Critically attacked and dubbed scandalous in its own time, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) is one of the earliest American novels that openly confronts the subject of female sexual desire. The novel’s main character, Edna Pontellier, rejects the traditional roles of wife and mother, which she believes have been forced upon her by society. Instead, she chooses to lead an unconventional life by moving out of her husband’s home and engaging in an extramarital affair. Edna’s “awakening,” then, is of a sexual nature. During the course of the novel she becomes aware of her physical desire for other men and decides to act on her impulses. Edna’s impulsive behavior, which prompts her to flout the conventions of 19th-century Louisiana’s conservative French Creole society, culminates in her suicide at the end of the novel.
Crucial to understanding Chopin’s novel is an understanding of the context in which it was written. Many other writers during the period, such as Henry James and William Dean Howells, were involved in a literary debate over the implications of Charles Darwin’s theories of sexual selection on human love relationships. This debate produced several novels focused on courtship and marriage at the turn of the 20th century. Chopin’s novel is an important contribution to this debate, since it provides a woman’s perspective on the issue of female sexual choice and argues that women, too, experience instinctual sexual desire.
The novel opens with Edna’s experiencing “an indescribable oppression” (8). As she embarks on her awakening, mainly inspired by her growing sexual desire for the attractive bachelor Robert Lebrun, Edna begins to realize that the oppression she feels results from lifelong repression of her natural desires. Later, after Edna has decided to rely solely on her instincts as a guide to living, Dr. Mandelet makes an important comment that reveals much insight into her character. While observing her at a dinner party, he notices that Edna “seemed palpitant with the forces of life. . . . There was no repression in her glance or gesture. She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun” (67). Edna has become poignantly aware that she, too, experiences and is compelled to act on her sexual desires. Repeatedly, Edna is characterized as “impulsive” (19). Chopin writes that she “was blindly following whatever impulse moved her” (32) and “lending herself to any passing caprice” (54). This decision to ignore the conventions of her society and follow her natural instincts arouses the ire of some in her social circle. Her husband is particularly disturbed by the change in her behavior, though he remains unaware of her extramarital affairs.
Besides her sexual indiscretions, Edna’s complete rejection of motherhood has drawn much fire from critics. Reviewers have labeled Edna as selfish and even childlike. Perhaps this is easily justifiable when she makes such comments as, “But I don’t want anything but my own way” (105), and when she admits that she would never sacrifice herself for her children. In her defense, however, Chopin reveals that Edna was not a “mother-woman” (9). Unlike the epitome of motherhood in the novel, Madame Ratignolle, Edna did not willingly choose to adopt the role of mother. Rather, she feels she was forced into it by the dictates of her society. The Awakening argues that motherhood is not a natural instinct in all women, an argument that was shocking in its time but that is widely accepted in the early 21st century.
After Robert Lebrun decides not to reject the conventions of his society and participate in an affair with a married woman, Edna comes to see that she cannot have everything her own way. This realization brings Edna to her ambiguous suicide at the end of the novel. Edna’s death has been viewed in two distinct ways. Some have argued that Edna can find the complete freedom she is looking for only in death. Edna embraces the “seductive” voice of the sea that calls her “to swim far out, where no woman had swum before”—so far out that she is incapable of returning to shore (27). Her death, then, is the ultimate release from the imprisonment of a society that cannot accept a woman who is completely in tune with her own instinctual nature. Others, however, have argued that Edna’s death is a punishment for her utter selfishness. Since she cannot have her own way, Edna, in despair, ends her life. Some readers have difficulty imagining that Chopin is simply punishing Edna, who comes much closer than anyone else in the novel to realizing her true nature, unless, as others have argued, Chopin felt compelled to punish this unruly woman by using the strictures of her own society.
Whatever the case, The Awakening remains an important text that explores significant changes in modern conceptions of female sexuality already underway at the end of the 19th century.
SOURCE
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Edited by Margo Culley. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Source
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Edited by Margo Culley. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
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