[In the following essay, Batten examines Chopin's ambiguity of meaning regarding the notion of illusion in The Awakening.]

Near the end of The Awakening, the protagonist is summoned by her friend Adèle Ratignolle, who is in labor for her fourth child. Although Edna herself has two children, the spectacle of childbirth leaves her shaken, and the kindly Doctor Mandelet insists on walking her home. Both the Doctor and Adèle know that Edna has moved out of her husband's house and possibly returned the attentions of the roué Alcée Arobin, and they may suspect, as the reader knows, that she is about to consummate her long-incubating passion for Robert Lebrun. The trouble, the Doctor tells Edna, is that

“youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature, a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.”

“Yes,” she said. “The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”¹

Of the commentators who for various reasons have extolled Edna's quest for selfhood, none notice, in this crucial interchange when Edna refuses professional help, that she and the Doctor are speaking at cross-purposes.² If by “illusions” they mean not, loosely, “misconceptions” or “delusions,” then they are speaking of the distorting power of imagination, of how certain images harmfully influence perception. But the Doctor is asserting that romantic fictions actually assist instinctual “Nature” to entrap women in the condition which Adèle has just exhibited at its severest, while Edna can only be referring to the habits and assumptions that have sustained her conventional marriage to Léonce Pontellier at the cost of her own passionate nature, which has only recently been awakened. Given the unfailing precision and sang-froid of Kate Chopin's writing, it seems likely that the confusion points to a serious rather than a merely accidental ambivalence.

Doctor Mandelet's diagnosis was the subject of two letters which Kate Chopin purportedly received from London in the autumn of 1899, in the midst of a general outcry against the novel. Rankin, Chopin's first biographer, reprints both letters in full.³ Lady Janet Scammon Young wishes that Mandelet had advised Mr. Pontellier not to “fancy that because you have possessed your wife hundreds of times she necessarily long ago came to entire womanly self knowledge—that your embraces have as a matter of course aroused whatever of passion she may be endowed with.” Had Pontellier helped Edna to distinguish between love and passion, Lady Janet continues, Edna need not have died, but could instead have enriched her marriage with “her passional nature.” With her letter Lady Janet encloses one from Dunrobin Thomson, a consulting physician who warns that “the especial point of a wife's danger when her beautiful, God given womanhood awakes, is that she will save her self-respect by imagining herself in love with the awakener.” If, on the contrary, again assisted by her husband, “she knows perfectly well that it is passion; if she esteems and respects her passional capacity as she does her capacity to be moved by a song or a sonnet, or a great poem, or a word nobly said—she is safe.” Edna, accordingly, could have learned that the fantasies she constructs with Robert Lebrun do not render his attraction fundamentally different from the unembellished lure of Arobin; for, although illusions can dress up passion to look like love, the “passional capacity” can be safely recognized by associating it, not love, with the excitement of music and other arts. Yet Edna's fantasies contain something essential to her, and her imagination is not the free agent that Doctor Thomson would wish. It would be of the greatest interest to have Doctor Thomson's reaction to the contrary case of Emma Bovary, whose faith in romantic illusions renders any reconciliation between her passionate nature and her real world impossible.

Chopin's second biographer, Per Seyersted, adds still another dimension to the problem of illusion. Writing seventy years after the fact, Seyersted was unable to verify that either Lady Janet or Doctor Thomson ever existed, so that although the letters are preserved at the Missouri Historical Society, “we cannot quite exclude the possibility that they may have been falsifications.”⁴ Did the author, stunned and perhaps embarrassed by the effluvia cast by critics upon her somewhat self-indulgent and certainly libidinous protagonist, deviously compose these laudatory missives herself, maintaining that “the essence of the matter lies in the accursed stupidity of men”? Or did Father Rankin, who interviewed many of Chopin's circle and whose research notes were unaccountably lost, intentionally foist bogus documents upon the public, which in 1932 might bring up the old charge of scurrility, requiring a rebuttal stronger than any he could otherwise supply? Whoever abused the limits of illusion in the case, the letters give thoughtful responses to the question of why Edna dies and what could have prevented “that last clean swim.” And while both letters maintain that Doctor Mandelet gives inadequate treatment to Edna's problem, they also point to the suggestive power of illusion for both cause and cure.

