The Awakening Notes 2019

39 chapters

Biography

Kate Chopin (nee O’Flaherty) born in St. Louis Missouri in the mid-nineteenth Century. Her parents
were Irish immigrant (father) and a descendent from early French pioneers (mother).

Grew up equally fluent in French and English. She was always more strongly drawn to French writers
than English writers.

Started writing when she was 32, a wealthy widow with 6 children. Her first works were sketches
and stories about Creoles, the Cajuns, and the blacks she had known in Louisiana. She had lived in
Louisiana with her husband Oscar Chopin.

Creoles were pure blooded descendants of French settlers, a kind of American aristocracy

Cajuns, lower down on the social scale, were descended from Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia by
the British in the 18th Century.

First novel published in 1890, at her own expense. “At Fault” has as its main protagonist a young
widow, Therese Lafirme, who takes over the running of a large plantation after her husband’s death.
Deals with theme of divorce. The central character is in love with a man who has divorced his
alcoholic wife. High principled she insists that he re-marries her. At the end of the novel the alcoholic
wife dies during a violent storm, and the lovers can marry with a clear conscience.

The first novel was not a great success. Undeterred, she went on to write many short stories, most
of which were set in the Louisiana area. These stories can be linked to a particular late nineteenth
century American genre called “local colour”. These stories, usually written by women, tended to be
set in the Southern states and tended to depict these locales and their inhabitants in a sentimental
and quasi-anthropological fashion for an urban (Northern) readership, superficially emphasizing
“picturesque” and “exotic” qualities. In that they are set in New Orleans and Louisiana, Chopin’s
stories bear some resemblance to stories of this type but do not simply depend on superficial “local
colour” regional appeal; they offer much more in terms of psychological and social insight.

In 1899 she wrote the novel, “The Awakening”, which happened to be the last work she was to write
(for reasons we will deal with later).

For her time, Chopin was an unconventional and independent woman. For example, she smoked
cigarettes, enjoyed wine, was outspoken in her opinions. She was in many ways a critic of both the
parochialism and sexism of nineteenth century American society. Many of her stories offer satirical
viewpoints on the nineteenth century trope of the “perfect wife”, which, as far as Chopin was
concerned, equated with passivity, obedience, lack of personality.

In “The Awakening”, Chopin invites her reader to imagine the development of a young wife, Edna
Pontillier, who discovers that she is no longer satisfied with being a mother and wife and, rejecting
her bourgeois marriage, embarks on a “voyage of self-discovery” that ultimately leads to her having
love affairs and committing suicide.

The book that lies behind this book is the novel “Madame Bovary” by the French writer Gustave
Flaubert. Published in 1856, this pathbreaking novel is often seen as one of the first truly modern
works of fiction because of its rigorously realistic style of narration and its selection of Emma Bovary
a rather unheroic lower-class woman as the main character. In the novel, Emma Bovary, the
attractive daughter of a farmer, marries Charles Bovary, a provincial doctor who is kind, but
somewhat dull and unambitious. Emma finds that her fantasy of marriage does not quite measure
up to the reality of life with the middle-class Charles, which is safe but rather boring and routine.
Though they have a daughter together, the marriage is not, to Emma’s mind, a success. In her
attempt to escape from this domestic tedium she embarks upon an affair with a local landowner.
Eventually the landowner grows tired of Emma and discards her, whereupon she experiences
something like a nervous breakdown. For her the relationship involved a huge emotional and fantasy
investment; whereas for him it had been a passing whim. When she recovers from the shock, she
starts another affair, this time with a previous acquaintance called Leon. This affair proves to be
equally disastrous, and its chaotic course is documented with unforgiving detail and precision by
Flaubert. Emma does not discover the ideal of love and happiness she is searching for in the affair
with Leon; instead, she ends up saddled with huge financial debts. Her desperate efforts to find the
money to repay these debts prove gallingly unsuccessful; whereupon, facing the prospect of bringing
disgrace upon herself, she commits suicide by eating arsenic. The hapless Charles is left alone to
raise their daughter. When he discovers Emma’s letters revealing that she has had affairs, he does
not blame her but ascribes his cuckolding to fate. He finally dies of a heart attack in the garden while
playing with the daughter. We are told that she gets a job in a local factory.

