[In the following essay, Stange discusses representations of the female self in The Awakening.]

In the beginning of The Awakening, New Orleans stockbroker Leonce Pontellier, staying with his wife, Edna, at an exclusive Creole family resort, surveys Edna as she walks up from the beach in the company of her summer flirtation, Robert Lebrun. “‘You are burnt beyond recognition’ [Leonce says], looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.”¹ Leonce's comment is the reader's introduction to Edna, whose search for self is the novel's subject.² To take Leonce's hyperbole—“you are burnt beyond recognition”—as literally as Leonce takes his role as Edna's “owner” is to be introduced to an Edna who exists as a recognizable individual in reference to her status as valuable property. This status appears to determine Edna's perception of herself: in response to Leonce's anxiety, Edna makes her first self-examination in this novel about a heroine who is “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” (15). Edna, having been told “you are burnt beyond recognition,”

held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her lawn sleeves above the wrists. This reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers.

(4)

In the context of the property system in which Edna exists as a sign of value, Edna's body is detachable and alienable from her own viewpoint: the hands and wrists are part of the body yet can be objectified, held out and examined as if they belonged to someone else—as indeed, in some sense that Leonce insists upon very literally, they do belong to someone else. Edna's perception of her own body is structured by the detachability of the hand and arm as signs of Leonce's ownership of her. Her hands also suggest the possibility of being an owner herself when they make the proprietary gesture of reaching out for the rings that Leonce obediently drops into the palm (this gesture of Edna's contrasts with a bride's conventional passive reception of the ring). The hands are the organs of appropriation; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a speech on female rights given in 1892, argued that “to deny [to woman] the rights of property is like cutting off the hands.”³ In having Edna put on the rings herself (a gesture Edna will again perform at a moment when she decisively turns away from her domestic role), Chopin suggests that the chief item of property owned by the proprietary Edna is Edna herself. Thus the opening scene foreshadows the turning point of the plot at which Edna, deciding to leave Leonce's house, resolves “never again to belong to another than herself” (80).

“Self-ownership” was a central project of feminist reformers of the second half of the nineteenth century. In the lexicon of late nineteenth-century women's rights reformers and feminist free love advocates, the term self-ownership, when applied to women, had a specific sexual meaning. First popularized by Lucinda Chandler in the 1840s and widely used by the feminist reformers who followed her, self-ownership signified the wife's right to refuse to have sex with her husband. According to Chandler, the practice of self-ownership would mean that “the woman … has control over her own person, independent of the desires of her husband.”⁴ Self-ownership was closely linked with “voluntary motherhood” and thus became a program for putting woman in control of sex and reproduction. “Self-ownership,” writes historian William Leach, “meant that woman, not man, would decide when, where, and how the sexual act would be performed. … It also meant that woman, not man, would determine when children would be conceived and how many.”⁵ Self-ownership became central to feminist ideology of the second half of the century. According to Linda Gordon, by the mid-seventies, advocacy of so-called voluntary motherhood—woman's “right to choose when to be pregnant”—was shared by “the whole feminist community.”⁶

This feminist community, in contradiction of its advocacy of choice and control for women, was unanimously opposed to the use of birth control devices. This opposition was shared by suffragists, moral reformers, and free love advocates alike. Various kinds of contraceptive technology were accessible to middle-class women. However, as historian Gordon notes, nineteenth-century birth control practice was determined by ideology rather than the availability of technology. In the prevailing ideology of even the most radical feminist reformers, motherhood was an inextricable part of female sexuality.⁷ Why did feminists, whose goal was to win for women the civil and proprietary rights that would make them equal to men, choose to deny women the freedom to have sex without pregnancy? As Gordon points out, the linkage of self-ownership with reproduction certainly reflects the reality of many women's lives, which were dominated by multiple births and the attendant realities of risk, disease, and pain.⁸ Some of the resistance to birth control technology, Gordon suggests, was motivated by material conditions: birth control devices, by separating sex from reproduction, appeared to threaten the family structure that provided most middle-class women their only social standing and economic security.⁹ But even among those reformers who were not concerned with upholding the family (free love advocates and nonmarrying career women, for example), there was a strong resistance to contraception—a resistance that amounts to a refusal to separate motherhood from female sexuality.

