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Prof. José Manuel Trabado Cabado

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The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Critical Reception
Compiled by M. Teresa González Mínguez
All the comments included under the following headlines are mainly quotations
extracted from different reviews and articles written by critics such as Emily Toth, Mary
Shaffter, Kenneth Eble, Marie Fletcher, Lewis Leary, George Arms, Per Syersted,
George Spangler, John May, Jules Chametzky, Cynthia Wolff, Margo Culley, Nancy
Walker, Elizabeth Ammons, Sandra Gilbert, Lee Edwards, Anna Elfebein, Helen
Taylor, Anne Heilmann, Edmund Wilson, Larzer Ziff, and Elaine Showalter in
Culley, Margo ed. Kate Chopin. The Awakening. New York, London: Norton,
1994.
Ann Heilman, Avril Horner, Helen Taylor, and Bernard Koloski in
Beer, Janet ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Cambridge: CUP, 2008.
Barbara Ewell, Ann Morris, Margaret Dunn, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Barbara Salomon, Joyce
Dyer, Nancy Rogers, Rosemary Franklin, and Suzanne Jones in
Koloski, Bernard ed. Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s The Awakening. New York:
MLA, 1988.
The reviewers were hostile to Kate Chopin’s subject in The Awakening, the book was
withdrawn from the libraries in St Louis, her native city, and she was denied
membership in the St Louis Fine Arts Club because of the scandal. Critics condemned
the novel when it was first published in 1899. They criticized Chopin’s frank
treatment of such moral issues as extramarital affairs and female sexuality
because, in their view, good literature simply did not discuss women’s emotions.
Chopin was deeply hurt by the negative criticism of The Awakening.
Kate Chopin
• Although Kate Chopin’s personal biography cannot be advanced as an
interpretative key to the text, personal motivations may have contributed to the
complex and unresolved structure of the text. Taking the ending as central, we
may ask from what perspective could the ending be read as satisfying. And one
answer is from Chopin’s personal perspective. It requires no extraordinary effort
to recognize the important bits of Chopin herself in Mlle. Reisz, Mme.
Ratignole, and Edna. A successful writer who had been happily married,
mother of six children, by all accounts content in her life, Chopin had also lost
her husband and the mother with whom she had been unusually intimate. In
writing The Awakening, Chopin may easily have been killing off a part of
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The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Critical Reception

Compiled by M. Teresa González Mínguez

All the comments included under the following headlines are mainly quotations extracted from different reviews and articles written by critics such as Emily Toth, Mary Shaffter, Kenneth Eble, Marie Fletcher, Lewis Leary, George Arms, Per Syersted, George Spangler, John May, Jules Chametzky, Cynthia Wolff, Margo Culley, Nancy Walker, Elizabeth Ammons, Sandra Gilbert, Lee Edwards, Anna Elfebein, Helen Taylor, Anne Heilmann, Edmund Wilson, Larzer Ziff, and Elaine Showalter in

Culley, Margo ed. Kate Chopin. The Awakening. New York, London: Norton, 1994.

Ann Heilman, Avril Horner, Helen Taylor, and Bernard Koloski in

Beer, Janet ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Cambridge: CUP, 2008.

Barbara Ewell, Ann Morris, Margaret Dunn, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Barbara Salomon, Joyce Dyer, Nancy Rogers, Rosemary Franklin, and Suzanne Jones in

Koloski, Bernard ed. Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s The Awakening. New York: MLA, 1988.

The reviewers were hostile to Kate Chopin’s subject in The Awakening , the book was withdrawn from the libraries in St Louis, her native city, and she was denied membership in the St Louis Fine Arts Club because of the scandal. Critics condemned the novel when it was first published in 1899. They criticized Chopin’s frank treatment of such moral issues as extramarital affairs and female sexuality because, in their view, good literature simply did not discuss women’s emotions. Chopin was deeply hurt by the negative criticism of The Awakening.