In the novel the narrator never passes explicit moral judgement on his heroine’s actions. Instead,
Flaubert depicts the trajectory of her bleakly prosaic married life via a remarkable illusion of
naturalness presenting it with dispassionate realism. At the same time, irony is a key device in the
presentation of characters and events in the novel, and it is through the use of irony (the seemingly
absolute contrast the work establishes between Emma’s fantasy of a romantic, exciting, aristocratic
existence, and her life as it actually is) that the novel avoids direct moral judgement while quietly
inviting the reader to view the main protagonist, her society, and the ideological underpinnings of
her fantasies, through a critical lens.

The parallels between “The Awakening” and “Madame Bovary” are not hard to see. Thematically,
they both focus on marriage and infidelity. The character arc of the two main protagonists, involving
frustrated marriage, infidelity and suicide, also invite comparison.

However, there are important differences between the two works to be considered as well. Whereas
Flaubert’s novel represents the mundane nature of his protagonist’s life, through realism, in
painstakingly precise detail, thereby encouraging the reader to view her romantic fantasies of
escape with a sense of criticism and irony, Chopin’s work, though it is not without irony itself, seems
more inclined to represent Edna Pontellier’s desire to escape from marriage, and the social
confinements of life as a woman in late nineteenth century America, with a degree of sympathetic
identification that seems altogether lacking in the French work which is, as stated, in many ways its
predecessor. In other words, “Madame Bovary”, a seminal novel of realism, invites its readers to
view the plight of its main character in a distanced, ironic fashion, partly in order to highlight what
the author appears to believe to be the fatuous and self-defeating nature of all dreaming; while, on
the other hand, “The Awakening”, which bears some of the features of Flaubertian realism, asks
readers to accept the dreaming of Edna Pontellier as in some sense an irreducible element of
“human nature”, while also implying that her unique willingness to allow her actions to be guided by
her dreams be interpreted as an act of defiance against the authority of her husband and, by
extension, the patriarchal institution of marriage as such.

Edna Pontellier

Another way to put it is that “Madame Bovary” is a European realist novel while “The Awakening” is
an American one. To help illustrate this point, it might be worthwhile briefly to put Edna alongside
another famous dreamer in American fiction, one who comes after Edna, but whom we have already
met, namely Jay Gatsby.

As we have seen, Fitzgerald’s novel offers Gatsby’s doomed quest for the unattainable Daisy
Buchanan, ironically and lyrically, as an instance of the tragic ambiguity of human nature. In Gatsby,
criminality, naivete and folly are somehow inextricably and ironically part of what makes him “great”
and representative.

What gives Gatsby’s life story its tragic coherence is an idea of Americanness that is, as it were,
imposed upon it. It is Nick Carraway’s retrospective narration of Gatsby’s life that represents him as
an American dreamer for the ages. Without Nick’s sympathetic perspective, Gatsby would be
nothing more than a bootlegger from Indiana. Nick rewrites Gatsby’s life of lawlessness and error
into a utopian quest that glamorously represents a universal yearning:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded
us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further ... And one
fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Like Gatsby, Edna Pontellier is an American dreamer, an archetypal figure. Like Gatsby, she defies
social convention in the name of personal ideals and pays the price for it.

From the beginning of the novel, Edna is positioned within a specific social matrix.

A daughter of a former confederate General in Kentucky, Edna is the wife of a shrewd and wealthy
New Orleans Creole businessman, Leonce Pontellier. Whereas Gatsby emerges from abject rural
poverty to acquire wealth, public notoriety and ultimately disaster, Edna’s trajectory towards
personal disaster is one which takes her away from a relatively stable and ‘privileged’ class setting
and background.

Her own tragic life story, as we will learn, is to have its roots in a “sad passion”, a deep-lying
melancholy that will ultimately drive her to suicide. Yet, from the outset, the narrator is careful to
indicate ambivalent feelings towards her own husband and family.

Here is an early indication: Edna is on holiday on the idyllic Grand Isle, surrounded by her husband’s
friends and relations:
Mrs Pontellier, though she had married a Creole, was not thoroughly at home in the society of
Creoles; never before had she been thrown so intimately among them. There were only Creoles that
summer at Lebrun’s. They all knew each other, and felt like one large family, among whom there
existed the most amicable relations. A characteristic which distinguished them and which impressed
Mrs. Pontellier most forcibly was their entire absence of prudery. Their freedom of expression was
at first incomprehensible to her, though she had no difficulty in reconciling it with a lofty chastity
which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn and unmistakable. (10-11)

Question

1. What does this passage show about Edna’s attitude towards the Creoles? What does it
suggest about the narrator’s attitude towards the Creoles?