To put voluntary motherhood practiced without birth control devices at the center of self-ownership is to make motherhood central to a woman's life and identity. The capacity to bear children is the sexual function that most dramatically distinguishes the sexual lives—and the day-to-day lives—of women from those of men. The ban on contraceptive technology enforces a lived distinction between male and female sexuality: without effective contraception, sex for a woman always means sex as a woman because it means a potential pregnancy. The opposition to contraceptive technology (as well as the idealization of motherhood of which it is a part) reflects a commitment to the sexualization of female identity. Through the practice of self-ownership, this differentiated sexuality with motherhood at its core becomes the possession that a woman makes available or withholds in order to demonstrate self-ownership. To ask why the feminist reformers opposed contraceptive technology is, then, to ask how motherhood functions in the construction of the self-owning female self. In making motherhood a central possession of the self, the feminists were defining that self as sexual and as female. The possession of this sexualized self through self-ownership amounts to the exercise of a right to alienate (confirmed by a right to withhold). This selfhood, then, consists of the alienation of female sexuality in a market. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her 1899 critique of this sexual market, attacked it as a market in which “he is … the demand … she is the supply.”¹⁰ The feminists' opposition to birth control technology reflects a commitment to this market: underlying their construction of female selfhood is the ideology of woman's sexual value in exchange.

Chopin's dramatization of female self-ownership demonstrates the central importance of the ideology of woman's value in exchange to contemporary notions of female selfhood. If, as Stanton declares in the speech on female selfhood quoted above, “in discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual,” what Edna Pontellier considers as her property is, first, her body.¹¹ Her body is both what she owns and what she owns with. She begins to discover a self by uncovering her hands and “surveying them critically” with her eyes, thus making an appropriative visual assessment of herself as a proprietary being. Her hands and eyes will serve her in her “venture” into her “work” of sketching and painting (54-55). Thus her hands, by remaining attached (and not cut off like those of the woman who is denied the rights of property), serve her visual appropriation of the world and provide the first object of this appropriation: her own body.

Edna's hands appear in two states: naked and sunburned, and ringed. In the first state, they are conventionally “unrecognizable” as signs of her status as Leonce's wife. Sunburned hands, by indicating the performance of outdoor labor, would nullify Edna's “value” as a sign of Leonce's wealth. In the terminology of Thorstein Veblen's turn-of-the-century analysis of the ownership system, Edna is an item of “conspicuous consumption” that brings “reputability” (a degree of status) to Leonce. Such status-bearing wealth must be surplus wealth: useful articles do not serve to advertise the owner's luxurious freedom from need. Edna must, then, appear to be surplus—she must appear to perform no useful labor.¹² The rings—showy, luxurious, useless items of conspicuous consumption par excellence—restore her status as surplus. Yet this status is also constituted by the sight of her hands without the rings: the significance of the sunburned hands quickly collapses into the significance of the ringed hands when the sunburned, naked hands “remind” both Leonce and Edna of the ringed, value-bearing hands. And Edna's sunburn is directly constitutive of her “value,” for it results from her conspicuous, vicarious consumption of leisure on Leonce's behalf (what Veblen calls “vicarious leisure”): she has been enjoying a holiday at the respectable, luxurious resort frequented by Leonce's Creole circle.

Thus Edna's hands appear in their naked and exposed state as a reminder of Leonce's property interests while they also, in this state, suggest an identity and proprietary interests of her own. The appropriative survey of the female body as a sign of male ownership continues to engage Edna: her visual fascination fastens on the hands and body of her friend Adele Ratignolle, whose “excessive physical charm” at first attracts Edna (15). Edna “like[s] to sit and gaze at her fair companion.” She watches Adele at her domestic labors. “Never were hands more exquisite than [Adele's], and it was a joy to look at them when she threaded her needle or adjusted her gold thimble … as she sewed away on the little night drawers” (10). Here, the hands are the organs of labor—but again, gender determines possessive status. Adele's hands are perfectly white because she always wears dogskin gloves with gauntlets (16). The femininity of the laboring hands, their luxuriously aesthetic and spectacular quality, conspicuously signifies that the value of Adele's labor does not stem from production for use: Edna “[can]not see the use” of Adele's labor (16). Adele's laboring hands signify her consecration to her “role” within the family, and they are marked with the gold of a thimble as Edna's are marked with the gold of a ring.

In their white, “exquisite” beauty, Adele's hands are stably—organically—signs of her status as wealth. When Adele jokes “with excessive naiveté” about the fear of making her husband jealous, “that made them all laugh. The right hand jealous of the left! … But for that matter, the Creole husband is never jealous; with him the gangrene passion is one which has become dwarfed by disuse” (12). (This ownership is not reciprocal: the question of jealousy pertains only to the husband; the wife's jealous, proprietary interest in her husband is not evoked.) Adele's entire presence is a reminder of the property system in which woman is a form of surplus wealth whose value exists in relation to exchange. A woman of “excessive physical charm,” Adele is luxuriously draped in “pure white, with a fluffiness of ruffles that became her. The draperies and fluttering things which she wore suited her rich, luxuriant beauty” (15-16). Her body is as rich, white, and ornamental as her clothes: she appears “more beautiful than ever” in a negligee that leaves her arms “almost wholly bare” and “expose[s] the rich, melting curves of her white throat” (55).