Edna's illusions fall into three categories: those suggested to her by other characters, those she creates, and the images associated with her by the author. The third group is equivalent to Edna's real experience, to objective rather than subjective material, a distinction sometimes deliberately blurred by the impressionistic narrative technique but no less crucial for understanding her plight. When Edna, despondent after Robert's withdrawal and apparent abandonment on the night of Mme. Ratignolle's accouchement, casts aside her bathing suit, she feels “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (p. 189). The birth image and the paradoxical feeling of returning to a place and knowing it for the first time are Edna's, but the attendant images are provided by the narrator. Incantatory passages are repeated from chapter six, early in the novel, but now the “seductive” voice and the “soft, close embrace” of the sea are more sinister. The soul is again drawn “to wander in abysses of solitude,” but the earlier “to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation” is dropped from the phrase (pp. 25, 189). Similarly, the wavelets, which “coiled back like slow, white serpents” on the night Edna learns to swim, have become shackles, “coiled like serpents about her ankles” (pp. 47, 189). During labor Mme. Ratignolle's braided hair is “coiled like a golden serpent” (p. 180). Much earlier, the reptilian image appeals to Edna, as she considers Robert's suggestion that they visit Grande Terre, to “climb up the hill to the old fort and look at the little wriggling gold snakes, and watch the lizards sun themselves” (p. 58). The powerful serpent image or uroboros thus surfaces at moments of seduction, childbirth, and death, but only under Edna's control in the first instance. Finally, as Edna begins to swim, she remembers her first exhilarating swim and the sea-like bluegrass meadow where she wandered as a child, “believing that it had no beginning and no end” (p. 190). More memories come as she swims until, on the threshold of eternity,

Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.

(p. 190)

These final images, though consisting of Edna's early memories, have the focus and sensory immediacy of illusions, completing the cycle of life by approximating Edna's return to significant moments in her childhood.

In her analysis, Cynthia Griffin Wolff posits that Edna's childhood shows the development of a schizoid personality, a self-enclosed and self-protective psyche that fears and avoids real intimacy.⁵ Less convincingly, Wolff argues that this solipsism protects an infantile, oral fixation, and that Edna's fascination with the sea betrays a longing to return to the gratifying “oceanic” state of the infant still at one with the mother, still immersed in the amniotic fluid. To make a watertight case, Wolff must ignore several important considerations; Edna, for example, does not perversely leave Robert but is instead called away by the imperious Mme. Ratignolle, who with maddening clairvoyance has perceived that neither he nor Edna may quite live up to the Creole code of conduct. More importantly, Edna's last sensations do not accord with a “regression, back beyond childhood, back into time eternal.”⁶ Instead, they leave her at a time in childhood having special significance for her, which she has in part confided to Mme. Ratignolle in an earlier scene:

At a very early age—perhaps it was when she traversed the ocean of waving grass—she remembered that she had been passionately enamored of a dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky. She could not leave his presence when he was there, nor remove her eyes from his face, which was something like Napoleon's, with a lock of black hair falling across the forehead.

(p. 31)

Edna was subsequently infatuated with a young man engaged to her sister's friend, and still later, as a young woman, “the face and figure of a great tragedian began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses” (p. 32). Wolff shows that this succession of love-objects, each one more illusory than the one previous, naturally leads Edna to marry Pontellier, because “a husband who evoked passion from her might lure the hidden self into the open, tempting Edna to attach her emotions to flesh and blood rather than phantoms.”⁷ After hearing Edna's confidences, however, Mme. Ratignolle is sufficiently uneasy to warn Robert to “let Mrs. Pontellier alone” (p. 35). What finally does and does not happen between Edna and Robert can be understood less as a flight from the realities of flesh and blood than as the result of difficulties with the “phantoms” themselves.

