léonce have had a disagreement about the care of the children and Edna begins to cry, overcome by vague feelings that cancel any memory of her husband's former “kindness”: “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. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood” (p. 8). This unspecified malaise is an inseparable part of marriage, producing a mood like a “shadow” or a “mist,” phenomena that can obscure the outline of things, perhaps even obscure the self. These images soon become part of The Awakening's symbolic design, for by suggesting that marriage obscures the essential self, they establish quite early one of Chopin's central political concerns. They allow us to see how Edna is oppressed by the facts of marriage and by her temperament in much the same way that the scene at the Banneville grove, where the wind coaxes a murmuring sound from the trees, symbolized Emma's ennui and disillusionment over her marriage to Charles.

The suggestion of obscurity and isolation that emerges from Edna's reverie reappears when Chopin writes that, “Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman … one who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (p. 10). Adele Ratignolle is the type of such selfless creatures: “There are no words to describe her save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams” (p. 10). What does Chopin mean to suggest by saying that there are no words to describe such women? Primarily, I would argue, that this epitome of the “mother-woman” is an anachronism, even though the beaches at Grand Isle are covered with them and they exemplify society's vision of woman's function. By saying that there are only the old words to describe Adele, Chopin subtly links her to the received ideas of woman's role in society. The “mother-woman” is a fiction. The old words have created a woman who fulfills “our” expectation and these words, associated with romance and dream, have created the self-image in which women like Adele bask. The point is that the essential self of both kinds of women is obscured, first by the institution of marriage, which separates the inner from the outer self, and second by the myths of womanhood that equate effacement of self, even the abjuring of self, with ideal and natural behavior. Thus both the romantic woman and the woman who mirrors the romantic clichés of a society's myths are blighted by the very terms of marriage.

But one of the novel's most interesting themes becomes apparent when we realize that, despite her rebelliousness, the associations Edna brings to marriage as a young woman can never be fully escaped. This is the case despite Léonce's lack of anything like the vigor of her youthful romantic fantasies that culminated in her infatuation with a “great tragedian” whose picture she kept and sometimes kissed. In fact, her entrapment is partly the result of the blandness she experiences with Léonce:

Her marriage to Léonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as decrees of Fate. It was in the midst of her secret great passion that she met him. He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and an ardor which left nothing to be desired. He pleased her, his absolute devotion flattered her. She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them in which fantasy she was mistaken.

(P. 19)

Edna then comes to see her marriage, with its initial vague resemblance to her adolescent longings, as a step into the “world of reality,” the act of a mature woman who will leave behind forever the “realm of romance and dreams.” It is not long before she finds herself forced to confront realities that are clearly antithetical to her modest expectations: “She grew fond of her husband, realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection, thereby threatening its dissolution” (pp. 19-20). So marriage for Edna devolves to fondness, and the absence of passionate emotion seems to guarantee stability.

The stultifying effects of the relationship with Léonce—the price Edna and all other wives pay for stability—are quickly developed. When she visits Adele in New Orleans, “the little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui” (p. 56). In response to Léonce's entreaties for her to attend her sister's wedding, she says that “a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth” (p. 6). Later, her awareness of having become a possession increasingly grates on Edna's sense of her individuality, and she gives her opinion of men who treat her as an object near the end of the novel during a conversation with Robert. “You have been a very, very foolish boy,” she says,

wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy, she is yours,’ I should laugh at you both.

(Pp. 106-7)

Earlier, when Edna first began to express her independence by ignoring the custom of her Tuesday at homes, Léonce responded by saying, “I should think you'd understand by this time that people don't do such things; we've got to observe les convenances” (p. 51). Léonce's comment cuts to the heart of what Edna rebels against; for her, marriage has come to seem like only one more convention within the myriad social forms that have become oppressive to her. Although she feels that marriage is “not a condition of life which fitted her,” that she is no longer a possession, the facts of her life argue against her interpretation of it. Margaret Culley stresses Edna's delight in her independence as an element of the novel's tragedy. Referring to her comment about no longer being a possession of any man's, Culley says that “we glimpse the ecstasy of the discovery of the power of the self and the refusal to abjure it.”⁶ But there is a considerable distance between what Edna says and does that makes Culley's assessment more optimistic than the situation warrants. Surely the “delight [Edna] takes in her solitary self”⁷ measures the distance between her imagination and reality in a painfully ironic way. Regardless of what she thinks, the shadow cast on Edna's soul by the convention of marriage and society cannot be escaped. Her decision to take her own life acknowledges the impossibility of returning to marriage, or of finding satisfaction in her solitude. It is the logical culmination of despair engendered by the loss of stability and her awareness of never being able to find a substitute for it in her affair with Alcée, or anyone else.