In her rich and elaborate yet revealing clothing, Adele is excessively covered while her body, already a sign of wealth, makes such coverings redundant. Adele appears as a concretized feme covert. Under the Napoleonic Code which was still in force in Louisiana in the 1890s, wives were legally identical with their husbands; being in coverture, they had no separate legal or proprietary identity and could not own property in their own right.¹³ Adele's beauty is her conspicuousness as a form of wealth: her looks are describable by “no words … save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance.” These words—“gold,” “sapphires,” “cherries or some other delicious crimson fruit”—construct femininity as tangible property. The value of the woman is emphatically defined as social wealth that exists as an effect of the public circulation of the tropes—“the old [words] that have served so often”—that identify her as beautiful. Her beauty is the product and representation of its own circulation. Adele's “excessive physical charm” is a kind of currency that makes her the “embodiment of every womanly grace and charm” (10).

It is in public display that Adele's beauty manifests itself. The sight of woman as social wealth is the starting point of Edna's self-seeking. “Mrs. Pontellier liked to sit and gaze at her fair companion as she might look upon a faultless Madonna” (12). An amateur artist, Edna finds such “joy” in looking at Adele that she wants to “try herself on Madame Ratignolle” (13). Adele, “seated there like some sensuous Madonna, with the gleam of the fading day enriching her splendid color” (13), appears to Edna as a particularly “tempting subject” of a sketch. This sketch becomes the second sight that Edna “surveys critically” (the first being her hands); finding that it “[bears] no resemblance to Madame Ratignolle” (and despite the fact that it is “a fair enough piece of work, and satisfying in many ways”), Edna enforces her proprietary rights in regard to the sketch as she smudges it and “crumple[s] the paper between her hands” (13). Edna is inspired to make another try when she visits Adele at home in New Orleans and finds her again at her ornamental domestic labor (Adele is unnecessarily sorting her husband's laundry). “Madame Ratignolle looked more beautiful than ever there at home. … ‘Perhaps I shall be able to paint your picture some day,’ said Edna. … ‘I believe I ought to work again’” (55). The sight of Adele at home inspires Edna to do the work that will help her get out of the home. Later she will leave Leonce and support herself on the income from her art and from a legacy of her mother's.

In her insistence on owning her own property and supporting herself, Edna is a model of the legal opposite of the feme covert—she is the feme sole. Thus Chopin connects her to the Married Women's Property Acts, property law reforms instituted in the latter part of the century that gave married women varying rights of ownership. Edna comes from “old Presbyterian Kentucky stock” (66). Kentucky belonged to the block of states with the most advanced separation of property in marriage. In fact, Kentucky had the most advanced Married Women's Property Act in the nation, granting married women not only the right to own separate property and make contracts, but the right to keep their earnings.¹⁴

Thus Chopin connects Edna to the feminist drive for women's property rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in her speech on female selfhood quoted above, makes possessive individualism the first consideration among women's rights: “In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual.”¹⁵ Chopin suggests that what a woman owns in owning herself is her sexual exchange value. The feme covert, in being both property and the inspiration to own, allows Edna to be a feme sole. The self she owns can be owned—is property—because it is recognizable as social wealth. Adele, who concretizes the status of the woman and mother as domestic property, makes visible to Edna the female exchange value that constitutes a self to own. Thus Edna's possessive selfhood looks “back” to the chattel form of marriage, valorizing (in a literal sense) the woman as property. In Adele, the “bygone heroine,” Edna finds the capital which she invests to produce her market selfhood.

The way that Edna owns herself by owning her value in exchange is a form of voluntary motherhood: “Edna had once told Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for any one. Then had followed a rather heated argument.” In this argument Edna “explains” to Adele, “I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.” Adele's answer is, “a woman who would give her life for her children could do no more than that. … I'm sure I couldn't do more than that.” Withholding nothing, Adele cannot conceive of giving more than she already gives. Edna cannot at first identify what it is she has chosen to withhold: “I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; … it's only something which … is revealing itself to me” (48).

The self at first exists in the presumption of the right to withhold oneself as a mother. But Edna, like the feminist advocates of self-ownership, soon determines that voluntary motherhood means withholding herself sexually. After her first successful swim (during which she experiences a moment of self-support and the absolute solitariness of death), she stays on the porch, refusing Leonce's repeated orders and entreaties to come inside to bed (32). Later Edna stops sleeping with her husband altogether, so that Leonce complains to the family doctor, “she's making it devilishly uncomfortable for me … She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women; and—you understand—we meet in the morning at the breakfast table” (65). It is by withholding herself sexually, then, that Edna exercises the “eternal rights of women” in insisting that she has a self and that she owns that self.