Little Edna was enamored of a man, not an illusion, so intensely that “she could not leave his presence when he was there, nor remove her eyes from his face.” The Freudian critic might well point out that the cavalry officer was a friend of her father and thus a suitable person to whom Edna could transfer powerful Oedipal longings. The other recurring image from this time, the endless sea-field, gives the child a sense of freedom (especially from the gloomy Presbyterianism of her stern father) but also suggests the danger of becoming lost. The overwhelming emotions attached to the officer carry the same threat. In her next phase, in early puberty, Edna is drawn to a man she can safely identify as lover and husband, though not her lover and husband. With the tragedian Edna brings to bear a repertoire of romantic illusions which, unlike Emma Bovary before her, she never imagines her own husband can fulfill. This third, precociously cynical stage, this dissociation of imaginary from actual experience, breaks down in the course of the novel, and Edna finds no means of regaining her equilibrium. Her dilemma is sketched in her contrasting responses to music. When Mlle. Reisz plays, Edna is shaken by passions lashing her “as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body” (pp. 44-45). Previously she has responded to music as she does to the more prosaic performances of Mme. Ratignolle. A piece Edna calls “Solitude” causes her to visualize

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.

(p. 44)

This foreboding constellation brings together three sets of images: birds, sea, and mysterious male figures, each ambivalent with longing and danger. James H. Justus comments: “The picture itself can be seen as a transsexual projection: the naked man is Edna as well as the vaguely identified, wished-for, would-be lover: a kind of redaction of the twenty-eight swimmers plus one in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.”⁸ It is also likely that the lost man is a transmuted memory of her first, powerful attachment. Here, however, the male principle, wisdom, or Zeus, is in flight from the animus figure, who is left at the mercy of the waves, the undifferentiated sea of the unconscious. The passions aroused by Mlle. Reisz's music are safely contained in the medium of art, but when Edna brings them to her actual experience the attenuation of her imaginative faculty will prove more serious.

The imagination becomes attenuated when it ceases to mediate between the inner world of the psyche and the external world of society, marriage, and morality. The fantasy life may become hyperactive, but rather than compensating the psyche for its loss of actuality it expresses the true nature of the problem, reinforcing the message of recurring dreams. On the night of Edna's first, exhilarating swim, she finds herself in a new, more powerful position in relation to her world. Expanding on her comment that “it is like a night in a dream,” Robert playfully associates her new skill with folklore:

On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is shining—the moon must be shining—a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the semicelestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But tonight he found Mrs. Pontellier. Perhaps he will never wholly release her from the spell. Perhaps she will never again suffer a poor, unworthy earthling to walk in the shadow of her divine presence.

(pp. 49-50)

Robert offers Edna a way to understand her excitement. The archetypal Gulf spirit only appears at times of crucial change, governed by the lunar, dream-like aspect of consciousness. He arises from the sea as the woman's animus arises from the unconscious at a moment when a new, more comprehensive organization of the psyche has become possible. Like the Gulf spirit, however, the animus presents a corresponding threat: the woman's subliminal, male identity, with its direct access to the unbounded unconscious, will dominate the psyche, eventually extinguishing the ego-consciousness; the woman is possessed by the archetype, who “will never wholly release her from the spell.” The usual defense is either to repress the instinctual life altogether or, as Robert unwittingly implies, to project the archetype onto a real man, to “suffer a poor, unworthy earthling to walk in the shadow of her divine presence.” This form of projection, though dangerous itself, at least opens the way through dialog to a relationship in which the transcendent figures are beneficially contained.⁹ Receptive to Robert's imaginative suggestions, Edna seems clearly on the path of projection, and when they return from the beach before the rest of the party the silence between them is “pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire” (p. 51).

