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= The_Awakening_(Chopin_novel) =
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Introduction
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'The Awakening' is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published on 22 April
1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of
the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle
between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood
with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century
American South. It is one of the earlier American novels that focuses
on women's issues utilizing narrative techniques. It is also widely
seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction
from contemporary readers and critics.
The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary,
and psychological complexity makes 'The Awakening' a precursor of
American modernist literature; it prefigures the works of American
novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the
works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. It can
also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that
would culminate with the modern works of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor,
Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.
Summary
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The novel opens with the Pontellier family--Léonce, a New Orleans
businessman of French Louisiana Creole heritage; his wife Edna; and
their sons Etienne and Raoul as they take a vacation on Grand Isle at
a resort on the Gulf of Mexico managed by Madame Lebrun and her sons
Robert and Victor.
Edna spends a lot of her time with her close friend Adèle Ratignolle,
who cheerily and boisterously reminds Edna of her duties as a wife and
mother. At Grand Isle, Edna eventually forms a connection with Robert
Lebrun, a charming, earnest young man who actively seeks Edna's
attention and affections. When they fall in love, Robert senses the
doomed nature of such a relationship and flees to Mexico under the
guise of pursuing a nameless business venture. The narrative focus
moves to Edna's shifting emotions as she reconciles her maternal
duties with her desire for social freedom and for Robert.
When summer vacation ends, the Pontelliers return to New Orleans. Edna
gradually reassesses her priorities and takes an active role in her
own happiness. She starts to isolate herself from New Orleans society
and to withdraw from some of the duties traditionally associated with
motherhood. Léonce eventually talks to a doctor about diagnosing his
wife, fearing she is losing her mental faculties. The doctor advises
Léonce to let her be and assures him that things will return to
normal.
When Léonce prepares to travel to New York City on business, he sends
the boys to his mother. Being left home alone for an extended period
gives Edna physical and emotional room to breathe and reflect on
various aspects of her life. While her husband is still away, she
moves out of their home and into a small bungalow nearby and begins a
dalliance with Alcée Arobin, a persistent suitor with a reputation for
being free with his affections. Edna is shown as a sexual being for
the first time in the novel, but the affair proves awkward and
emotionally fraught.
Edna also reaches out to Mademoiselle Reisz, a gifted pianist whose
playing is renowned but who maintains a generally hermetic existence.
Her playing had moved Edna profoundly earlier in the novel.
Mademoiselle Reisz focuses her life on music and herself instead of on
society's expectations, acting as a foil to Adèle Ratignolle, who
encourages Edna to conform. Reisz is in contact with Robert while he
is in Mexico, receiving letters from him regularly. Edna begs Reisz to
reveal their contents, which she does, proving to Edna that Robert is
thinking about her.
Eventually, Robert returns to New Orleans. At first aloof (and finding
excuses not to be near Edna), he eventually confesses his passionate
love for her. He admits that the business trip to Mexico was an excuse
to escape a relationship that never could work.
Edna is called away to help Adèle with a difficult childbirth. Adèle
pleads with Edna to think about her children and what she would be
forgoing if she did not behave appropriately. When Edna returns home,
she finds a note from Robert stating that he has left forever because
he loves her too much to shame her by engaging in a relationship with
a married woman.
In devastated shock, Edna rushes back to Grand Isle, where she had
first met Robert Lebrun. Edna seeks escape by committing suicide,
drowning herself in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Main characters
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*Edna Pontellier - a respectable Presbyterian from Kentucky, living
in Creole society in Louisiana. She rebels against conventional
expectations and discovers an identity independent from her role as a
wife and mother.
*Léonce Pontellier - Edna's husband, a successful businessman who is
oblivious to his wife's unhappiness.
*Mademoiselle Reisz - Her character symbolizes what Edna could have
been if she had grown old and had been independent from her family.
Despite viewing Reisz as disagreeable, Edna sees her as an inspiration
to her own "awakening."
*Madame Adèle Ratignolle - Edna's friend, who represents the
19th-century woman as she is totally devoted to her husband and
children.
*Alcée Arobin - known for seducing married women, he pursues a
short-lived affair with Edna, satisfying her while her husband is
away.