IV

Edna is deceived by the promises of sex just as she is misled by the conventions of marriage, but even though she delights in the adulterous pleasures discovered with Alcée, The Awakening is not an erotic novel. Lazar Ziff sees the true significance of her sexuality when he writes that Edna “was an American woman, raised in the Protestant mistrust of the senses and in the detestation of sexual desire as the root of evil. As a result, the hidden act came for her to be equivalent to the hidden and true self, once her nature awakened in the open surroundings of Creole Louisiana.”⁸ Ziff's observation alludes to the “shadow” Jung characterized as “a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”⁹ Ironically, Edna's discovery of the “dark aspects” of her “true self” leads to increased self-knowledge, which isolates her from human contact, rather than providing a means by which she could experience emotional and physical gratification.

Such reflexiveness is clearly illustrated in the affair with Arobin. Edna has agreed to go to the races with Alcée and Mrs. Highcamp and later, when he takes her home, we are told that she “wanted something to happen—something, anything; she did not know what” (p. 75). Like Rodolphe when he first meets Emma, Alcée senses an easy conquest. All he has to do is fulfill her expectations:

His manner invited easy confidence. … They laughed and talked; and before it was time to go he was telling her how different life might have been if he had known her years before. With ingenuous frankness he spoke of what a wicked, ill-disciplined boy he had been, and impulsively drew up his cuff to exhibit on his wrist the scar of a saber cut which he had received in a duel outside of Paris when he was nineteen.

(P. 76)

This apocryphal story of Alcée's past as a hero out of the pages of Dumas provides the opportunity for an even bolder gesture: “He stood close to her, and the effrontery of his eyes repelled the old, vanishing self in her, yet drew all her awakening sensuousness” (p. 76). Here Alcée's melodramatic persona appeals to Edna for the same reason she was drawn to the cavalry officer and the tragedian—he embodies the “realm of romance” left behind with her marriage and reawakened by Robert.

What follows is as inevitable as Rodolphe's success with Emma, for what Edna wants is an opportunity to express the “animalism” that “strove impatiently within her” (p. 78). A mutual seduction follows “the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded” (p. 83). However, despite this expression of freedom, which was clearly inevitable, when Arobin leaves later that night “there was an overwhelming feeling of irresponsibility. There was the shock of the unexpected and the unaccustomed.” There was also something more important:

Above all, there was understanding. She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality. But among the conflicting sensations which assailed her, there was neither shame nor remorse.

(P. 83)

The mist “lifted from her eyes” is the same mist Chopin refers to in the passage dealing with the “vague anguish” Edna discovers in marriage. What Edna understands here is that she has been liberated from the kind of life for which she is “not suited,” from marriage and from the shadow marriage cast on her sexuality. At the same time, this scene reveals another important aspect of her character. Edna always greets each new experience hyperbolically and she is constantly duped by fresh promises. Her conviction that she can now “comprehend the significance of life” is only another example, since her understanding fades with the waning of her enthusiasm about her passional self. She has learned nothing that could help her escape from the solitude steadily encroaching on her inner life.

The affair with Alcée becomes part of an emerging pattern of longing and restlessness which recalls the shadows and mists of her earliest sense of oppression. At the farewell party she gives to her old life on Esplanade Street such unfocused yearning is obvious:

… As she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed. There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable.

(P. 88)

The sense of ennui returns us to the bedroom of her cottage on Grand Isle where she wept without knowing why, and felt a “vague anguish” whose source was inexplicable. The only substantial difference between the passage above and Edna's earlier encounters with hopelessness is the vision of the “beloved one” who is obviously “unattainable.” Clearly, her vision has been enlarged while the conditions of her life remain as they were on the night the novel opens.

Thus every detail in The Awakening contributes to a growing impression that Edna's beginning is her end. Ten pages into the novel, Chopin writes that “Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (pp. 14-15). Yet, a sentence later, in a paragraph introducing the first reference to the sensuous voice of the sea, the narrator warns that “The beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginnings! How many souls perish in the tumult!” The voice of the sea, as well as the Gulf spirit, hold out to Edna a promise that cannot be fulfilled. When the voice is heard once again on the last page it echoes the earlier promise of the sea, but concludes on the word “solitude,” and the invitation to Edna's soul to “lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation” is replaced by the image of the “bird with the broken wing.” Moreover, between these images of the sea framing the novel we see other motifs and themes also turning away from the promises they held out for Edna to their beginnings: the positive suggestiveness of Chopin's impromptu is transposed to Wagner's evocation of the dying Isolde; the fantastic worlds of Chênière Caminada and Grand Isle become the house on Esplanade Street; the sexual passion with Alcée deliquesces into loneliness; and the promise of Robert's attention on Grand Isle turns into his farewell letter.