Kate Chopin

  • Although Kate Chopin’s personal biography cannot be advanced as an interpretative key to the text, personal motivations may have contributed to the complex and unresolved structure of the text. Taking the ending as central, we may ask from what perspective could the ending be read as satisfying. And one answer is from Chopin’s personal perspective. It requires no extraordinary effort to recognize the important bits of Chopin herself in Mlle. Reisz, Mme. Ratignole, and Edna. A successful writer who had been happily married, mother of six children, by all accounts content in her life, Chopin had also lost her husband and the mother with whom she had been unusually intimate. In writing The Awakening, Chopin may easily have been killing off a part of

herself –a residual adolescence dependency– even as she played with criticizing a society that had , by and large, treated her well.

  • Kate Chopin was a woman of the nineties , a writer of the fin de siècle. What did it mean, though, to be a woman, a female artist , of the fin de siècle , with all that such a faintly exotic, voluptuously apocalyptic French phase implied? Superficially, at least, the fin de siècle meant, for literary men, a kind of drawing-room sophistication —smoking Turkish cigarettes, subscribing to The Yellow Book , reading and translating French fiction, all of which Kate Chopin did, especially in the St. Louis years of her widowhood, which were the years of her major literary activity.
  • Chopin’s creole links with French literature and culture , with European ways of thinking about sexual love, and especially with the long tradition of women’s writing on love, marriage and adultery , were to make a great difference both to the liberties she took in her writing and the ways she was received and misconstrued in her own country.
  • The parallels between the experiences of Edna Pontellier, as she breaks away from the conventional feminine roles of literary domesticity, suggest that Edna’s story may also be read as a parable of Chopin’s literary awakening.
  • The choice Kate Chopin made of leaving a local planter and then returned to St Louis to live with her mother is echoed in the novel , when Edna leaves a man – Robert– to be with a woman: the “mother-woman” Adéle, who is about to give birth.
  • Chopin should be regarded as a psychological realist rather than a regionalist.
  • According to Chopin’s brother-in-law Phanor Breazeale, the novel was inspired by the true story of a New Orleans woman , well-known to the French Quarter residents.
  • The Awakening also has its roots in Kate Chopin’s own life , especially her pursuit of solitude, independence, and an identity apart from her children –and apart from the men who always admired her.

The Awakening

  • In important respects, The Awakening may be read as a variant of the female bildungsroman or novel of female initiation.
  • The novel offers a paradigmatic tale of a woman’s abortive struggle toward selfhood in an oppressive, uncomprehending society.

unread for almost sixty years. Recent critics have tended to blame the literary double standard , which prohibited female authors at the turn of the century from broaching topics available to male authors, for the opprobrium Chopin suffered.

  • The fin de siècle was associated, for women as for men, with artistic and intellectual revolutionaries like Beardsley and Wilde , together with their most significant precursors— Swinburne, Pater, Whitman, Wagner, Baudelaire.
  • After the Civil War, the homosocial world of women’s culture began to dissolve as women demanded entrance to higher education, the professions, and the political world. The female local colourists who began to publish stories about American regional life in the 1870s and 1880s were also attracted to the male worlds of art and prestige opening up to women , and they began to assert themselves as the daughters of literary fathers as well as literary mothers.
  • When Chopin began to write, she took as her models such local colourists as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Williams Freeman , who had not only mastered technique and construction but had also devoted themselves to telling stories of female loneliness, isolation, and frustration.
  • Kate Chopin can be seen not only as one of the American realists of the 1890s , but also as a link in the tradition formed by such distinguished American women authors as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow. One factor uniting these writers is their emphasis on female characters. Another is their concern with values but Chopin is less than interested than they are in preserving these values.
  • Kate Chopin parallels the naturalists in her view of basic urges as imperative, but differs from them in that she lets Edna decide her own destiny in an existentialist way.
  • The influence of Darwin’s theories on naturalism resulted in the sentiment that humans have little control over themselves or the forces that shape their lives, but must struggle to survive, prospering only at the expense of others.

The Creoles

  • Creole society was in some ways unlike any other in the United States. Occupying the southern half of Louisiana (and parts of Alabama and eastern Missouri), the Creoles were the descendants of French and Spanish colonists of the eighteenth century. Some of them became very wealthy as sugar cane planters; others were less successful economically, but all were bound by

Catholicism , strong family ties , and a common language ( French ) into a cultural subgroup which had little in common with –indeed, was often in conflict with– Anglo-American society. The cultural patterns of the Creoles have been romanticized by local colorists, including Chopin, in her short stories.