*Robert Lebrun - has a history of charming women he cannot have but
finds something different with Edna and falls in love. Robert's
flirting with Edna catalyzes her "awakening", and she sees in him what
has been missing in her marriage.
Style
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Kate Chopin's narrative style in 'The Awakening' can be categorized as
naturalism. Chopin's novel bears the hallmarks of French short story
writer Guy de Maupassant's style: a perceptive focus on human behavior
and the complexities of social structures. This demonstrates Chopin's
admiration for Maupassant, yet another example of the enormous
influence Maupassant exercised on 19th-century literary realism.
However, Chopin's style could more accurately be described as a hybrid
that captures contemporary narrative currents and looks forward to
various trends in Southern and European literature.
Mixed into Chopin's overarching 19th-century realism is an incisive
and often humorous skewering of upper-class pretension, reminiscent of
contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and
George Bernard Shaw.
Also evident in 'The Awakening' is the future of the Southern novel as
a distinct genre, not only in setting and subject matter but in
narrative style. Chopin's lyrical portrayal of her protagonist's
shifting emotions is a narrative technique that Faulkner would expand
in novels like 'Absalom, Absalom!' and 'The Sound and the Fury'.
Chopin portrays her experiences of the Creole lifestyle, in which
women were under strict rules and limited to the role of wife and
mother, which influenced her "local color" fiction and focus on the
Creole culture. Chopin adopted this style in her early short stories
and her first novel 'At Fault', which also deals with some of the
issues of Creole lifestyle. By using characters of French descent, she
was able to get away with publishing these stories because the
characters were viewed as "foreign", without her readers being as
shocked as they were when Edna Pontellier, a white Protestant, strays
from the expectations of society.
The plot anticipated the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
and the plays of William Inge, and Edna Pontellier's emotional crises
and her eventual tragic fall look ahead to the complex female
characters of Tennessee Williams's plays. Chopin's life, particularly
in terms of having her own sense of identity--aside from men and her
children--inspired 'The Awakening'. Her upbringing also shaped her
views as she lived with her widowed mother, grandmother and
great-grandmother, all of whom were intellectual, independent women.
After her father was killed on All Saints' Day and her brother died
from typhoid on Mardi Gras, Chopin became skeptical of religion, a
view that she presents through Edna, who finds church "suffocating".
Being widowed and left with six children to look after influenced
Chopin's writing, which she began at this time. Emily Toth argues
against the view that Chopin was ostracized from St. Louis after the
publication of 'The Awakening', stating that many St. Louis women
praised her; male critics condemned her novel.
Aspects of Chopin's style also prefigure the intensely lyrical and
experimental style of novelists such as Virginia Woolf and the
unsentimental focus on female intellectual and emotional growth in the
novels of Sigrid Undset and Doris Lessing. Chopin's most important
stylistic legacy is the detachment of the narrator.
Solitude
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One of the more prominent themes in 'The Awakening' is solitude. As
noted previously, Chopin's work was originally called 'A Solitary
Soul'.
Through Edna Pontellier's journey, Chopin sought to highlight the
different ways that a woman could be in solitude because of the
expectations of motherhood, ethnicity, marriage, social norms, and
gender. Chopin presents Edna's autonomous separation from society and
friends as individually empowering while still examining the risks of
self-exploration and subsequent loneliness. In an attempt to shed her
societal role of mother and wife, Edna takes charge of her limited
life and makes changes to better discover her true self. For example,
Edna leaves her husband and moves into a new house to live by herself,
a controversial action because a true woman never would leave her
husband. Although Edna's journey ultimately leads to an unsustainable
solitude due to lack of societal support, "her death indicates
self-possession rather than a retreat from a dilemma." She takes
control over what she still has agency over: her body and her self.
By making Edna's experiences critically central to the novel, Chopin
is able to sound a cautionary note about society's capacity to support
women's liberation. As shown through Edna's depressing emotional
journey, isolation, and eventual suicide, Chopin claims that the
social norms and traditional gender roles of the 19th century could
not tolerate an independent woman. The novel questions the value of
solitude and autonomy within a society unable to positively sustain
women's freedom.