It is Robert's letter that finally shatters Edna's illusions of escape. After sitting up all night thinking about it, her dilemma finally becomes clear:

She had said over and over to herself: ‘To-day it is Arobin; tomorrow it will be some one else. It makes no difference to me, it doesn't matter about Léonce Pontellier—but Raoul and Etienne!’. … There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.

(P. 113)

Edna now understands that Alcée, Robert, and her own sexual awakening belong to a metaphor for the unattainable. Her life has no direction, her world no form, and the emptiness she has come to feel is Chopin's comment on the “realms of romance.”

But this is not the end. Edna's void is suddenly filled with a vision of her children, which not only takes her back to her beginning, but also becomes the sign of her “soul's slavery.” Regardless of her casual attention to them, and her attempts to break away from marriage, they have always been there. Once, Edna said to Adele Ratignolle that “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. 48). That was when their antagonism was veiled. During her vigil, Edna has come to realize that it is Raoul and Etienne, not Léonce, who bind her to the ennui of a life that does not fit her. And so it is a double vision Edna experiences; she understands the mendacity of her “spiritual vision” and also that the “soul's slavery” her children would drag her back to is too great a price to pay now that she has tasted freedom, however confusedly. The agony she feels has a moral basis because she realizes that continuing to live as she must in a world circumscribed by les convenances could only destroy her children, and that realization adds considerably to her stature.

Defeated by the lies of romance and the facts of les convenances, Edna's return to the seashore at Chênière Caminada is accompanied not by thoughts or Robert or Alcée, but by the overwhelming pressure of Léonce, Raoul, and Etienne. As she swims out to sea, her mind is filled with sounds from her youth, above all the clang of the cavalry officer's spurs. We are left, as Edna dies, to meditate on that sound with intimations of a world that vanished as she reached out to grasp it.

Chopin's novel is prophetic of concerns that Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and other women novelists would explore in the next quarter-century; were it not for her blindness to alternatives at the end, her virtual isolation, Edna might have grown up to keep company with Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsey, and to achieve a sense of identity similar to theirs. Though my argument in this book depends on (among other things) the persistence of a fictional critique of Romantic Idealism that extends well into our own time, it is important to see that Kate Chopin's treatment is idiosyncratic and focused on its debilitating effects not only on a single character but also on all women caught in the rigidities of a social system like that of Creole Louisiana. And this leads to an interesting irony that emerges from the conjunction of the two previous studies of female characters and the chapter that follows on Lord Jim. The “realms of romance” explored by Chopin and Flaubert are unquestionably destructive, and both novelists show that romance was the preeminent form of thought, the matrix of identity, available to women in the nineteenth century. Emma and Edna, because of their narcissism, are not free to choose another mode of thought, but it should be kept in mind that Jim and the other male characters at least have available to them other means of achieving identity or establishing personality. No novel considered here is so bleak as Chopin's in this regard, for she shows us that the illusions of romance were the dead end of identity for nineteenth-century women. As we will see in the next chapter, it is just the potential, the freedom to disabuse himself of similar illusions, that makes Conrad's Jim such a problematic case.

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 15. Hereafter cited in the text.

2. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Paul de Man (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 58.

3. In The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking, 1966), Lazar Ziff makes the following comments about Creole society: “The community about which she wrote was one in which respectable women took wine with their dinner and brandy after, smoked gcigarettes, played Chopin sonatas, and listened to the men tell risqué stories. It was, in short, far more French than American. … [T]hese were for Mrs. Chopin the conditions of civility, and, since they were so French, a magazine public accustomed to accepting naughtiness from that quarter and taking pleasure in it on those terms raised no protest. But for Mrs. Chopin they were only outward signs of a culture that was hers and had its inner effects in the moral make-up of her characters” (p. 297). For a more general examination of the social contexts of fiction than I can explore in this space see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962), and Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1965).

4. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland, Ohio: The Press of the Case Western Reserve University, 1973), p. 26.

5. Todorov, p. 33.

6. Margaret Culley, “Edna Pontellier: ‘A Solitary Soul,’” in The Awakening, p. 228.

7. Culley, p. 228.

8. Ziff, p. 304.

9. C. G. Jung, Psyche and Symbol, ed. Violet S. de Laszlo (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), p. 7.