  • The Creoles seldom accepted outsiders to their social circles and felt newcomers should live by their rules.
  • New Orleans was called a Southern Babylon because of the quadroon and octoroon mistresses supported openly by Creole men. Quadroons, having one- quarter Negro blood, were of course considered fully Negro by society (cf. the quadroon servants in The Awakening ) and it is probable that the mother of a quadroon girl was pleased –and economically relieved– to have her daughter become the mistress of a wealthy white man.
  • Creole women assumed that marriage is of supreme importance; these women see no happiness, actually no real existence, without marriage and most of them wed young.

Women in the novel

The Awakening is densely peopled with socially adapted women. And the social requires underscoring. Madame Lebrun, Madame Ratignolle, Mlle. Reisz, Mrs Highcamp, Mrs Merriaman, the shadowy and sinister lady in black, even Edna’s sister, all live. They have all found a social space adequate to their existence.

Edna

  • Edna tries to discover what kind of woman she might be through the refusal of “feminine” behavior and style.
  • Unlike the French ladies on the island, Edna is willing to give her time and her money but not her inner self to her family.
  • Edna learns to swim , further experiencing the power of the connection between mind and body.
  • From early in the novel, Chopin establishes that Edna is not one of the “mother-women,” not one of those female characters who live only for and through husbands and children. Critics frequently applaud that dimension of Edna’s personality as proof of her incipient independence , her willingness to live for herself. Chopin doubtless intended Edna’s rejection of motherhood as a totally self-determining vocation to express her own importance with women’s internalization of the social restrictions under which they lived.

and her strength was gone.” In the final paragraphs of the book, Edna begs for understanding, not judgement.

  • Edna first awakens to the sexuality she has suppressed, and then she begins a search for herself beyond the collective’s definition. But her suicide tells us that she has failed , for reasons hard to define.
  • Increasingly strong, practical and sure of herself and her needs through most of the novel, Edna suddenly collapses , and what the reader gets in the way of explanation does not follow what he has witnessed before.
  • The Awakening ’s image of womanly beauty is a radiantly pregnant woman – perhaps the only one described in novels of the 1980s. Through Adéle, the traditional woman, prefers to give birth in pain, Edna (like her creator) took chloroform during her deliveries –and The Awakening is Edna’s protest against physical and spiritual confinement and pain. Most of Edna’s awakenings take place in the unconfined outdoors, in the sensual tropical paradise of Grand Isle.

Adéle

  • Like Edna Adéle is preoccupied with eating , she pays extravagant care to the arrangement of her own physical comforts , and she uses her pregnancy as an excuse to demand a kind of mothering attention for herself. The difference between Edna and Adéle is that Adéle can deal with her nurturing needs by displacing them onto her children and becoming a “mother-woman.” Adéle can have a rewarding adult relationship with her husband.
  • The pre-eminence of Adéle over Robert in Edna’s emotional life affirmed by Edna’s crucial choice, is undeniably linked to her image as a nurturing figure and, especially here, as a mother-to-be. In this capacity, she is also linked to Edna’s own children—insistent specters in Edna’s consciousness; and this link is made explicit by Adéle’s repetition of the cryptic injunction to “think of the children.”
  • Adéle is a dear friend. She is the living embodiment of that state which Edna’s deepest being longs to recapture.
  • Edna is intensely involved with Adéle’s pregnancy.
  • Chopin offers glimpses of Adéle’s ecstatic family planning , but also a physically fulfilled marriage, suggesting a sensual satisfaction that is entirely absent from Edna’s marital life.
  • The novel begins with Mme. Ratignolle pregnant and concludes with that birth, parallel to Edna’s own “birthing” of self.