The freedom to withhold oneself has its complement in the freedom to give oneself. No longer sleeping with—or even living with—her husband, Edna declares herself free to have sex with whomever she chooses. She tells Robert, “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose” (107). Edna supposes that her self-giving is chosen because she has presumed the choice of not giving—she has made her motherhood voluntary. Adele, in contrast, is the mother who never withholds and thus cannot choose but to give. Will and intention seem to be with Edna, whereas Adele exercises no will (and has no self). Yet Adele's giving is not an involuntary and therefore selfless reflex, but a consciously and intentionally developed identity. Adele is Grand Isle's greatest exponent of the “role” of “mother-woman,” a role that is produced through deliberate public staging (10). First presented to Edna as a beautiful vision of the “Madonna,” Adele produces her maternity through public discourse. Her children are “thoughts” brought out in speech: Adele “thinks” (out loud) of “a fourth one” and, after giving birth to it, implores Edna, in a phrase that Edna will not be able to get out of her mind, to “think of the children, oh think of them” (110).

“Madame Ratignolle had been married seven years. About every two years she had a baby. At that time she … was beginning to think of a fourth one. She was always talking about her ‘condition.’ Her ‘condition’ was in no way apparent, and no one would have known a thing about it but for her persistence in making it the subject of conversation” (11). Adele produces her “role” of “mother-woman” by thinking and provoking thought, but it is impossible to determine whether Adele thinks about getting pregnant; whether, that is, she practices self-ownership and voluntary motherhood by withholding herself from sex. The two-year intervals between her pregnancies might result from chance, or they might represent intentional spacing that keeps Adele in or nearly in the “condition” that provides her identity. This ambiguity characterizes the “condition” of motherhood that Adele is “always” producing for herself. Motherhood is a “role” and therefore consciously produced and paraded. Yet the intention and will that are used to stage the role conflict with its content, for the role of mother demands selflessness: the mother-women of Grand Isle “efface themselves as individuals” (10). Motherhood is never voluntary or involuntary. If motherhood is a social role that Adele intentionally inhabits, it is also a condition that she can never actually choose, since intending to become pregnant cannot make her so. Thus, motherhood has a kind of built-in selflessness that is dramatically expressed in the scene when Adele, who is usually in control of her presence, becomes pathetically hysterical and paranoic during labor and childbirth. Here, Adele's intentional embrace of motherhood gets its force from the unwilled nature of the “torture” that it attempts to appropriate. Hardly able to speak after her ordeal in childbirth, Adele whispers in an “exhausted” voice, “think of the children, Edna” (109).¹⁶

Adele and Edna embody the two poles of motherhood: Adele is the “mother-woman” and Edna is “not a mother-woman” (15, 10). The axis of motherhood gives Edna her original sense of identity. What makes her “not a mother-woman” is her refusal to “give” herself for her children. Unlike Adele, Edna does not embrace the role. Her motherhood seems arbitrary, externally imposed and unwilled, “a responsibility which she had blindly assumed.” She is “fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She [will] sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she [will] sometimes forget them” (20). Her “half-remembered” experience of childbirth is an “ecstasy” and a “stupor” (109, 108). Edna's refusal to give herself as a mother, rather than making her the controller and proprietor of her life, entails the passivity of thoughtlessness. In refusing to be a mother-woman she absents herself from the motherhood that is thus all the more arbitrarily thrust upon her.

Indeed, Edna is inescapably a mother. Motherhood is what Edna withholds and thus she, too, is essentially a “mother-woman.” Adele's presence is a provocation and reminder of the self-constituting function of motherhood. Adele's selflessness is an inducement to Edna to identify a self to give. For Edna, who “becom[es] herself” by “daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world” (57), the friendship with Adele is “the most obvious … influence” in the loosening of Edna's “mantle of reserve” (57, 14-15). The Creole community recognizes no private sphere. Adele's sexual and reproductive value is already located in the sphere of public exchange (or, the public is already like the private: the Creoles are like “one big family”) (11). In this Creole openness, Edna is inspired to resituate her sexual exchange value in an economy of public circulation.

“The candor of [Adele's] whole existence, which every one might read,” is part of a Creole lack of prudery that allows for the open circulation of stories about sex and childbirth. With “profound astonishment” Edna reads “in secret and solitude” a book that “had gone the rounds” and was openly discussed at table. “Never would Edna Pontellier forget the shock with which she heard Madame Ratignolle relating to old Monsieur Farival the harrowing story of one of her accouchements, withholding no intimate detail. She was growing accustomed to like shocks, but she could not keep the mounting color back from her cheeks” (11). The candor of Adele's motherhood provokes blushes that simultaneously constitute Edna's reserve and “give her away” to the public. Her body, whether sunburned or blushing, is red from an exposure that privatizes and valorizes that body as her domestic, private attributes—sexuality, modesty, reproduction—are manifested as social value.