You can read more about the history of the Creoles in Louisiana here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people

Collectively, the group labelled “Creoles” constitute some of the oldest “colonial” peoples in
Louisiana. Its complex origins – French, Spanish, Native American, African – is in some ways a
reflection of Louisiana’s complex colonial history. The Creole group that Edna marries into in “The
Awakening” is of French origin – there are numerous hints and references to this in the novel. Their
self-conscious Frenchness might be seen as a mode of racial differentiation – a way of asserting a
sense of prestige, and social superiority over other, less “pure”, groups, including other groups that
identified as Creoles. (We will perhaps benefit from recalling that Chopin herself has an interesting
genealogical and familial connection with France, that she preferred French literature to English
literature, for example.)

The setting of the novel is New Orleans, the capital of Louisiana, the late nineteenth century. As
mentioned, New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city, the home of many immigrant communities (French,
Spanish, Irish, Polish, Mexican, African, etc). In some ways it is the archetypal “melting pot” North
American big city that brought together a rich diversity of ethnicities.

Historically, New Orleans was a major entrepot for slaves from Africa and this fact accounts for its
sizeable African-American community. This group played a significant role in the formation of jazz
music, which is arguably America’s greatest contribution to modern popular culture. New Orleans is
commonly regarded as the birth place of jazz (in the early 20th Century), a type of popular music that
came out of the juxtaposition and fusion of a variety of musical traditions (ragtime, blues, spiritual
church music). (In the novel, music – classical and European, rather than American jazz – plays a part
in Edna Pontellier’s “awakening”, through the piano playing of Mademoiselle Reisz.)
Edna’s complex engagement with this Creole “Other” is staged through the depiction of three
personal relationships which we can list here

1. Her husband, Leonce Pontellier

2. Adele Ratignolle
3. Robert Lebrun

Edna Pontellier and Adele Ratignolle: The One Vs the Many

Edna’s relation with Adele Ratignolle essentially occupies two important portions of the novel: the
conversation between the two women at the beginning of the novel; and the scene towards the end
of the book, in New Orleans, when, at Adele’s request, Edna is in attendance during her labour.

For most of the novel Ratignolle is pregnant, a clue to her “maternal” significance for Edna (her own
mother had died during her childhood).

Here is a description of the two women walking together to the beach in the early scene:

The women were of goodly height, Madame Ratignolle possessing the more feminine and matronly
figure. The charm of Edna Pontellier’s physique stole insensibly upon you. The lines of her body were
long, clean and symmetrical; it was a body which occasionally fell into splendid poses; there was no
suggestion of the trim, stereotyped fashion-plate about it. A casual and indiscriminating observer, in
passing, might not cast a second glance upon the figure. But with more feeling and discernment he
would have recognised the noble beauty of its modelling, and the graceful severity of poise and
movement, which made Edna Pontellier different from the crowd. (16)

The first sentence is a comparative reference that suggests Adele is something “more” than, i.e.
superior to, Edna. Counterintuitively, the rest of the paragraph consists of a long and rather
flattering description of Edna’s physique that totally ignores Adele. Below, we will have an
opportunity to take a closer look at the way this paradox reveals interesting aspects of the way the
novel ‘works’. But before that, let’s focus on Adele Ratignolle for a while.

Earlier Adele Ratignolle had been described at some length in a stand-alone paragraph most of
which I will quote here:

Many of them [Creole women] were delicious in the role; one of them was the embodiment of every
womanly grace and charm. If her husband did not adore her, he was a brute, deserving of death by
slow torture. Her name was Adele 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.
There was nothing subtle or hidden about her charms; her beauty was all there, flaming and
apparent: the spun-gold hair that comb nor confining pin could restrain; the blue eyes were like
nothing but sapphires; two lips that pouted, that were so red that one could only think of cherries or
some other delicious crimson fruit in looking at them. (9)

Adele’s physique is presented as emblematic of the group to which she belongs. The language used
to capture her is close to cliché, consisting of a number of tired, formulaic descriptions and
conventional romantic analogies (the hair like spun gold, the lips like cherries, etc). It’s close to self-
parody. There is a movement from the general to the particular: Adele’s beauty “stands for”,
epitomizes, the beauty of Creole women in general. She is “the embodiment of every womanly grace
and charm” [itallics added]. Alongside this there is a hint that Adele’s dramatic beauty might exist on
the surface only. “There was nothing subtle or hidden about her charms; her beauty was all there,
flaming and apparent” (9). The language employed to describe her is slow, generalizing, hyperbolic,
full of negations (“nothing subtle or hidden about her charms”, “her beauty was all there”).