Edna and Robert amplify their shared images during a trip by sailboat to Chêniére Caminada the next day, ostensibly to attend mass. Recalling the “mystic spirit” Edna now feels “free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails” (p. 58). Previously, Edna's confidences to Mme. Ratignolle had begun with her confession that “the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky, made a delicious picture that I just wanted to sit and look at” (p. 29). Now a participant, Edna is drawn to Robert's entreaties to take her sailing in his own pirogue, and she is delighted at the suggestion that her Gulf spirit will help her find buried treasure. Like Robert's “little wriggling gold snakes” and Edna's vision of “watching the slimy lizards writhe in and out among the ruins of the old fort,” pirate gold becomes a metaphor for illicit sexual gratification:

“I'd give it all to you, the pirate gold and every bit of treasure we could dig up. I think you would know how to spend it. Pirate gold isn't a thing to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to squander and throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the golden specks fly.”

“We'd share it, and scatter it together,” he said. His face flushed.

(pp. 58-59)

Small wonder, after this, that Edna finds the atmosphere in church “stifling” and leaves before the end of mass. The renegades find harbor at a nearby cottage, she “in the very center of the high, white bed,” he reclining “against the sloping keel of the overturned boat” just outside the bedroom (pp. 61-62). Refreshed, Edna consumes a bit of bread and wine, then plucks an orange and throws it at Robert, who is sufficiently seduced to insist on delaying their return until night. After hearing their hostess tell legends of the Baratarians, Edna and Robert sail home by moonlight, while the narrator records that “misty spirit forms were prowling in the shadows and among the reeds, and upon the water were phantom ships, speeding to cover” (p. 65). The impersonal narrative voice thus confirms what will prove to be the furthest extent to which the lovers can actualize their fantasies. Robert, who has perhaps pandered his illusions more effectively than he anticipated, decides the next day to begin his fortune-seeking trip to Mexico, a project he had postponed numerous times before. The dreamspinner turns and escapes into the commercial, material world. Surprised and hurt, Edna finds his move “perfectly preposterous and uncalled for” (p. 74).

Edna possesses now a complex of images of special significance for her: Gulf spirit, moonlit expeditions, sails on open sea, pirates, buried treasure, phantom ships, mists, a cloud of gold dust thrown “to the four winds.” Building upon the actual setting at Grand Isle and neighboring islands, these images contain as their nexus the animus in the form of demon lover, the woman's spirit-ravisher, illicit lover of body and soul. Robert's initial withdrawal frustrates Edna in the normal course of projecting the affect-laden archetype, who remains tied up in her framework of illusions and therefore insusceptible to dialog. During Robert's long absence, Edna consolidates her illusory resources. Her father visits, providing “a welcome disturbance,” revealing that his stern religion and patriarchal attitudes are matched, significantly, by his love of horse racing, his attractive bronze complexion, his white, silky beard and hair, and his habit of staying drunk all day with “numerous ‘toddies’” of his own concoction (pp. 113, 115). After a particularly exciting day at the races, Edna and her father join her husband and Doctor Mandelet for dinner. Over the wine the talk turns to recollection and story telling, Pontellier and Edna's father leading the way by telling stories of more interest to themselves than to the hearers. The Doctor appears no “happier in his selection, when he told the old, ever new and curious story of the waning of a woman's love, seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of unrest” (p. 117). Edna, in particular, is unimpressed by this case history, relevant though it may be to her own predicament. Instead,

She had one of her own to tell, 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 trace of them from that day to this. It was a pure invention. She said that Madame Antoine had related it to her. That, also, was an invention. Perhaps it was a dream she had had. But every glowing word seemed real to those who listened.