Adele has nothing to hide because her body underneath her clothes is manifestly social wealth. Her bareness is as ornamentally “beautiful” as her ornamented, clothed self. The reserved, private, domestic self of Adele reveals itself to Edna as the valuable product of circulation, and this revelation prompts Edna to explore her own possessive privacy. She becomes aware of having “thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They belonged to her and were her own” (48). Her erotic longings belong in this category. “Edna often wondered at one propensity which sometimes had inwardly disturbed her without causing any outward show or manifestation on her part” (18). This is a propensity to become silently infatuated with various men. These “silent” possessions of the self are owned in a way most clearly illustrated in the story of Edna's greatest infatuation, whose object was a “great tragedian.”

The picture of the tragedian stood enframed upon her desk. Anyone may possess the portrait of a tragedian without exciting suspicion or comment. (This was a sinister reflection which she cherished.) In the presence of others she expressed admiration for his exalted gifts, as she handed the photograph around and dwelt upon the fidelity of the likeness. When alone she sometimes picked it up and kissed the cold glass passionately.

(19)

Edna's comment upon the fidelity of the likeness recapitulates the book's opening, in which Leonce's anxiety about Edna's lapse from recognizability, and his restoration of her recognizability via the wedding rings, consists of a discourse that constantly remembers and reinscribes her as a sign of him in his proprietary office. Her “fidelity” in this marital, possessive sense is her recognizability as such a sign. Edna's photograph is to Edna as Edna is to Leonce. It represents her possessive identity, her selfhood as an owner (thus there is a mirrorlike quality in the “cold glass” which shows her herself kissing herself). The photograph embodies and reflects Edna's erotic desire for the tragedian. It objectifies her sexuality in an image that is handed around, praised for its “fidelity,” and kissed in private.

Like Adele, the photograph concretizes erotic value that is both publicly produced and privately owned. The erotic availability and desirability of the actor whose photograph “anyone might possess” is a product of reproduction and circulation, as Edna's own kisses are incited by and followed by the circulation of the object. The mode of owning it is “handing it around” while she praises the “fidelity” of the likeness. That is, she assumes an individual possessive relationship to the photograph only in the context of its possession by any number of other owners, whose possession produces the “sinister reflection” of her own possessive, cherishing privacy. But Edna's position as an owner is not that of Adele's husband—or of her own. Edna gives up possession in order to have this possessive relationship. In praising the “fidelity of the likeness” she does not praise its likeness to her but emphasizes that the photograph represents and thus “belongs to” its original—a man whose inaccessibility makes her infatuation “hopeless.” Edna can see her photograph as property only by seeing it as male property—just as her own hands, in their function as signs of Leonce's ownership of her, appear detachable and therefore ownable. Yet the absence of Edna in what the photograph represents allows her to imagine a possessive self that is somehow hidden and concealed—and therefore her own. Alone with her photograph, she imagines it circulating. Circulating it, she is able to imagine being secretly alone with it. In her ownership of the photograph, Edna establishes her possessive relationship to her sexuality.

“I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose,” says Edna to Robert (106-107). She has withheld herself from her husband in order to give herself. Instead of being property “to dispose of or not,” she intends to be property that is necessarily disposed of. The forms of value in which Edna exchanges herself are the duties and functions of the woman and wife—female sexual service, motherhood, and the performance of wifely domestic/social amenities. Edna reprivatizes and reserves this value by giving up her social and domestic duties as the lady of the house, by moving out of the impressive family home into a private domestic space, the “pigeon house” (91), and by withholding sex from her husband. This reserved self is what she gives away at her “grand dinner,” when she launches her sexual exchange value into wider circulation.

Whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself. “I shall give a grand dinner before I leave the old house!” Edna exclaimed.

(80)

At the dinner, the “glittering circlet” of Edna's wedding ring (57) is now her crown.

“Something new, Edna?” exclaimed Miss Mayblunt, with lorgnette directed toward a magnificent cluster of diamonds that sparkled, that almost sputtered, in Edna's hair. …

“… a present from my husband. … I may as well admit that this is my birthday. … In good time I expect you to drink my health. Meanwhile, I shall ask you to begin with this cocktail, composed … by my father in honor of Sister Janet's wedding.”

