SOURCE: Taylor, Walter and Fineman, Jo Ann. “Kate Chopin: Pre-Freudian Freudian.” Southern Literary Journal 29, no. 1 (fall 1996): 35-45.

[In the following essay, Taylor and Fineman examine psychoanalytic elements in The Awakening.]

As Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier sits contemplating the sea in The Awakening (1899), her friend Adèle Ratignolle asks a simple question: “Of whom—of what are you thinking?” The question evokes a complex response. Edna replies that she was thinking of a day during her Kentucky childhood when she was walking through a meadow; to a “very little girl” that meadow “seemed as big as the ocean.” And she remembers that she “threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out at the water.” Now, at age 28, Edna does not remember why she was walking through that meadow, only that “I felt as if I must walk on forever, without coming to the end of it” (16-17).

Edna's feeling of euphoria, of a connection with matter which extends on to infinity, suggests what Freud was later to describe as the “oceanic state,” a period of early childhood when the infant, unaware of the boundaries between her own body, her mother's, and her environment, identifies erotically with all three. Edna, who has lost her mother at an early age, is at the time of her memory long past the oceanic state, old enough to walk through the meadow alone.¹ What she is experiencing appears to be a “screen memory,” a memory which masks an earlier memory; her walk through the tall, sea-like grass, moving caressingly as though to her dead mother's touch, reflects a wish both to return to the symbiosis of the “oceanic state” and to restore her mother's soothing arms. And most significantly, the memory of that grassy field surfaces in the adult Edna while she is talking with Adèle, a friend to whom she has given the patronizing label of “mother woman.”

Too little attention has been paid to the significance of Edna's memory, which suggests a great deal about Chopin's remarkable understanding of depth psychology. Perhaps her most important achievement in The Awakening's to have conceived, as Freud later did, the notion of an unconscious mind which dominates her character's actions. Edna is, in fact, the paradigm of a pioneering map of the human psyche for which Chopin, with her pre-Freudian perspectives, was forced to imagine both the contours and the vocabulary. It is a map which existed in no previous work of literature.²

From the opening pages of The Awakening, Edna's actions are shown to be controlled by unconscious forces. It is a given of modern psychodynamic child psychiatry that the early loss of a parent is an overwhelming determinant of adult character. Perhaps because the trauma of her mother's death is so deeply embedded in Edna's unconscious, Chopin chose not to dramatize the event directly; the text supplies only the information that her mother had “died when … [Edna and her sisters] were quite young” (17). But Edna's adult responses to this loss illustrate Chopin's acute understanding of the dynamics of repression and avoidance. Edna is able to retrieve her memory of the sea of grass only after a series of evasions. Her first response to Adèle's question is denial: she replies “with a start” that she is thinking of “nothing”—then quickly adds, “I was not really conscious of thinking anything.” When she seeks consciously to “retrace her thoughts,” she realizes this too is untrue. And when she finally admits she was thinking of that day in Kentucky, she is still unaware why; she insists that it is “without any connection I can trace,” then contradicts herself by saying that it was “the hot wind [of the sea] beating in my face” that was the connection (16-17).

Edna's resistance to the memory thus attests to the scars the loss of her mother has created; but her trauma, Chopin is aware, concerns more than the loss of a parent. Childhood psychoanalytic psychology is clear on the point that any child would contrive reasons for such a loss and that such a child might blame the surviving parent; the younger the child, moreover, the more irrational might be the response. Edna's trauma is exacerbated by the fact that there may be an element of truth in such fantasies. In a passage remarkable for its directness, Chopin's narrator comments that Edna's dominating father “had coerced his own wife into her grave”—a fact of which her father himself “was perhaps unaware” (68).

If Edna's childhood memories of her mother remain only in screen memories, she is supremely conscious of her father, whose portrait is vividly detailed. A former Confederate colonel who tells war stories with himself as the hero, her father is a profane, hard-drinking, Bible-quoting Presbyterian who, her husband Léonce has heard, “used to atone for his week-day sins with his Sunday devotions” (63). His notion of marriage remains patriarchal and controlling. “You are too lenient” with Edna, he tells Léonce. “Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard. …” For the Colonel, that is “the only way to manage a wife” (68).