(p. 117)

Dreams are often the medium through which the ego can glimpse animus, and Edna's frequent sleep or drowsiness has been commented on.¹⁰ The expedition which she and Robert never carried out has gained an archetypal immediacy, as “every glowing word seemed real” even to the male listeners. But here the trip ends, not with the lovers scattering gold together, but with disappearance and probable death. Consciously, Edna continues to develop her attachment to Robert, but unconsciously she feels that this romance cannot be reconciled with the known world. After hearing Edna's tale, the Doctor recognizes that her latency leaves her open to impersonal eroticism: “I hope to heaven it isn't Alcée Arobin” (p. 118)

The common cultural cognate for Edna's complex illusion is best exemplified in the group of ballads known as “The Daemon Lover” or “James Harris,” in which a woman abandons her husband and children to answer the call of her former lover, who appears at her window after a long absence at sea and tempts her with the promise of riches.¹¹ In an early, lengthy version, the lover is a spirit “much like unto a man,” but in later, shorter variations he is a devil replete with cloven foot; and rather than merely disappearing the woman is drowned or carried to hell aboard his golden ship. Oral tradition appears to have developed the disastrous consequences of the woman's departure from her proper role as wife and mother, though the cautionary note is offset by the lurid effects of the devil's blandishments. Any sacrifice of social identity naturally bodes great risk, and when Edna moves out of her husband's grand house to the tiny “pigeon-house” she jeopardizes what she terms “illusions,” the social role and support system which her own paradigm may not adequately supplant. Her step toward greater independence and fulfillment, then, is also a move to act out the archetypal story of the woman governed by animus. Edna's disregard for the consequences and contingencies of violating convention indicates that her new illusions will mediate with the social world as poorly as her previous “illusions” mediated latent aspects of her psyche. Her certitude in this line of action is charged with mystification. In response to Doctor Mandelet's offer of help, she explains:

“Some way I don't feel moved to speak of things that trouble me. Don't think I am ungrateful or that I don't appreciate your sympathy. There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way.”

(p. 184)

Minutes later, when Edna is about to enter the house where she believes Robert is waiting for her, “she could picture at that moment no greater bliss on earth than possession of the beloved one” (p. 185). A second time, however, Robert proves elusive, if not illusory; longing to possess, Edna is herself possessed. Jung writes that the woman at this stage

becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus.¹²

In compensation for this peril, animus is also a psychopomp, who “gives to woman's consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-knowledge.”¹³ Unable to free herself of her “veil of illusions” through relationship with Robert, on whom she could project her overwhelming animus, Edna is left a prey to its negative effects, impersonal and hapless sexuality: “Today it is Arobin; tomorrow it will be someone else” (p. 188). Correspondingly, the obligations which Edna casts aside are not supplanted by experiences of relatedness through which the self gains meaning and stability; hence the capacity for self-knowledge becomes a void, prey to illusions made fascinating by the archetype.

But Edna's “veil,” woven of dream, fantasy and folklore, gains a still deeper archetypal reference through a set of images applied to her, images which associate her with both Venus and Psyche. Recalling Mrs. Pontellier's last dinner party in her husband's house, Victor Lebrun says that “Venus rising from the foam could have presented no more entrancing a spectacle than Mrs. Pontellier, blazing with beauty and diamonds at the head of the board” (p. 186). This appearance of seductive, god-like self-sufficiency ironically belies what Edna is feeling at the party, when she simultaneously longs for Robert and is overpowered by a sense of the unattainable. Victor's description does, however, accord with Robert's earlier conjecture that Edna “will never again suffer a poor, unworthy earthling to walk in the shadow of her divine presence.” The divine aura, the effulgence of reified archetype, actually makes the woman fragile. The perilous cross between mortal and divine is the subject of the myth of Psyche, in which Eros himself serves as animus, holding Psyche captive in his sumptuous palace, visiting her bed nightly, but adjuring her never to look upon him.¹⁴ At first it is Venus who, angered by the tributes paid to Psyche's merely mortal beauty, represents the malignant power of archetype; when Psyche brings forth her concealed lamp and discovers the beauty of Eros, he punishes her by taking flight, leaving her so bereft that her first impulse is to fling herself into a river to die.¹⁵ This crucial phase of the myth is the subject of “Psyche's Lament,” one of Kate Chopin's early poems. The second stanza