Contrast this with the description of Edna earlier:

Mrs Pontellier’s eyes were quick and bright; they were a yellowish brown, about the colour of her
hair. She had a way of turning them swiftly upon an object and holding them there as if lost in some
inward maze of contemplation of thought. (4)

Here the writing is much fresher, cleaner, more deft. In contrast to the laboured allegorical
construction of Adele, the language is more lively because it seeks to capture Edna’s individuality.
The focus on Edna’s eyes suggest the narrative’s interest in that which is unique about her; these
physical features are not merely denotative, they attempt to evoke, metonymically, an interior
“soul”. Adjectives are used more discriminatingly than in the narrator’s description of Adele to
generate imaginative possibilities in the reader’s mind (rather than tediously reinforcing existing
meanings). For example the words “quick” and “bright”, used to describe Edna’s eyes, indicate an
engaging appearance, while also suggesting distinct intellectual qualities lying beneath the lively
appearance. Similarly, the compound adjective “yellowish brown” to describe her eyes offer a
precise picture of this physical feature while also hinting that this colouration is metonymic of an
unusual and interesting interior life.

Overall, then, the novel’s definition of Edna’s external features simultaneously evokes internal
qualities, thereby creating an impression of a layered, complex individual, whereas, in contrast, the
allegorical description of Adele implies that she is essentially a surface character, limiting her
existential significance in the narrative to the racial group which she is seen as emblematic of.

The contrast between Adele and Edna, then, corresponds to the way we are invited to ‘read’ the
characters of this novel, by grasping them in terms of an inner opposition between “the one” and
“the many”, between depth and surface. The text generates the literary metaphors by which it
means its characters to be interpreted (or not to be interpreted). For instance, the narrator tells us
of Edna’s body that “there was no suggestion of the trim, stereotyped fashion-plate about it”. This
negative analogy frames Edna via a “literary” or “high art” response, precisely by distancing her from
the “generic” images of slim women already being circulated in an emergent mass media. Contrast
this expectation of aesthetic discrimination with the narrator’s insistence that only the “old words”
of “romance” will suffice to capture Adele. In other words, to grasp Adele only a cliched image will
do, yet it is precisely a cliched image that will prevent one from understanding Edna!

Thus, we need to understand that “The Awakening” is an asymmetrical narrative that charts the
development of its Anglo-Saxon protagonist by prioritising her interiority through the suppression of
the interiority of a host of secondary Creole characters surrounding her that it essentially reduces to
a cast of supporting roles. Edna’s “awakening” is paradoxical and ironic not only in the sense that it
does not lead to her rebirth as a person (rather the opposite), but also in the sense that it involves a
seeming inability, on her part, to engage, on a meaningful level, with the Creole Other.

Edna as heroine: dreamer or neurotic?

In the intimate conversation between Edna and Adele at the beach that follows the descriptions
above, it is Edna who is the talker, Adele who passively listens. Edna talks about her early life in
Kentucky, and, more daringly, about her relations with various men prior to her marriage to Leonce.
Most of the latter is given to the reader as a paraphrase of what she says by the narrator (a tactic
that further marginalizes Adele’s role as listener). Asked to share her thoughts, Edna says the
following:

The hot wind beating in my face made me think – without any connection that I can trace of a
summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking
through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when
she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in water (18)

This dreamy intimate recollection of a personal moment in her rural childhood perhaps seems
appropriate to the charming Grand Isle setting, and yet Edna’s use of the third person suggests that
she is almost talking to herself about herself, and that Adele is not really present as an audience at
all. It hints at the protagonist’s intense self-absorption. I have quoted this passage because there is
an almost identical one just before Edna commits suicide at the end of the book:

She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that
seized her as the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on
and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that
it had no beginning and no end. (135)

What this pairing of passages seems to imply is that Edna’s suicide is somehow a perverted
repetition of the early happy memory of her Kentucky childhood on her father’s estate. In a
Freudian reading the ocean would be seen to function as a symbolic medium of Edna’s suppressed
infantile wishes (the limitless, enclosing ocean as a version of the maternal womb?), and/or early
traumatic memories (the mother’s untimely death?) to which the protagonist tragically submits.
There are numerous passages that might be used to confirm such a reading of the sea as a psychic
symbol, e.g. “the voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamouring, murmuring,
inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward
contemplation” (15), etc.