(86)

Her wedding rings had “sparkled,” but the tiara (a conventional adornment of the “young matron”) “sputters.” This dinner marks the exploding of the intramarriage market, in which she repeatedly sells herself to the same man, into the public market, in which she circulates as the owner of her own sexual exchange value. In its very conception, the dinner collapses the private and public: “though Edna had spoken of the dinner as a very grand affair, it was in truth a very small affair and very select” (85). The absent beloved, Robert, is represented by Victor, his flirtatious younger brother. Flanking Edna are representatives of two modes of the market in sex value: Arobin, the gambler and playboy, represents adulterous and extramarital serial liaisons, while Monsieur Ratignolle enjoys the quasi-organic bond of Creole marriage.

The wealth of the Pontellier household is conspicuously displayed and offered to the guests. On the table “there were silver and gold … and crystal which glittered like the gems which the women wore” (86). The women, like the accoutrements, are presented as forms of wealth, and Edna is the queen among them. In her diamond crown, she both embodies and reigns over Leonce's riches. This dinner at which, like all women under exogamy, she leaves “the old house” is a version of the woman-giving potlatch, the marriage feast at which the father gives away the virgin daughter. The cocktail “composed” by the father for the daughter Janet's wedding is explicitly compared by Edna's lover Arobin to the gift of Edna herself: “it might not be amiss to start out by drinking the Colonel's health in the cocktail which he composed, on the birthday of the most charming of women—the daughter whom he invented” (87). Edna is thus the gift not just of Leonce, who makes her into a form of wealth by marking her as value, but of her father, too; that is, she is a bride. As a bride, she is an invention—man-made, brought into the world for, by, and on the occasion of the staging of ownership in the conspicuous consumption of a wedding/potlatch.

An “invention,” Edna is thoroughly representational. As a sign of value she is hailed as a sign of her father's wealth of inventiveness in making signs/wealth. The dinner dramatizes the richness of her market-determined transformations: ceremonial drink, invention, queen, luxurious gift. To say that it is her “birthday” is to say that her self is born through exchange and consists of these multiple signs which circulate in the market. What Edna wears marks her as value:

The golden shimmer of Edna's satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. It was the color of her skin, without the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh. There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance … which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.

(88)

The gold of her dress makes reference to the value in which she is robed. The lace “encircling” her shoulders refers to the skin which at the novel's opening effects Edna's transformation into “surplus.” It is as if the lace is an extra skin—a conspicuously surplus skin—which in its decorative insubstantiality mirrors the meaning of Edna's skin. But the lace is not a true mirror. It points out the superior capacity of the “real” skin to change, to have “myriad tints” which allow it to be continually dissolved and recreated as a sign of value.

Edna as a sign of value is the referent of all the surrounding signs of value. She sits at the head of the table in her crown like “the regal woman, the one who rules, … who stands alone,” as if she were the principle (and principal) of value that reigns over all its manifestations—the gold, silver, crystal, gems, and delicacies. Now Edna is like Adele, the regal woman who has the “grace and majesty which queens are … supposed to possess” (14). And like Adele, who is tortured and “exhausted” by childbirth, Edna experiences the complement of regal power in the exhausted passivity that overcomes her after the dinner, when the celebration of private wealth moves into the realization of value through the ceremonial enactment of breakage and loss.

Edna leaves the Pontellier house with Arobin, who pauses outside the door of the “old house” to break off a spray of jessamine, enacting this defloration. He offers it to Edna: “No; I don't want anything,” she answers. Emptied, she says she feels as if “something inside of me had snapped.” This metaphorical defloration empties Edna of the erotic desire whose ownership constitutes her selfhood. Edna's shoulders are bare of the encircling lace and Arobin caresses them. Edna is passive, but Arobin feels the “response of her flesh,” which, in its consecration to value, embodies the sexuality that is created in circulation. Now, after Edna's ceremonial “self-giving,” this eroticism no longer constitutes a sensation that Edna can appropriate as her own desire (91).

The loss of the self in maternal bloodshedding is enacted at the end of the dinner when the ceremony changes from a potlatch to a sacred, sacrificial rite. The desirous Mrs. Highcamp crowns Victor with a garland of yellow and red roses, effecting his magical transformation into a bacchanalian “vision of Oriental beauty.” One of the transfixed guests mutters Swinburne under his breath: “There was a graven image of Desire / Painted with red blood on a ground of gold.” This “graven image,” like Edna's photograph, reflects her desire. Victor publicly sings the secret song that expresses the production of Edna's “private” desire as a suspicious reflection of circulation, si tu savais ce que tes yeux me disent (“if you knew what your eyes are saying to me”) (90). She reacts with such consternation that she breaks her wine glass, and the contents—either red or gold, like the roses and the graven image—flow over Arobin and Mrs. Highcamp. Arobin has consecrated the evening's drinks as analogues of Edna, who has invited the guests to “drink her health”—that is, drink her—on her “birthday.” In involuntarily shattering the glass, which, like the “cold glass” covering the photo, contains a possessive reflection of her value, Edna shatters the “mantle of reserve,” symbolically releasing the maternal blood that constitutes her value.