Still, despite the detail with which her father's portrait is realized, Edna's detached attitude indicates the familiar process of evasion at work. The narrator's comment that Edna is “not very warmly or deeply attached” to her only surviving parent seems calculatedly inadequate, as does Edna's response when he visits her in New Orleans. “She discovered that he interested her,” the narrator relates, “though she realized that he might not interest her long.” What that means to Edna at the time is that “for the first time in her life she felt as if she were thoroughly acquainted” with her father; yet when he leaves after a brief argument the narrator comments that she “was glad to be rid of [him] … with his padded shoulders, his Bible reading, his ‘toddies’ and his ponderous oaths” (65-66, 68).

Padded shoulders, toddies, oaths: these are vexations; what Edna has chosen not to be acquainted with, the text implies, is that these are symptoms of a poisonous family gestalt from which her sisters must have suffered as much as she. The most obvious result of her mother's death is that they have been raised in a repressively patriarchal, masculine-dominated home. The portraits of the sisters, again sketched only in the barest outline, suggest Edna's evasion of the problem. Edna has never been close to either sister. According to Léonce, the younger sister, Janet, “is something of a vixen” (63). Edna and Janet “had quarreled a good deal,” the narrator relates, “through force of unfortunate habit”—a statement which suggests both are in some sense victims of the situation; but the mature Edna sees no reason to attend Janet's wedding. The older sister, Margaret, appears to have served as a rather unsympathetic mother-substitute for the two girls; she took over the role of housewife after their mother's death, and the situation has shaped her character. She is “matronly and dignified,” the narrator relates, “probably from having assumed matronly and housewifely responsibilities too early in life”; thus “Margaret was not effusive; she was practical” (17). She also stands for the repressive qualities Edna and others associate with the father's Presbyterian religion. According to Léonce, “Margaret … has all the Presbyterianism undiluted” (63).

These teasing hints constitute all of the narrative's significant information about Edna's sisters; and again, Edna's bland disinterest suggests her deep-rooted repression of the traumas of her childhood. There is a story here that cries out for understanding: a three-daughter family presided over by a father who thinks “authority, coercion are what is needed” with a wife, who has “coerced” the mother into an early grave. In such a family it would be no wonder that a younger daughter was perceived as a “vixen” or that an older daughter, burdened with assuming a mother's role without a mother as a model, imitated the father's remote, authoritarian notion of parenthood. That Edna appears programmed to evade such understanding suggests much about the formation of her psyche. Scanty as this information is, however, Chopin has provided significant guidelines for Edna's emerging character. Not only has Edna suffered the loss of her mother, removing the model and primary identification figure, but the practical and (by inference) distant and effectively cold Margaret never offers a substitute object for feminine identification.³ The youthful Edna has thus become fixed in her longing for and symbolic search for reunion with the lost mother.

Predictably, she is a lonely, bookish child who shrinks from familiarity with other girls. “Edna had had an occasional girl friend,” the narrator comments, “but whether accidentally or not, they seemed to have been all of one type—the self-contained.” It is equally suggestive that embedded in these early memories are fantasies which indicate a propensity to displace her libidinal needs onto a male other than her father. Another incident—“perhaps it was when she traversed the ocean of waving grass”⁴—is a childhood experience of fantasied love of a particular man: “a dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky.” Edna “could not leave his presence … nor remove her eyes from his face” (17, 18).

Bereft of her mother, raised by a father who responds to femininity only by refusing to recognize it, Edna thus creates a fantasy of a man who affirms her as a female. This is, clearly, a defensive attempt at restitution, not only to be comforted by the erotic fantasy of the tender “sad-eyed cavalry officer,” but to find a pre-oedipal object attachment as a restitution for the mother. This childhood fantasy, which soon “melted imperceptibly out of her existence” (31), resurfaces in another avatar when Edna is “a little miss, just merging into her teens.” Her new focus is an “engaged young man” from a neighboring plantation whose fiancée is a friend of Margaret's; the result is predictably “bitter” because it provokes the realization that “she herself was nothing” to the young man (18). For Chopin, the situation is a paradigm of repression and self-devaluation. The two experiences have the common feature that the relationships are, per se, unrealizable. Moreover, Edna has now reconstructed an oedipal triangle, a reparative, defensive fantasy which allows her safely to yearn for the “engaged young man” and at the same time to consolidate further her self-image of nothingness and faulty feminine identity. In this way, the narrator comments, “at a very early period, she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which comforms, the inward life which questions” (14).