In this sense, it can be argued that the novel offers a focus on Edna not so much (or not just) as a
privileged protagonist in an asymmetrical narrative, but as a kind of ‘case study’ of an individual
suffering from a neurotic disorder.

It is not insignificant that the novel was published in exactly the same year as Sigmund Freud’s
classic “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899). Freud’s text elaborates his theory of the
“unconscious” nature of all human motivations via an extensive and intensive analysis of the dreams
of his Viennese mentally ill patients, most of whom happened to be women. Because Freud’s theory
about mental illness heavily emphasized the significance of early childhood psycho-sexual
development as the primary cause of neurosis, and because its examples were mainly drawn from
female patients, it has been criticized by feminists as being sexist. It has been argued that Freudian
theory reinforces the false notion that certain mental illnesses were inherently feminine and that
women are more prone to mental illness than men (for example, “hysteria” is a psychological
disorder frequently associated with females – the Greek root of this word, “hysterus”, means
“womb”).

At any rate, we can say that Chopin’s text seems, in some ways, to position Edna as an individual
suffering from a profound psychological malaise.

Here is a description of Edna’s reaction to an argument with her husband over a trivial matter at the
beginning of the novel:

An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her

consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing
across her soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. (7)

The narrator puts this in context for us, telling us that “such experiences […] were not uncommon in
her married life” (7).

Question:

1. The narrator characterises Edna’s state as a “mood”. What are the connotations of this
word, and how well does it apply to the state of Edna as described here?

Later on, Edna starts to neglect her domestic duties, and Leonce Pontellier, troubled by this turn in
his wife’s behaviour, visits a doctor to seek his advice.

Read through the account of their conversation on pp.75-78.

Questions:

1. What does Leonce Pontellier say is ‘wrong’ with his wife?

2. What is Doctor Mandelet’s diagnosis and solution?
3. Are the diagnosis and solution reliable, in your opinion? Justify your answer.
4. Why does Doctor Mandelet refrain from asking Leonce whether there is “a man in the
case”?
5. What does this unspoken question imply about Mandelet’s assumption about Edna’s
‘problem’?

Subsequently, Mandelet visits Edna at her home to observe her.

Read through his reflections on p.82

Question:

1. In what way, if any, has Mandalet’s thinking about Edna changed?

Finally, there is an account of a brief conversation between Edna and Mandelet towards the end of
the novel.

Read p. 130

Question:

1. Explain why Mandelet says to Edna “you seem to me to be in trouble”.

In sum, one of the readings of Edna that the novel makes available to the reader is that she is a
victim of emotions historically strongly linked to her gender as a female. Mandelet tells Edna that
her problem is that she is unable to resist “illusions” that are somehow seen as specific to women
(“a provision of Nature… a decoy to secure mother’s for the race”). The word “Illusions” here could
be translated as “desires” (to use a more modern and Freudian term). In this sense, Mandelet
appears to be suggesting that Edna’s ‘problem’ is a uniquely sexual and feminine one, i.e. that she is
unable to resist her (sexually defined) desires. But even if Mandelet’s reading of Edna’s psychic
situation is an accurate one (and the novel may give us reason to doubt this), the fact remains that
latter seems unable to use the doctor’s knowledge of her to benefit herself (in fact she kills herself
shortly after this conversation). This is at least partly because she seems unprepared to allow herself
to be absolutely defined by society’s gender-specific expectations of her: “I don’t want anything but
my own way” is how she puts it to Mandelet. This echoes an earlier remark she made earlier in a
conversation with Adele:

“I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I
wouldn’t give myself.” (55)
On the face of it, this statement had seemed nonsensical when first read (Edna seems to insist on a
willingness to surrender her life for her children while simultaneously insisting that she would never
surrender her life). However, if one links what she says here with what she later says to Mandelet (“I
don’t want anything but my own way”) one can retrospectively interpret the phrase “I wouldn’t give
myself” as meaning not so much “I would never kill myself” as “I would never surrender my sense of
self” (in this sense that one can die physically without losing one’s idea of oneself, one’s integrity). It
follows from this that what her language is overall responding to in both instances is her sense of the
primacy of individual desire, i.e. her need to reject limited versions of her selfhood and specifically
gender being imposed on her from the outside (whether it be Adele’s Creole-tinged patriarchal
conservatism or Mandelet’s sexist medical science).