The maternal quality of her self-giving—its involuntary and selfless aspects—overwhelms Edna again some time after the potlatch when, just as she is about to “give” herself to Robert, Edna is called away to witness Adele enduring the agonies of childbirth. The sight of Adele's “torture” overwhelms Edna (as does Adele's exhausted plea to “think of the children”), leaving her “stunned and speechless” (109-111). When she returns to her little house, Robert is gone forever. Deprived of the chance to “give” herself to her desire, she spends the night thinking of her children. Later, she walks to the beach from which she will swim to her death “not thinking of these things” (113). Withholding herself from motherhood, insisting on her right to refuse to “sacrifice” herself for her children, Edna owns herself. In the logic of self-ownership and voluntary motherhood, motherhood is itself the ground on which woman claims ownership of her sexual value. Edna seizes the most extreme prerogatives of this self-ownership, withholding herself from motherhood by withholding herself from life and thus giving herself in a maternal dissolution.

Edna's death in the ocean dramatizes the self-ownership rhetoric of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton argues that “self-sovereignty” is the existential birthright of both women and men, for every human being “launched on the sea of life” is unique and “alone.” But women's self-sovereignty specifically denotes sexual self-determination.¹⁷ And women—that is, mothers—earn a special presumptive self-sovereignty: “alone [woman] goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world; no one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.”¹⁸ At the moment of extreme maternal giving, the moment when motherhood takes her life, the woman owns her self by withholding herself from motherhood.

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 4. All further references are given in the text and refer to this edition.

2. Many critics who have discussed the search for selfhood in The Awakening argue that Chopin opposes selfhood to socially imposed feminine roles that entail passivity, relative identity, and other-centeredness. See, for example, Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1969) and Margaret Culley, “Edna Pontellier: ‘A Solitary Soul,’” in The Awakening, ed. Culley, pp. 224-228. Susan Rosowski and Cynthia Griffin Wolff argue that Chopin depicts the difficulty of resisting the infantilizing, fantasy-prone narcissism encouraged by the feminine role in order to achieve autonomy in the realm of the real. See Susan Rosowski, “The Novel of Awakening,” Genre 12 (Fall 1979): 313-332, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” American Quarterly 25 (October 1973): 449-471. Sandra M. Gilbert locates the achievement of selfhood outside of the existing, male-dominated social order. Chopin's heroine, Gilbert argues, achieves symbolic “rebirth” by departing for a mythical matriarchal realm. See Sandra M. Gilbert, “Introduction: The Second Coming of Aphrodite,” in The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 7-33.

3. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” in Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken, 1981), p. 249. In this speech Stanton gave in 1892 on the occasion of her regination from the presidency of the suffrage movement, Stanton argued for full civil rights for woman on the grounds of her aloneness and existential “self-sovereignty.” In its argument and rhetoric, this speech of Stanton's is strikingly similar to Chopin's presentation of female selfhood (The Awakening's original title was A Solitary Soul). Like the self Chopin's heroine discovers, Stanton's self is an absolute, possessive self whose metaphorical situation is that of a lone individual “on a solitary island” or “launched on the sea of life” (247-248). In Stanton and in Chopin, female subjectivity and women's rights are grounded in absolute selfhood. For an account of early English feminists' commitment to absolute selfhood, see Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (Spring 1988): 24-39.

4. Lucinda Chandler, “Motherhood,” Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, May 13, 1871. Quoted in William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 89. Leach sees the drive for women's property rights as an attempt to codify self-ownership through property law. He writes, “Chandler believed so strongly in the principle of self-ownership that she wanted it fixed in the law; she joined the moral educationists of Washington in an attempt to repeal the law of couverture in the District of Columbia and to give every woman the ‘legal … custody and control of her person in wifehood to govern according to her wisdom and instincts the maternal office and protect her child … from the dangers of selfish passion, alcoholism and vice’” (89).

5. Ibid.

6. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 109. On voluntary motherhood, see Gordon, Woman's Body, chap. 5, “Voluntary Motherhood: The Beginnings of the Birth Control Movement,” pp. 95-115. William Leach writes, “by the 1870s, self-ownership … had become the stock in trade of feminist thinking on birth control” (Leach, True Love, p. 92). Daniel Scott Smith notes that “the theme of the wife's right to control her body and her fertility was not uncommon” in Victorian America. Smith quotes Henry C. Wright as follows: “it is a woman's right, not her privilege, to control the surrender of her person; she should have pleasure or not allow access unless she wanted a child.” Henry C. Wright, Marriage and Parentage (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1853), pp. 252-255, quoted in Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Lois Banner and Mary Hartman (New York, 1974), pp. 119-136, 129. Smith also quotes Dido Lewis on the advocacy of the Moral Education Society for the right “of a wife to be her own person, and her sacred right to deny her husband if need be; and to decide how often and when she should become a mother.” Dido Lewis, Chastity, or Our Secret Sins (New York: Canfield Publishing Company, 1888), p. 18, quoted in Smith, “Family Limitation,” p. 129.