The situation foreshadows a final fantasied relationship, an imagined love affair with “the great tragedian.” Never identified by name in the narration,⁵ this misty figure, whose photograph she favors with secret kisses, has the added but inevitable feature that he is beyond any personal contact: a blank page on which to project her fantasies. As the narrator makes plain, Chopin is well aware of the reality of the needs that underlie such fantasies. “The persistence of the infatuation lent it an aspect of genuineness. The hopelessness of it colored it with the lofty tones of a great passion” (18).

It is Léonce Pontellier's misfortune—and Edna's—that she has chosen him as a player in her effort to repress these fantasies. “It was in the midst of her secret great passion [for the tragedian] that she met him,” the narrator relates. When Léonce, twelve years older than Edna, falls in love with her, she decides that although “the acme of bliss, which would have been a marriage with the tragedian, was not for her in this world,” still, “as the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she … could take her place … in the world of reality.” Léonce, in short, has the misfortune to be cast in the role of “reality”; to Edna at the time of their marriage, he thus symbolizes the act of denial, “closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams” (18-19).

The terms of Edna's marriage with Léonce are illustrated in the fact that she realizes “with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection, thereby threatening its dissolution” (19). Léonce is a representation of the oedipal father of her fantasy, a displacement from the original father, safely defended against by the splitting off of sexual passion. He is also a narcissistic object choice; she is drawn to him because he is a man who “worshiped” her, thus placing her in the position of the woman who is admired and treasured. Edna, in choosing Léonce, has finalized her psychological split between “that outward existence which comforts” and “the inward life which questions.”

Edna's “unaccountable satisfaction” thus consists in the fact that by choosing a man twelve years her senior, a substitute for her remote, passionless father, she appears to have sealed off the threat from her incapacity for a mature, post-oedipal male object attachment. But Chopin, aware of the ambiguities of repression and fixation, at least suggests another reason for that “unaccountable satisfaction”: by choosing a man whose very existence drives her erotic projections underground, she protects those projections rather than banishing them, insuring their continuance as fantasies. No wonder that when Edna rejects her husband and her marriage, she turns to art as a possible replacement; not yet committed to painting, she has already created an extended sketch of that part of her experience which she has been fated consciously to evade and deny. And significantly, the immediate agent of Edna's awakening is not Robert Lebrun, to whom she ascribes it, but a woman who is also an artist, the pianist Mlle. Reisz.

Reisz strikingly resembles Edna's childhood girlfriends who were “all of one type—the self-contained.” Like Edna, she is a woman alienated from Creole society, though for different reasons: the pianist is singularly unequipped with the physical and social charms society demands. A “homely woman, with a small weazened face,” possessed of “absolutely no taste in dress,” unmarried and “no longer young,” Reisz could easily have become a basket case of inhibition and asexuality (25). Instead, she has channeled her deepest fantasies into art and creative expression, where she has succeeded brilliantly. Her success has allowed her a freedom possible for few women. She lives alone in her Bienville Street apartment. To many she is “a disagreeable little woman … who had quarrelled with almost everyone”; but this reputation, Edna understands, is in part “owing to a temper which was self-assertive” as well as to “a disposition to trample upon the rights of others” (25). Reisz's strength, in short, comes through as a social as well as an artistic triumph. In addition to talent, she tells Edna, “the artist must possess the courageous soul.” For Reisz, that means “the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies” (61).

If this self-isolated woman has achieved such status, it is because her art has provided her a way to channel impulses that Edna has hitherto dealt with through evasion. But the way she speaks to Edna is not in words; it is through that art. “You are the only one worth playing for” (45), she tells Edna at Grand Isle. The irony of that statement is that her art conveys impulses Edna is ill-equipped to handle. What Edna hears is “an impress of the abiding truth” (44); and that truth is precisely the truth screened by her memory of that sea of grass. All summer, Robert has struggled, unsuccessfully, to teach her to swim. Her failures are clearly connected to her buried memories of the oceanic phase and the lost mother. “A certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water, unless there was a hand near by that might reach out and reassure her” (27). Reisz's music speaks to the source of these fears: “… the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her … body” (26). Now, having received the ocean-like “impress of the abiding truth” from another woman, she no longer needs the support of this nearby hand. She discovers that she has power over the sea.