For all his insight and empathy, then, Mandelet is ultimately shown to be as powerless as anyone
else in the novel to save Edna from herself, i.e. to stop her from killing herself. The heroine’s suicide
at the end of the book must in this sense seem to readers ambiguous: either a sad consequence of
an ‘incurable’ psychic malaise peculiar to women like Edna, or of an individual’s courageous defiance
of social norms in the name of the right to desire.

Edna and the problem of desire

To pursue this question more fully, let’s more closely examine how the novel handles the question
Edna’s desire.

It is clear that the tragedy of Edna, like that of Emma Bovary before her, stems in some way from a
problematic marriage. The narrator’s description of the marriage proposal makes this fairly obvious:

Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other
marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. It was in the midst of a secret great passion
that she met him. He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an
earnestness and ardour which left nothing to be desired. He pleased her; his absolute devotion
flattered her. She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy
she was mistaken. Add to this the violent opposition of her father and her sister Margaret to her
marriage with a Catholic, and we need seek no further for the motives which led her to accept
Monsieur Pontellier for her husband. (20-21)

Leonce had pursued Edna because he “fell in love” with her. Edna on the other hand is said to have
been merely “pleased” by his “devotion” and “earnestness”. Thus there seems to have been a
radical asymmetry in their relationship from the outset, where Leonce is sincerely in love with Edna,
while Edna only thinks she loves Leonce: “she fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste
between them, in which fancy she was mistaken”. This asymmetry within Edna’s racially mixed
marriage reproduces the larger asymmetry of narrative, whereby the singularity of Edna (Anglo)
consciousness is privileged over the numerous mostly Creole “flat” characters who revolve around
her. Indeed, it is true to say that we are rarely taken inside Leonce’s head; he is an externally
observed character for the most part.

What this passage also seems to indicate is that Edna’s acceptance of Pontellier as a husband
involved a displacement of her desire for another, designated only as “the tragedian”. “It was in the
midst of a secret great passion that she met him”. Presumably Leonce’s proposal was acceptable to
her partly because it enabled her to forget the grief stemming from not conquering this other, more
intensely felt, love object (the tragedian). In this sense a denial of desire was locked into the
marriage contract from the beginning, as far as Edna was concerned.

If Edna eventually wishes to remove herself completely from her marriage it is not because she loses
her love for him. On the contrary, an initial absence of passion for Leonce is shown to be an enabling
condition of the marriage, as far as Edna is concerned. This is made clear in the following sentence:
“She grew fond of her husband, realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of
passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection” (21).

But the problem is that Leonce loves her while she does not reciprocate that emotion. An early
passage hints at a possibility of marital discord underlying the outwardly harmonious and successful
union. Edna has just returned from the beach with Robert at Grand Isle and Leonce takes exception
to her being out in the midday sun:

“You are burnt beyond recognition,” he added, he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a
valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands,
strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her fawn sleeves above the wrist.
Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for
the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest
pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her
knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers. He sent
back an answering smile. (3)

Question:

1. What does this passage illuminate about Leonce’s expectations of Edna as his wife?
2. In what other ways does Leonce feel let down by Edna?
3. Analyze Edna’s response to Leonce’s complaint. What does it suggest about her
relationship with her husband at this point.

The passage above can be linked with a later one on p.61.

Here Edna, alone in the New Orleans house, flings her wedding ring to the ground and, in her fury,
stamps on it. But this action does not damage the ring. She then hurls and breaks a vase. Afterwards,
the servant returns the ring to Edna, who puts it back on her finger.
Is this episode to be understood as showing Edna experiencing a transient, but intense, emotion of
anger towards Leonce that will shortly pass? Or is it instead to be interpreted as a sign of a deeply
felt, but ultimately helpless and resigned, antipathy towards the social institution of marriage itself?