O sombre sweetness; black enfolden charms,
          Come to me once again!
Leave me not desolate; with empty arms
          That seeking, strive in vain
To clasp a void where warmest Love hath lain.(16)

expresses a passionate longing for the lost Eros, with no suggestion that he might be recovered. Here, in contrast to the myth, the “cursed lights” have only destroyed a sensual paradise, not opened the way to conscious love. The ambivalence of this moment is central to Edna's tragedy. Arobin's is “the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire” (p. 139). The light of Psyche's lamp transforms Eros from the serpent she expected to the most ravishing of lovers; after intercourse with Arobin, Edna “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” (p. 140). Edna cannot “imagine herself in love” with Arobin, however, and therefore the light, figurative and literal, cannot survive Robert's farewell note. After receiving it “She did not sleep. She did not go to bed. The lamp sputtered and went out” (p. 185). The narrator's images of illumination from torch or lamp reveal Edna to be a type of Psyche thwarted. In the brief chapter which introduces the incantatory personification of the sea, the narrator has warned: “A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her—the light which, showing the way, forbids it” (p. 25).

One alternative open to Edna is to become herself a creator and manipulator of illusion in the self-conscious and socially recognized role of artist. Although she “handled her brushes with a certain ease and freedom” indicating “natural aptitude” (p. 22), she has difficulty making the transition from amateur to professional. The discipline she needs has not been part of her upbringing; but training and practice might supply this deficiency were it not for more elusive problems confronting the dabbler who would be artist. The first of these emerges when Edna attempts a portrait of Mme. Ratignolle:

The picture completed bore no resemblance to Madame Ratignolle. She was greatly disappointed to find that it did not look like her. But it was a fair enough piece of work, and in many respects satisfying.

Mrs. Pontellier evidently did not think so. After surveying the sketch critically she drew a broad smudge of paint across its surface, and crumpled the paper between her hands.

(p. 22)

Clearly, the narrator does not share the evaluation made by the two women, and Edna's perfectionism may not be very distant from her friend's desire for a product that is representational rather than otherwise “satisfying.” The scene suggests that Edna has neither resolved the inevitable tension between illusion and reality, nor learned to inhabit the hinterland between the two, a place more essential to the artist than the convenient “atelier” where Edna daydreams. Another aspect of Edna's limitations arises in her relationship with Mlle. Reisz, who is unquestionably an artist. When in a later scene Edna laughingly speaks of becoming an artist, Reisz tells her she has “pretentions,” for the artist in addition to “absolute gifts” must, in order to succeed, “possess the courageous soul … The brave soul. The soul that dares and defies” (pp. 105-106). On another visit Reisz feels Edna's shoulder blades to see if her wings are strong, adding, “the bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth” (p. 138). The imagery here recalls Edna's vision of a bird in flight from a male figure and anticipates the actual, wounded bird which flutters into the sea moments before the end. As conceived and represented by Mlle. Reisz, the Romantic artist must be opposed and superior to society, heroic and solipsistic. Quarrelsome, ugly, wearing an emblematic bunch of artificial violets in her hair, the little pianist shows the disfigurement which her kind of specialized isolation entails.¹⁷ Artistry thus presents danger as great as any Edna could encounter in employing her skills toward greater self-knowledge.