Gender roles and social constraints
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The themes of romance and death in 'The Awakening' aid Chopin's
feminist intent of illuminating the restrictive and oppressive roles
of women in Victorian society. Edna's longing for Robert Lebrun and
affair with Alcée Arobin explicitly show Edna's rejection of her
prescribed roles as housewife and mother as she awakens to her
sexuality and sense of self. Edna has an emotional affair with Robert,
who leaves in order to avoid shaming her in society. Afterward, Edna
has a physical affair with Alcée. Through these affairs, Edna
exercises power outside of her marriage and experiences sexual longing
for the first time. However, through these affairs Edna also discovers
that no matter which man she is with, there is no escape from the
general oppression women face; Edna's society has no place for a woman
like her, as she must either be an exemplary housewife and mother like
Adèle Ratignolle or an isolated outsider like Mademoiselle Reisz.
Edna's suicide at the end of the novel exemplifies how few options
women had in society at this time. Leaving society all together was
Edna's way of rejecting and escaping this oppressive dichotomy. One
critic stated that the book leaves one sick of human nature, and
another one stated that the book is morbid because it is about an
unholy love that tested traditional gender roles of the late 1800s and
that the book belongs to the overworked field of sex fiction. When the
book was re-evaluated years later, it was considered a canonical
contribution to feminist literature. This later view resulted in many
other women writers of the 19th being re-evaluated.
Musical romanticism
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When Edna first hears Mademoiselle Reisz play, she develops a strong
appreciation toward music and art. At the ball at the Grand Isle, when
Edna is seen with Robert listening to Mademoiselle Reisz play a piece
by Frédéric Chopin (who is not related to Kate Chopin), Edna is
affected tremendously. Camastra states that
The emotional fluidity of music is not solely responsible for Edna's
evolving constitution. Such an assertion would deny any individual
agency on her part and misrepresent the synthesis of artistic form and
content that serves as a musical parallel to Edna's experiences.
Chopin's music successfully integrates the opposition of "the
'classical' concern for form and the 'romantic' urge of inspiration."
Edna ostensibly adheres to prescribed feminine standards before
witnessing an iconoclastic revelation of her senses.
Therefore, due to Edna's fascination with romantic melodies, it causes
Edna to "awaken" and desire new things to free herself from
confinement. The theme of solitude also is related with musical
romanticism. Camastra states that Edna comes to the same despondency
to which the writer Maupassant arrived. Maupassant attempts to commit
suicide a few months before his actual death in 1893. Maupassant
fictionalized spirits and Frederic Chopin internalized them in his
music. In 'The Awakening', Edna is fascinated by the musical poet's
repertoire, and she is forced to confront the spectral presence of a
deeper yearning for something that eventually drives her to commit
suicide.
Publication and critical reception
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'The Awakening' was particularly controversial upon publication in
1899. Although the novel never was technically banned, it was
censored. Chopin's novel was considered immoral for its comparatively
frank depictions of female sexual desire and for its depiction of a
protagonist who chafed against social norms and established gender
roles. The public reaction to the novel was similar to the protests
that greeted the publication and performance of Henrik Ibsen's
landmark drama 'A Doll's House' (1879), a work with which 'The
Awakening' shares an almost identical theme. Both contain a female
protagonist who abandons her husband and children for self-fulfilment.
However, published reviews ran the gamut from outright condemnation to
the recognition of 'The Awakening' as an important work of fiction by
a gifted practitioner. Divergent reactions of two newspapers in
Chopin's hometown of St. Louis reflect these polarities. The 'St.
Louis Republic' labeled the novel "poison" and "too strong a drink for
moral babes", and the 'St. Louis Mirror' stated "One would fain beg
the gods, in pure cowardice, for sleep unending rather than to know
what an ugly, cruel, loathsome Monster Passion can be when, like a
tiger, it slowly awakens. This is the kind of awakening that impresses
the reader in Mrs. Chopin's heroine." Later in the same year, the 'St.
Louis Post-Dispatch' praised the novel in "A St. Louis Woman Who Has
Turned Fame Into Literature."