Mlle. Reisz

  • Mlle. Reisz tells Edna about the price of solitude.
  • The disturbing and sinister figure of Mlle. Reisz haunts Edna’s story much as the woman in black haunts the steps of the young lovers in the early scenes at Grand Isle. Mlle. Reisz fills a complex function in the novel. Her role as counterpart to Madame Ratignolle is highlighted by the juxtaposition between the white of Madame Lebrun and the black of the other lady in the opening sections of the book. As Mme. Ratignolle is married, beautiful, sensual, fair, and beneficently maternal, Mlle. Reisz is single, homely, ascetic, dark, and malevolently maternal. As an artist, Mlle. Reisz stands for the possibility of female independence. Her life may be austere and frugal, but it is her own. And her unappealing external frame harbours a rare musical talent. Her music, indeed, seduces and entwines Edna , blending into, even as it seems to articulate, the nameless, shapeless longing that consumes and fires Edna’s soul.
  • Mlle. Reisz is a seductress. Appearing to offer Edna that which she most craves, she contributes to binding her to a hopeless passion. If Mme. Ratignole stimulates and lures Edna with her warm, embracing body, Mlle. Reisz winds the threads of her power around Edna’s soul. Robert writes to Mlle. Reisz. Mlle. Reisz turns her letters over to Edna. She mediates their love and, in mediating, encourages it in the paths of fantasy, longing and that soul-engulfing death of drugged escape.
  • Although Mlle. Reisz offends almost everyone, she likes Edna, and they become friends.
  • Edna’s women friends Adéle Ratignole and Mlle. Reisz are her confidantes and models ; she admires them and loves them both and values their counsel. At the same time, Chopin exposes their insufficiency as models and embodies in them aspects of Edna’s basic conflict between her romantic desires and her longing for self-sufficiency. Chopin creates in these two women rich models of the limited alternatives late nineteenth-century America offered women.
  • Isolation and sexual abstinence is the only viable alternative, but Edna cannot endure a solitary life. She is not strong enough to live under the austere tutelage of Mlle. Reisz. She cannot submit her newly discovered feelings to the discipline of work.

The “lady in Black”

  • The motif of Edna’s awakening is associated with a return to her earliest childhood in order to bring the sunlight of adult awareness to bear on a mode of existence which her Presbyterian upbringing has forced into repression. The mysterious and somewhat sinister “lady in Black,” counting her rosary and

control of her body, she becomes aware of its potential for pleasure and learn to claim her right for self-determination.

  • Edna is allowed to do an inordinate amount of sleeping throughout the novel, is spite of her underlying vitality.
  • The lady in black and the mother-woman represent the actual limits imposed by the Creole environment ; as symbols they specify the restrain of the city.
  • New Orleans is the romantic city opposite to the sea. It is community, with all the demands that the social organization makes upon the individual , and which the self sometimes finds hard to accept after the expansive experience on the sea or, the innocent interlude on “the happy island,” a romantic symbol which in Edna’s case is Grand Isle.
  • The alternation between Grand Isle and New Orleans clarifies the conflicts Edna experiences between the sensuous and physical realities that awaken her self and the strict social conventions that have previously defined her.
  • The connotation of Chopin’s description of Edna as a child changes from childlike to childish as Edna moves from Grand Isle to New Orleans. Edna responds to disappointments with unproductive tantrums.
  • When Edna returns to the city , she throws off the trappings of her old life – devotion to family, attention to societal expectations, and adherence to tradition– to explore independence in love, life, and sexual fulfillment.
  • Grand Isle is an oasis of women’s culture , or a female colony.
  • Grand Isle is clearly established as its own world , different from that of hot news, marker reports, and the other concerns of the masculine, public space.
  • On Grand Isle Edna can violate social taboos with impunity. While Edna’s vacation in the islands richly develops her inward life , it creates problems in her social life. No one understands her.
  • The Awakening opens in the privileged, leisure world of Grand Isle which had been literally destroyed by a hurricane in 1893. A nice image of the storm of social ferment that was leaving America and American women forever changed.
  • In A , the sea lets us see the crisis Edna experiences which determines her development through the rest of the book. As in much romantic art, however, the sea serves here a double purpose for the individual: it invites “the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude;” it can turn the soul’s attention outward to the infinity suggested by the endless expanse of encircling horizons and sky.
  • One of the reasons for Edna’s great attraction to the sea is surely its limitless expanse , which offers welcome release from her feeling of domestic confinement.
  • The sea in the novel announces both the sexual and the spiritual freedom Edna hopes to achieve. The gulf –like the woods in Hawthorne, the Mississippi River in Twain, the ocean in Melville– is a place that promises spiritual as well as physical freedom.
  • The symbolic invocation of the seductive sea that calls one to the ecstasy of immersion corresponds to Freud’s conception of the Oceanic feeling of absolute fusion of the infantile ego.
  • As if emboding every infant’s wish to come true, Edna slips into the universal womb—the ocean.
  • Women writers developed a multifaceted feminine imagery of seascapes which operated as a complex set of metaphors encoding the female psyche, the feminine body and women’s sexual desire.
  • Like the eternal self-renewal of the sea , Edna’s rebirth marks a return: to childhood, to the “blue-grass meadow” with no beginning and no end” from which she has gained so much pleasure as a young girl.
  • Caged birds serve as remainders of Edna’s entrapment and also of the entrapment of Victorian women in general. Madame Lebrun’s parrot and mockingbird represent Edna and Madame Reisz, respectively. Like the birds, the women’s movements are limited by society and they are unable to communicate with the world around them.
  • Oaks and violets point to further limitations. The oaks appear recurrently to remind us of the essential biological connection between mothers and children. Chopin sees the oaks as female and maternal. Children, again and again, play croquet under their protective shade. The oaks periodically “moan as they bend their heads” in the same way as Edna suffers in her role as protector.
  • Mlle. Reisz is associated with black lace and artificial violets , a flower connected to rites of protection against harm.
  • Mlle. Reisz’s use of music situates her as a nonconformist and a sympathetic confidante for Edna’s awakening.
  • The latent wish to be fed is communicated in the novel through one of its dominant images: food. Almost every significant occurrence in Edna’s life is associated with food. Because Mr Pontellier often sends his wife huge boxes of candies and liqueurs , the women on Grand Isle consider him an excellent husband. Meanwhile, he neglects returning to have dinner with his family and
  • As the story progresses there is an increasing emphasis on tactile imagery. When Victor ceremoniously apologizes for offending Edna, the touch of his lips is “like a pleasing sting to her hand.” During her reunion with Robert, Edna notices the “same tender caress” of his eyes.