Let us now turn to Edna’s extra-marital relationship with Robert Lebrun which is an important
element of the “awakening” of the central character. Her affair with the young unmarried Creole
begins as a seemingly innocent summer holiday flirtation on Grand Isle, tolerated, even encouraged,
at first by Leonce. Later it takes on more serious, even tragic, overtones.

What must be stated at the outset is that Edna’s affair with Robert is to be understood in the
context of the Anglo/Creole opposition mentioned earlier. Indeed Robert’s close relationship with
Edna on the Grand Isle initially seems to observe an old Creole custom whereby unmarried young
males act as platonic companions for married women while their husbands’ are away on business or
working. However, two things are shown to complicate this customary bond in the case of Edna and
Robert. The first is that Edna is not a Creole herself, and so may not understand how to handle such
a delicate relationship in the appropriate culturally nuanced way. The second is that Robert is
offered as a relatively “modern” and acculturated Creole in the sense that he belongs to a younger
generation whose respect for the old customs may be diminishing.

On pp.22-23, there is an interesting conversation between Adele and Robert regarding his relations
with Edna.

Question:

1. What is the point that Adele is trying to make to Robert here?

2. How does he respond to Adele’s pleas?

When Robert fails to heed Adele’s warning, it is rather abruptly announced that he will be leaving
New Orleans to live in Mexico. This is ostensibly to pursue a business career, but the unstated
reason may be to separate him from Edna before the relationship becomes too embarrassing for all
concerned.

After Robert leaves, Edna’s feelings for him appear to intensify into a full-blown “infatuation”.

Read passage bottom of p.52, top of p.53.

Edna’s desire (“infatuation”) for Robert is only fully awakened once he becomes unattainable to her.
In this sense, her desire for the unattainable Robert (once he departs for Mexico) is a mirror of her
previous, now extinct, desire for the unattainable “tragedian”, which had been displaced by her
decision to marry Leonce, a man who “pleased” her, but with whom she was never “infatuated”,
never truly desired. Thus the “awakening” of desire in Edna, occasioned by Robert’s departure to
Mexico, logically puts in jeopardy her marriage to Leonce, since it was one of the functions of the
marriage to deny or “contain” Edna’s true desires, in the first place.

And indeed, the narrative absence of Robert (his period in Mexico) corresponds closely with a
steady decline in Edna and Leonce’s relationship. By the time Robert returns from Mexico, at the
end of the novel, the couple are living separate lives. The marriage is legally intact but all but over in
spirit.

Robert, and the decision to absent himself in Mexico, thus becomes a trigger for the awakening of
Edna’s (dormant) desire. Given rein by the protagonist, this desire shown to be a vagrant desire that
knows no loyalty to anyone other than the self, a desire that then comes to be seen by the author
and Edna as incompatible with the marriage contract itself.

When Robert talks, at the end of the novel, of his dream of marrying Edna, she firmly rebuts him:

“You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you
peak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose
of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘Here Robert, take her and be happy; she is
yours,’ I should laugh at you both.” (126)

This is very ironic in the context of the novel as a whole. Robert stands as clear proof that marriage
cannot suppress Edna’s desire, and yet it is precisely Robert that attempts to contain that desire
again, by proposing to marry her.

Robert has his own practical reasons, social and economic, for wishing Edna to marry him (besides
the fact that he, like Leonce, appears to be in love with her). Indeed, it is difficult to see how else
Robert could express his desire for Edna in any definitive way, other than by gaining her consent to
marry him (especially given the conservative Creole background he comes from, the need to support
a widowed mother, etc).

However, the point that the novel may want the reader to understand here is that marriage is
impossible for Edna, because it would involve her sacrificing her newly awakened ‘right to desire’.

Marriage is in this sense viewed as the legitimization of male control over women’s freedom of
choice (their desire). “I am no longer one of Mr Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not,” Edna
says, “I give myself where I choose”.

The metaphor of “possessions” in Edna’s language implies that economics is the ultimate means of
men’s control over women. In an era (late 19th Century USA) when very few women worked or had
an independent career, men controlled the economy at the time the novel was set (they still do).
The institution of marriage inevitably mirrored this economically based gender inequality as it stages
itself within the framework of the male-dominated economy.