Some reviews clucked in disappointment at Chopin's choice of subject:
"It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic
grace to enter the over-worked field of sex-fiction" ('Chicago Times
Herald'). Others mourned the loss of good taste; 'The Nation' claimed
that the book opened with high expectations, "remembering the author's
agreeable short stories," and closed with "real disappointment,"
suggesting public dissatisfaction with the chosen topic: "we need not
have been put to the unpleasantness of reading about her." 'The
Nation' also called Chopin "one more clever writer gone wrong."
Some reviews indulged in outright vitriol as when 'Public Opinion'
stated "We are well-satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims
out to her death in the waters of the gulf."
Chopin's work also garnered qualified, but still negative, reviews.
'The Dial' called 'The Awakening' a "poignant spiritual tragedy" with
the caveat that the novel was "not altogether wholesome in its
tendencies." Similarly, 'The Congregationalist' called Chopin's novel
"a brilliant piece of writing" but concludes "We cannot commend it."
In the 'Pittsburgh Leader', Willa Cather set 'The Awakening' alongside
'Madame Bovary', Gustave Flaubert's equally notorious and equally
reviled novel of suburban ennui and unapologetic adultery--but Cather
was no more impressed with the heroine than were most of her
contemporaries. Cather "hope[d] that Miss Chopin will devote that
flexible, iridescent style of hers to a better cause."
Historical context
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In the 1890s, when Chopin wrote 'The Awakening', a range of social
changes and tensions that brought "the woman question" into public
discussion influenced Chopin's novel.
Louisiana, the setting for 'The Awakening', was a largely Catholic
state where divorce was extremely rare, and women were expected to
stay loyal and faithful to their husbands, and men to their wives. A
main issue that 19th-century readers had with the novel was the idea
of a woman's abandoning her duties as a wife and mother. Etiquette of
the time proclaimed: "if she has the true mother-heart the
companionship of her children will be the society which she will
prefer above that of all others."
Chopin did not write another novel after 'The Awakening' and had
difficulty publishing stories after its release. American academic,
Emily Toth, believes this disruption was in part because Chopin "went
too far: Edna's sensuality was too much for the male gatekeepers."
Chopin's next book was cancelled due to the publisher running out of
funds, and health and family problems consumed her. When she died five
years later, she was on her way to being forgotten. Per Seyersted, a
Norwegian literary scholar, rediscovered Chopin in the 1960s, leading
'The Awakening' to be regarded as a landmark in feminist fiction.
Literary critic Linda Wagner-Martin writes "sometimes being considered
'European' (or at least certainly 'French') rather than American,
these types of works were condemned for the very ambivalence that made
them brilliant and prescient pieces of writing." Chopin's 'The
Awakening' and other novels in the 19th and early 20th centuries were
censored due to their perceived immorality, which included sexual
impropriety, an argument supported by the initial reviews of the book
found in newspapers at the time. Author Margo Culley stressed that
Chopin was not the only woman challenging gender ideologies in this
period; writing a novel brought her views into public prominence.
Legacy and adaptions
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In 1982, the novel was cinematized as 'The End of August', directed by
Bob Graham and written by Leon Elswit, Gregory Nava, Eula Seaton, and
Anna Thomas.
'The Awakening' serves as a structural and thematic background for
Robert Stone's 1986 novel 'Children of Light,' in which an assortment
of doomed characters, including an alcoholic writer and a mentally
unstable actress, gather in Mexico to make a film of Chopin's novel.
In 1991, 'The Awakening' was dramatized in the film 'Grand Isle',
directed by Mary Lambert and starring Kelly McGillis as Edna, Jon
DeVries as Leonce, and Adrian Pasdar as Robert.
In "Wish Someone Would Care", the ninth episode of the first season of
the HBO series 'Treme' that aired in 2010, professor Creighton
Bernette (John Goodman) assigns the novel to his class and briefly
discusses it with his students.
External links
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* [
https://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/Chopin/chopin-awakening
Chopin, Kate. 'The Awakening', Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1899] .
'Literature in Context: An Open Anthology.'
* (plain text and HTML)
*[
https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%22The%20Awakening%22%20creator%3Achopin%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts
'The Awakening'] at Internet Archive and Google Books (scanned books
original editions)
*
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