The change signals a significant psychic event: a reunion with those forces the sea symbolizes. Edna literally shouts for joy: “A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her soul.” And her response recalls the child's first discoveries of its ability to control its body in the outer environment: “… she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone.” But predictably, her response also resembles a child's first ecstatic sense of omnipotence. She reacts both “boldly and with overconfidence,” the narrator relates. “As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (27-28).

Edna's reaction illustrates another aspect of Chopin's perception of the psychology of loss. The fascination of memories of the oceanic state is that, because the child has not marked off the symbiotic boundaries between itself and others, the world of the self appears unlimited and grandiose. The irony of the adult's effort to recreate that world is that, while the movement of the psyche appears to be outward and assertive, it is in fact inward and repressive. As Edna swims outward toward the sea, she moves inward toward that childhood vision of the sea of grass. For the present, Edna manages to return safely to shore, but the problem remains.

For Chopin, the very definition of “awakening” can thus be understood as a reversal, as in dream work. Edna is, in fact, slowly but inexorably regressing toward attempted symbiotic union with the lost mother. Mlle. Reisz has been a transient revival of the maternal object, a woman who gives her music to Edna as a mother gives to and nurtures a beloved infant; but such restitutions for early lost love objects often cannot be sustained. Edna has no art to channel her passions as Mlle. Reisz has and no image of adult female conduct except the “mother women” she despises. “The past,” she feels, “offered no lesson which she was willing to heed” (44).

Chopin's acute sensitivity to unconscious life shows brilliantly here; the past, for Edna, is bereft of a maternal feminine identification figure, leaving her only with unresolved pre-oedipal longings to merge with a love object, rather than to experience individuation and psychic autonomy. It is in this context that Edna's awakening focuses on two younger men who appeal to her thwarted adult female identity: Robert Lebrun and Alcée Arobin. Each affair, in its own way, is an effort to recreate the compensatory fantasies of her youth.

Her flirtation with Robert is another version of the hopeless love affairs with the cavalry officer, the engaged young man, and the tragedian: “… she recognized anew the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman” (44). When Robert predictably yields to the mores of his society and rejects her—his parting note reads, “Good-by—because I love you” (106)—those fantasies are stripped away, baring the loveless narcissism of her affair with Alcée Arobin. Alcée represents a further development in her regression and the gradual failure of her fragile defenses. There is none of the affective rapport she feels with Robert. Rather, he appeals to an “animalism that stirred impatiently within her”; “the touch of his lips upon her hands” acts “like a narcotic upon her” (75, 74). It is now clearer than ever that sexuality without loving is the splitting to which Edna has been doomed by the loss of the mother-infant attachment. This is her deepest pathology, and the proof of it is that with Alcée she is able to experience sexual arousal without true attachment to her love object.

Such is the final episode of Edna's ironic awakening: an explicitly sexual one to which her entire history has led her in her twenty-eighth year. It is not, however, the final jolt that edges Edna into despair. That is provided by the one individual who most truly has her interests at heart, the “mother woman” Adèle Ratignole. It is most suggestive that, as Edna sits on the beach and remembers that feminine sea of grass, Chopin has her in the company of the first mature feminine companion of her life.⁶ A significant aspect of Edna's tragedy is that she will be unable to receive the mothering Adèle's friendship offers. The two friends quarrel over Edna's unwillingness to “sacrifice herself for her children”: “a rather heated argument” in which they “did not appear … to be talking the same language” (46). Adèle sees Edna's lack of maturity clearly. “In some ways you seem to me like a child” (91), she tells her. But precisely because the two women are not talking the same language, the pregnant Adèle's affection turns tragic.

To draw Edna to an awareness of the need for such sacrifice, Adèle extracts a promise that Edna will attend her when her time comes. The move brings on the shock that finalizes Edna's regression. Summoned to Adèle's bedside, she experiences “a vague dread.” Her memory reviews her own childbirth experiences, now apparently obscured by anesthesia and denial. “They seemed far away, unreal, and only half remembered.” Fragmented memories surface. “She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain,” then, apparently, unconsciousness, followed by a very different—and ironic—“awakening” from the one aroused in her by Reisz's music and by Robert, “an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being” (104). This curiously detached response reflects Edna's sense of alienation from her own children. Not surprisingly, the familiar process of avoidance sets in. “She began to wish she had not come,” and she struggles to find an excuse to leave. She stays, however, and observes an event which traumatizes her. “With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture.” Adèle's final admonition, “Think of the children,” only adds to the damage. When Edna at last departs she is “still stunned and speechless with emotion” (104). It is in this context that she returns home to find Robert's farewell note.