The New Woman and the Woman Question

  • For women , however, the nineties also meant the comparatively new idea of “free love” as well as the even newer persona of “The New Woman.” In addition, to be a woman of the nineties meant to have come of age in a new kind of literary era , one whose spirit was, if not dominated by literary women, at least shaped by female imaginations. For it was only in the nineteenth century, after all, when women entered the profession of literature in significant numbers.
  • The revolution in female manners , demanded by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 and practiced in the new century by Madame de Staël, George Sand and Margaret Fuller, was adopted as a literary paradigm by the Brontë sisters in the mid nineteenth century and the female sensation writers in the 1860s New Woman movement.
  • New Woman writers frequently employed sensational plot elements (cross- dressing, prostitution, syphilis, madness) in exploring feminist themes.
  • If the transatlantic New Woman movement is conceived as the cultural and literary arm of first-wave feminist activism, with the underlying objective of many writers being the use of literature as a political tool for social change, Chopin was certainly not a straightforward New Woman. Unlike Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Robins and other British and American New Woman writers, she never assumed an active role in any feminist organization. However much she looked askance at social-purity feminism, in other respects Chopin shared many features of the New Woman: she liked smoking and enjoyed going for solitary urban walks; on her honeymoon she assured that she would not fall into the useless degrading life of most married ladies.
  • In her short stories Chopin frequently engaged with the themes of the New Woman fiction : the importance of female independence , tomboyish heroines who refuse to be feminized, women’s conflict between art and love , unconventional martial arrangements, marital oppression , prostitution and congenital syphilis.
  • The Awakening surprises the reader by its modernity , by Kate Chopin’s insights into “the woman question.” It is not so much that she advocates women’s libidinal freedom or celebrates the force of the body’s prerrogatives —our post- Freudian age has won those battles (or should have). Nor she is terribly explicit

about the mechanics of sex, in the contemporary way. What Kate Chopin shows so beautifully are the pressures working against woman’s true awakening to her condition, or what that condition is.