Whether Edna fails or refuses to sublimate her newfound, passionate nature through the medium or art, her plight shows the difficulty of finding a social role adequate to her needs. Society in this novel offers women only one role, and Edna is not a “mother-woman.” With mild sarcasm the narrator explains: “They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (p. 16). In her study of nineteenth-century American culture, Ann Douglas maintains that this maternal mystique served largely unacknowledged purposes:

The cult of motherhood, like the Mother's Day it eventually established in the American calendar, was an essential precondition to the flattery American women were trained to demand in place of justice and equality. It offered them, of course, a very genuine basis for self-respect. It gave them, moreover, an innate, unassailable, untestable claim to charismatic authority and prestige, a sanction for subjectivity and self-love.¹⁸

While men in The Awakening enjoy their careers in business or the professions, the matriarchy has ascendancy over the personal sphere, with the result that in respectable relationships men seem to have difficulty conceiving of women in other than maternal terms. When Edna resists her husband's selfish demand that she wake up and listen attentively to his account when he returns late from his gambling party, he retaliates by accusing her of neglecting their children. Even Robert, who helps to formulate Edna's erotic fantasies, had attended sometimes a girl or widow, but “as often as not it was some interesting married woman” (p. 20). His great hope on his return from Mexico is that Pontellier will set Edna “free” to become a wife and, inevitably, a mother all over again. Despite the practicality of its basis, the matriarchy is not independent of illusion, for like other complex roles it draws upon imagination. The prime embodiment of “mother-woman” is, of course, Mme. Ratignolle:

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 … the spun-gold hair that comb nor confining pin could restrain; the blue eyes that were like nothing but sapphires; two lips that pouted, that were so red one could only think of cherries or some other delicious crimson fruit in looking at them.

(p. 17)

Again the narrator simultaneously employs and debunks standard images, suggesting both their usefulness and their deficiency. In the Creole society into which Edna has married the charismatic mother image gains its ultimate, paradoxical power through association with Roman Catholic iconography. Posing for her portrait Mme. Ratignolle is “like some sensuous Madonna” (p. 22) wearing her favorite color, white. The imagery continues with the Farival twins (whom Mlle. Reisz, significantly, dispises), “girls of fourteen, always clad in the Virgin's colors, blue and white, having been dedicated to the Blessed Virgin at their baptism” (p. 41). The logical disparity between “mother-woman” and virgin is dissolved in the figure of Mary, who expresses her consummate motherhood without the aid of mere men. In light of the miraculous mother, an archetype fully as powerful as the demon lover, the narrator wonders if Edna's growing recognition of “her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” is “perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman” (p. 25, italics mine).

Although in their final conversation Edna and Doctor Mandelet have differing referents in mind for “illusions,” the problem addressed is the same: what to do when illusions fail, when the psyche is left unprotected against particularities of time and place over which it has no more control than do the caged or stricken birds that appear at beginning and end. Worse still to live unshielded from full knowledge of this entrapment. The circle closes about Edna as she discerns that, all illusions aside, Adèle's final admonishment to “think of the children” bears a moral weight from which she cannot escape. She is overwhelmed, finally, not only by transcendent forces but also by the orientation of her society toward them, which reinforces the increasing autonomy of her fantasy life and frustrates her need to actualize vital aspects of her psyche through a meaningful and viable relationship with another. Among her last thoughts she acknowledges that husband and children are part of her life, “but they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul” (p. 190). Her flaw is that she counters this absolutism with her own by refusing, despite her reply to Doctor Mandelet, to live and suffer knowledge. In this respect she resembles Madame Bovary, who is similarly cornered by a network of circumstances and who dies in recoil from the painful recognition of her failure.¹⁹ In contrast, Edna's struggle achieves Promethean dimensions because her fascination with animus both charts a crucial phase of psychic development and brings her into oppostion with the sexless mother archetype which commands her social world. Her tragedy arises, however, less from the archetypes themselves than from the perilous nature of illusions which, clashing, rend for a moment to reveal the real world which is the perogative of the tragic protagonist, through suffering, to know.

For Edna, then, truth to her inmost nature and to the forces of individuation demands that she complete the transition from illusion to reality, that she finish the story she and Robert began on the night of her first long swim. If she cannot go forward, she can return to the erotic darkness which Psyche laments, to her first demon lover, to the point when past and present, illusion and reality, thought and sensation merge in the blissful embrace of animus, the shepherd of her soul. “The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Avon Books, 1972) 184. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. Per Seyersted's edition in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin can be found in libraries but is relatively rare.