Edna's shock at the “scene of torture” is a complex matter, and critics have predictably disagreed about its significance. What is clear is that the incident shocks Edna into the self-knowledge that she cannot integrate the split in her personality: “the dual life—that outward existence which conforms” (housewifery, mothering) and “the inward life which questions” (independence, sensuality) (108). The result is that “she understood now clearly what she had meant long ago when she had said … that she … would never sacrifice herself for her children” (108). It is a climactic insight. As Edna's regression—with its consequent sense of emptiness and detachment from love objects—increases and overwhelms her, she realizes that she cannot find a loving attachment to Raoul and Etienne; in Nancy Chodorow's terms, she cannot “reproduce mothering” that she has never experienced. Those children now “appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had … sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days” (108).

Shocked into a final regressive state, Chopin's Edna commits suicide mechanically. She returns to the beach the next day believing that she has “done all the thinking which was necessary.” As she stands naked on the shore she feels “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.” But the infinity the ocean promises is what it has always been, an illusion. Edna's final thoughts are not of the sea which surrounds her, but of the day she walked through the grass remembering the oceanic feelings of infancy. “Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. … The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch” (108-109). The final avatar of Edna's awakening reveals her desire to return to the oceanic phase of her childhood and the embracing arms of the lost mother. But the sea, like her lovers, betrays her at last; its image of infinity masks the destructive force of regression to the inner world of the infantile psyche.

There is, obviously, a great deal more to be said about Chopin's use of depth psychology in The Awakening. It is unfair to Chopin to claim for her a modern knowledge of psychoanalysis or to superimpose on her a twentieth-century vocabulary. Still, her understanding of Edna's psychology reveals her as a true pioneer. Psychoanalytic considerations saturate The Awakening to such a degree that it is impossible to visualize Edna's emergence, or her tragedy, without them. Years before her time, Chopin created in The Awakening a vision of the human psyche that included the unconscious mind and an entire structure of defense mechanisms. Through Edna Pontellier she constructed a central thesis that Freud was in the process of developing: that such unconscious motivations are the driving force in human behavior. And in doing so she anticipated, by three quarters of a century, studies of the effect of inadequate mothering or early mother loss such as that of Chodorow. That her originality has gone virtually unnoticed in this post-Freudian age is a testament to the accuracy of her observations.

Notes

1. Perhaps because Edna's memories of her mother are buried in her unconscious, Chopin never specifies the time sequence between the death of the mother and this childhood memory. Indications of the mother's presence are significantly missing, however, from the description of the day in Kentucky, or from subsequent discussions of her childhood.

2. The names of Freud, Bleuler, and other European psychiatrists of Chopin's time are notable in their absence from Emily Toth's 1990 biography. We know of no study that suggests specific influences of this nature. Cynthia Griffin Wolff's “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening” uses Freud and Laing with insight to speculate about Edna's psychology but never considers the nature or the originality of Chopin's understanding.

3. As Nancy Chodorow succinctly puts it, “Women come to mother because they have been mothered by women” (The Reproduction of Mothering 211).

4. The word “perhaps” signals Edna's avoidance of the significance of the issue; but it also implies that she does connect the memories.

5. Culley writes that the tragedian is “probably Edmund Booth,” emphasizing that “Chopin was a fan of the actor and in 1894 published a review of his letters entitled ‘The Real Edmund Booth’” (18 n.).

6. Hence it is not surprising that when Adèle takes her hand in a moment of closeness, Edna finds the unexpected intimacy “a little confusing.” She is, the narrator relates, “not accustomed to an outward … expression of affection” (17) from a woman, and in Adèle she has met the image of the adoring mother of her fantasies. Nor is it surprising that Edna—no stranger to the arts of evasion—reacts with ambiguity, saddling Adèle with the disparaging label of “mother woman,” a term which suggests her own need to deprecate and deny what she has been deprived of.

Works Cited

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening: An Authoritative Text. Ed. Margo Culley. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1994.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening. American Quarterly 25 (October 1973), 449-71.