  • New Woman and decadent man were in equal measure perceived to pose a threat to bourgeois society.
  • The real struggle is for the woman to free herself from being an object or possession defined in her functions, or owned, by others. Despite her middle- class advantages—money and freedom to pursue a talent—Edna Pontellier is fully unable to overcome by herself the strength of the social and religious conventions and the biological mystique that entrap her.
  • Edna’s struggle toward a new state of awareness and independent being is to some extent understood and encouraged by only one other woman in the book —the pianist Mlle. Reisz. But this strange woman’s encouragement takes the form of urging a kind of self-sufficiency that is as selfless as the marriage vows: if Edna is serious about her work as an artist, then she must give herself to it entirely –a renunciation of the flesh and conventional human relationships. That, of course, is an answer, but no answer to the woman question posed in this book how to be free in one’s self and for one’s self but still meaningfully connected to others. Posed in this way, the question, of course, applies to everyone. What makes it particularly related to the woman question in The Awakening is Mrs Chopin’s unwillingness to make her heroine’s situation easier by removing from her selfness the burden and possibility of motherhood.
  • The Awakening ends with the newly born New Woman Edna’s declaration of economic and sexual independence. Edna’s proclamation of rights is the equivalent of Chopin’s claim to independence in her choice of subject matter, as is the desire to venture “where no woman had swum before.”
  • What makes the novel peculiarly related to the Woman Question is Mrs Chopin’s unwillingness to make her heroine’s situation easier by removing from her selfness the burden and possibility of motherhood.
  • In its quest for female self-determination , The Awakening aligns itself with nineteenth-century female traditions of writing, in particular the Anglo- American fiction of the New Woman. Chopin’s frank treatment of female sexuality broke new ground at a time when married women had no legal rights over their bodies and when few other female or feminist writers hazarded openly to explore women’s sexual desire.

understand that marriage is, at best, irrelevant to the qualities Edna most values in their relationship. If merging with Robert means marriage, marriage – to Edna– means death.

  • Unlike the speech of Edna’s husband, Robert ’s words invite dialogue.
  • By the end of the novel Robert Lebrun has served as an iconic replacement for that which Edna cannot say; his name functions as a hieroglyph condensing Edna’s complex desires—both those she has named and those which remains unnameable.
  • An experienced womanizer , Alcée Arobin excites and imparts a sexual pleasure which years of marriage have been unable to arouse. Alcée detects Edna’s latent sensuality.
  • Sexually awakened as Edna is, she cannot bear to live as the wife of Léonce ; Robert Lebrun does not really want her; and with Alcée Arobin there is no feeling of companionship, only sexual satisfaction about which she has a sense of guilt because of her feeling that she has betrayed Robert.
  • Edna believes that she can be an artist and a lover and still be independent. Alcée and Robert prove her wrong. They reimpose the original conflict by proving to Edna that they can see her in only one way.
  • After his rejection, Robert speaks a language incomprehensible to Edna.

Children

  • Edna does not possess the strength to live her life alone and is therefore driven to seek the solitary security of death. Her view of her children as enemies who seek “to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days” is the hysterical response of a woman who, compelled by the instinct to return to the unbroken bond with her mother, must perforce renounce to her own motherhood.
  • The underlying awareness of contrasting forces in the novel is exhibited in its use of children. Edna has two boys of two and five. With them she has little intimacy, and her husband accuses her of neglecting them , as does her mother- in-law –an accusation endorsed by the author, who early in the novel announces, “In short, Mrs Pontellier was not a mother-woman.”
  • Edna constantly returns to her children as a kind of penance whenever she displays most markedly her love outside of marriage. The children stand for a stable society and the permanency of an unbroken home.

Themes

  • Chopin’s novel is the first to use mainly English and French feminist themes in an American and especially a Southern context.
  • The Awakening may be seen as a novel praising sexual discovery and critiquing the asymmetries of the marriage plot , but we must also recognize that this is a novel in which the heroine’s capacities for thought are shut down , a novel in which Edna’s temptations to think are repressed by the moody discourse of romance.
  • Chopin took her stand against the sexual stereotypes that deny women, including Edna and the other women in the novel, not only the freedom and the opportunity but even the ability to experience and express their diversity.
  • A develops the theme of self-discovery so important in the works of the transcendentalists. Chopin presents Edna as a defiant soul who stands against the limitations that both nature and society place upon her, and who accepts in the final analysis a defeat that involves no surrender. Chopin neither approves nor condemns on Edna’s actions.
  • Edna’s habits of reading Emerson in the library after dinner is a reaction against her father’s Presbyterianism , but to grow sleepy over a Transcendental individualist also hints that Edna’s individualism lacks philosophical grounding.
  • The philosophic question raised by Edna’s awakening is what most deeply concerns Chopin: the relation of the individual self to the physical and social realities by which it is surrounded, and the price it must pay for insisting upon its absolute freedom.
  • The fundamental significance to Edna of an awakening is an awakening to separation , to individual existence , to the hopelessness of ever satisfying the dream of total fusion.
  • Edna’s suicide is a regressive act coming from “a sense of inner emptiness” and a failure to fulfill in real life her infinite yearning for fusion.
  • Chopin remains simultaneously preoccupied with the tension between female destiny as a truth of nature and female destiny as a social truth. Her open critique to male privilege and power is shadowed by a more tentative and ambiguous exploration of female influence over other women.
  • A plays with male and female influences , so does it weave a complex pattern of progression and regression in the course of the woman who seeks to escape the institutional context of female life.