7. Gordon, Woman's Body, pp. 106-111.

8. Ibid., pp. 109-111.

9. Ibid., p. 110.

10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: The Economic Factor between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, ed. Carl Degler (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 86. For a twentieth-century critique of the market in woman, see Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, 157-210) p. 177.

11. Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” p. 247.

12. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan Company, 1899). Veblen argues that the purpose of the ownership of personal property is to achieve social status (or “reputability”); all property is a version of that original property whose “usefulness” was to serve as a trophy marking the “prepotence,” or social superiority, of the trophy's owner (23, 29). Objects that are appropriated for use do not cause reputability or prepotence to accrue to their possessors, and such objects are not owned in the conventional sense but are instead subject to “use-appropriation” (23). Ownership, and the reputable self it produces, exists only when the community has reached a point of social and economic organization that allows for the production of a surplus. The first form taken by this “margin worth fighting for” is woman. The original form of ownership was the ownership of women by men. Veblen's account depends upon the idea that woman is already property, for the first ownership came about when the men of one tribe stole the women of another tribe in order to hold them as trophies (20, 23). To be a woman, then, is to be an object of exchange, a social product, surplus. In Veblen's famous characterization of the contemporary domestic ownership system, the bourgeois wife advertises her status as surplus in her role as the chief item of household property as she earns “reputability” for her husband through vicarious consumption and by performing vicarious leisure (usually in the form of nonproductive domestic and social functions) (65-67). This reading of Veblen suggests that ownership and the male selfhood it constitutes are produced by and reflect not the self but others, whose over-shifting perceptions and positions create and destroy the effect of reputability and thus of selfhood. Surplus is a product of social/economic organization; to own (surplus) is thus to establish a mediated relationship with the world. Like Veblen, Chopin pokes fun at the figure of the male owner whose relationship to the world is thus mediated. In the opening pages of The Awakening, Leonce rather ridiculously governs himself according to his notions of property rights; for example, he grants the caged birds the right to sing because they are owned by Mme. Lebrun and grants himself the right to retreat to “his own cottage” (3). The surplus and mediating character of personal property is manifested in the woman's femininity. While femininity reflects the oppressive system that makes woman property, for Edna, the unstable, nonessential, and representative character of her status as Leonce's property becomes suggestive of the possibility of a self-determination that paradoxically remains within the bounds of the male ownership system: she can herself put her wedding rings on or take them off.

13. Margaret Culley, “The Context of The Awakening,” in The Awakening, ed. Culley, p. 118.

14. Leach, True Love, p. 175.

15. Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” p. 247.

16. Motherhood (which includes the abstention from motherhood) is thus a form of a speculative risk taking. The intention to become a mother is the kind of “weak” intention that Walter Benn Michaels connects with “acts that take place in the market, such as speculating in commodities.” See chapter 7, “Action and Accident: Photography and Writing,” in Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 237. Michaels argues that for the self in the market, “self-possession” and “self-interest” are grounded in “the possibility of intention and action coming apart” (244, 241). My discussion of the logic of voluntary motherhood—like Michaels's own example of Lily Bart as a self-speculating self—emphasizes that this self-interest is gendered. For women, self-speculation is sexual; that is to say that sexuality is the content of the female self in the market. Contrary to what Michaels claims, Lily is “a victim of patriarchal capitalism” in a way that the male entrepreneurs in the novel are not (240). The “voluntariness” of female self-speculation is merely an effect of the commodity system, which constructs value along the polarities of accessibility and rarity. The woman cannot choose whether to speculate or what to speculate in; by being a woman she is already sexually at risk. The speculative risk taken by Lily Bart in the marriage market includes the risk of withholding sexual accessibility from the market—a risk that results in her death (complete with hallucinated motherhood). “Voluntary motherhood” concretizes female self-speculation as the risk of pregnancy—which is the risk of life—and points to the enforced nature of female self-speculation by identifying all women as mothers.

17. Ellen Carol Dubois writes, “everywhere [Stanton] lectured, she held parlor meetings of women only on ‘marriage and maternity.’ … Her central point was that women ought to be able to control their own sexual lives, a right which she called ‘individual’ or ‘self’ sovereignty.” Ellen Carol Dubois, Introduction in Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, p. 95.

18. Ibid., pp. 248, 251.