Edna is typical of women at that time in having no independent source of income, though she is a
moderately successful (but hardly professional) painter. Leonce, a successful businessman, controls
Edna through his control of money. In one of the passages above, we will recall the description of
Leonce looking at Edna as “ a valuable piece of personal property”, a phrasing that precisely
indicates the economic basis of the problem of patriarchal marriage as far as Edna is concerned.
Edna can free her spirit, but the system of patriarchy has a claim over her body that can only be
overturned by biological death. This is the tragic perspective on gender that the novel would appear
to drive towards.

At the same time, the novel offers glimpses of other women, besides Edna, struggling to free
themselves from the patriarchal system of male domination, and we can conclude by turning our
attention to some of these minor characters and considering the role they play in the novel.

Focalization of the protagonist’s interiority through minor characters: Mademoiselle Reisz and Adele
Ratignolle

As stated, the novel focuses disproportionately and asymmetrically on the psychological destiny of
one singular character, namely Edna Pontellier, at the expense of a whole host of minor characters
who circle around her and are relegated to subordinate and merely external roles in relation to the
protagonist’s in-depth singularity.

At the same time, these minor characters, while remaining minor, are shown to play important parts
in the development of Edna’s interiority and singularity.

One such example is Mademoiselle Reisz, the cantankerous piano player whose house becomes a
sort of spiritual refuge for Edna in the middle section of the novel.

Significantly, Reisz does not belong to the circle of elite Creoles with which Edna is inextricably linked
through marriage. (The name Reisz, in fact, suggests East European and Jewish antecedents.) Her
social distance from this privileged clique is indicated very clearly:

She was a disagreeable little woman, no longer young, who had quarrelled with almost everyone,
owing to a temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample upon the rights of others.
[…] She was a homely woman, with a small wizened face and body and eyes that glowed. She had
absolutely no taste in dress, and wore a batch of rusty black lace with a bunch of artificial flowers
pinned to the side of her hair. (29)

The narrator disparages her as “a disagreeable little woman”, and she is clearly presented as
physically repugnant, yet we might detect a grudging respect in the prose for this character’s spirit of
feisty non-conformism.

Reisz’s brave decision not to depend on economically more powerful males has meant that she has
had to resign herself to genteel poverty.

Read the description of her flat, pp.71-2

Despite the negative tone of the narrator, Reisz has a positive narrative function as a woman who
works (she earns an independent income giving piano lessons). Reisz is a figure that has, through
personal choice, gained a degree of autonomy from patriarchal society (dominated by the Creoles)
by deciding to live on her own, not marry, pursue an artistic career, and not care what others think
or say about her.

In the novel, Edna will follow a trajectory that roughly mirrors Reisz’s example: she moves out of the
matrimonial home into smaller independent accommodation; she attempts to free herself from
dependence of her husband’s income by selling her paintings; she tries to stop attaching importance
to what others think about her scandalous behaviour in order to develop a growing sense of inner
freedom. In this sense, the example of the minor character Reisz functions positively in the narrative
to focalize Edna’s “awakening”, her deepening singularity.

Actually, it is more precise to say that Reisz and Adele Ratignolle help to give narrative focus to
Edna’s “awakening” and will to independence. Reisz represents the positive pole of female
autonomy (but also the attendant economic poverty that this choice brings) while the ‘domestic
goddess’ Adele represents Creole patriarchy’s ideal of womanhood (and the bases of social privilege
it rests on).

In the novel, we continually see Edna being pulled between these two opposed markers of female
desire (and social status), Reisz on the one hand and Adele Ratignolle on the other. In the first part
of the novel, we see Edna leaning on Adele’s judgement and opinion; while in the middle section of
the novel, Adele drops out of view, allowing Reisz to take her place as Edna’s chief spiritual mentor;
then, in the final part of the novel, Adele Ratignolle dramatically re-enters the narrative when she
attempts to reclaim her role as Edna’s mentor from Reisz by summoning the protagonist to be
present at her childbirth.

Let’s look at a chapter which shows the function of Reisz: read pp.71-75

Question:

Explore the new feelings and ideas that Edna seems to experience at Reisz’s house.

Next, focus on the part where Adele, about to give birth, calls for Edna: read pp.127-129

Question:

In what ways does this chapter enable us to understand Edna’s decision to end her own life?