self-generated. The ambiguous structure of the word “awakening” encompasses these definitions, permitting Edna to be awaken, to awaken someone else (as she awakens Robert) or simply to awaken spontaneously as she does at the beginning of the novel.

  • The novel’s final images frame and articulate Edna’s incessant need for some other register of language , for a mode of speech that will express her unspoken, but not unspeakable needs.
  • The book is an attempt to argue through the highly political subtext, demonstrating how the work makes an original contribution to women’s writing about the Catholic/Protestant divide , about nationality and regionalism , and about patriarchal institutions and the New Woman in the 1890s South.

Topics for discussion

  • Does Chopin offer her heroine –or her reader– any emancipatory alternative?
  • What are the differences between Léonce’s and Robert’s speech?
  • Can Edna, and Kate Chopin, then, escape from confining traditions only in death? Some critics have seen Edna’s much debated suicide as a heroic embrace of independence and a symbolic resurrection into a myth.
  • Why most contemporary critics automatically interpreted Edna’s suicide as the wages of sin?
  • Discuss the juxtaposition between “compulsory” and “voluntary” motherhood in Chopin’s novel.
  • Discuss female concerns in the novel: marrying (the sociological ramifications of marriage and family life of the 1890s, the “mother-woman”), dealing with social roles, discovering sexuality, developing selfhood, the conventional opposition and Edna’s understanding of love and passion, of romance and passion, the moral isolation of women in patriarchal systems, the role of female friendship, the importance of the body and the physical world of self-realization, the ambivalence toward children and childbearing.
  • Discuss how stereotypes disintegrate when one sees another point of view, and the peculiar constraints women must face and resolve.
  • Discuss Edna’s relations with others , men and women, her role as mother and wife; her notions of sex and sexuality; the role of setting.
  • Discuss is Edna’s deed is justifiable or even defensible.
  • Discuss the function of minor characters , the use of female models (the roles of the artist such as Mlle. Reisz in American society of the 1890s), image patterns (birds, the sea, eating and sleeping).
  • Why didn’t she just move away? Elope with Robert? Get a job?
  • Discuss the symbolic contrasts of waking and sleeping, city mansions and coastal cottage.
  • Contrast and compare the symbolism of wings/ caged and free-flying birds.
  • Why do critics see Edna’s actions, particularly her suicide, as a defeat rather than an act of triumph and self-affirmation? Which interpretation do you find most compelling, and why?
  • Discuss Chopin’s treatment of Southern and Creole women.
  • Study the comparison of Léonce , who looks at his wife “as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property” and Robert Browning’s famous Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess.” (Only if you do Literatura Inglesa II).
  • Compare Léonce with Dr John, the husband in Charlotte Perkins Gilman ’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
  • Find parallels between Gilman’s story and The Awakening by investigating the attitudes of society toward the creative woman as depicted in the two works.
  • Consider the characters’ use of French to try to determine what it reveals about their social standing or personality traits.
  • How was Chopin regarded in comparison with other women writers of the day?
  • Describe the relationship between Edna and her husband. Do the marriage partners communicate with each other?
  • Comment this statement by Marie Fletcher: “Edna’s entire life is a flight from one kind of confinement after another.”
  • How does the novel use clothes or the lack of them to portray Edna’s rebellion against Victorian norms?
  • What does Edna’s appearance tell us about her personality?
  • Describe the culture through the customs and traditions honoured by Creole descendants as well as through their routine of daily life. (Only for further study).