2. For example, Ottavio Mark Casale, “Beyond Sex: The Dark Romanticism of Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” Ball State University Forum 19.1 (1978): 76-80, places the novel in the tradition of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville; Donald A. Ringe, “Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” American Literature 43 (1972): 580-588, relates the novel's transcendentalist concept of self-discovery to the sea imagery; Susan J. Rosowski, “The Novel of Awakening,” Genre 12 (1979): 313-332, compares Edna with other female protagonists of the bildungsroman type and links sea and meadow as images of escape from finitude; I am especially indebted to Lawrence Thornton, “The Awakening: A Political Romance,” American Literature 52 (1980): 50-66, who shows Edna's conflict with Creole culture, its dependence on illusion, and the moral aspect of her sexual awakening; Nancy Walker, “Feminist or Naturalist: the Social Context of Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” The Southern Quarterly 17.2 (1979): 95-103, also deals with conflict between cultures but stresses the novel's adherence to naturalist conventions in representing the sexual basis of Edna's enlightenment; Priscilla Allen, “Old Critics and New: The Treatment of Chopin's The Awakening,” The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977) 224-238, gives a useful, if somewhat polemical, review of earlier treatments of Edna; Allen finds emphasis on sexual awareness reductive and suggests, instead, that Edna's is a tragic struggle for freedom, for “full integrity, full personhood—or nothing” (p. 238).

3. Quotations from the Young and Thomson letters in Daniel S. Rankin, Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932) 178-182.

4. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969) 179.

5. In “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 449-471. Wolff is seconded by Ringe's essay on the question of Edna's solipsism and possessiveness, though he attributes these qualities to a Romantic vision of the emerging self. James H. Justus, “The Unawakening of Edna Pontellier,” The Southern Literary Journal 10.2 (1978): 107-122, similarly attributes Edna's apparent regression to an actual increase in self-awareness which cannot find mature expression.

6. Wolff, p. 471.

7. Wolff, p. 452.

8. Justus, p. 116.

9. On the phenomenon of animus see Emma Jung, Animus and Amina, trans. Cary F. Baynes and Hildegard Nagel (1957; Zurich: Spring Publications, 1978); and C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, vol. 9, pt. 2 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2nd ed., Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) pars. 1-67. On the problem of containment and projection see also Jung's discussion of marriage in The Development of Personality, vol. 17 of The Collected Works (1954) pars. 324-345.

10. Especially by George Arms, “Kate Chopin's The Awakening in the Perspective of Her Literary Career,” Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, ed. Clarence Gohdes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1967) 215-228; by Ringe; and by Robert S. Levine, “Circadian Rhythms and Rebellion in Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” Studies in American Fiction 10 (1982): 71-81.

11. Eight versions of the ballad are given in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, 5 vols. (1882-1898; New York: Dover Publications, 1965) 4: 360-369. Child records that an “Americanized version” of this ballad was printed at Philadelphia and cited in Graham's Illustrated Magazine for September, 1858 (p. 361). Given the widespread oral tradition of the tale, however, Kate Chopin need not have had any specific text in mind when she wrote her novel.

12. Aion, par. 32.

13. Aion, par. 33.

14. The standard psychological explication of this myth is Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine—A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series 54 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). For application to female protagonists of fiction, Lee R. Edwards, “The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of Female Heroism,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1979): 33-49.

15. Neumann, p. 100, comments on Psyche's suicidal reactions to the enormity of archetypal experience.

16. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted, 2 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969) 2: 727.

17. The short story “Lilacs” shows the author's interest in the suggestiveness and emblemism of flowers. The pianist's hair ornament recalls the withered violets of Ophelia, while the pinks associated with the cavalry officer are dianthus, flower of the god Zeus or Eros.

18. The Femininization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) 75.

19. The comparison with Flaubert accords with the findings of Eliane Jasenas, “The French Influence in Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 4 (1976): 312-322.