The Second Coming of Aphrodite
The radiant ancient Venus, the Aphrodite born from the white foam of the sea, has not traversed the horrifying darkness of the Middle Ages
with impunity . . . . She has retired into the depths of a cave, . . . lighted up by fires which are not those of the benign Phoebus.
—Charles Baudelaire (1861)
I was born under the star of Aphrodite, Aphrodite who was also born on the sea, and when her star is in the ascendant, events are always propitious to me.
—Isadora Duncan (1927)
Swiftly re-light the flame, Aphrodite, holy name, . . .
—H.D. (1945)
In February 1899, while The Awakening was in press, Kate Chopin wrote a poem called “The Haunted Chamber,” in
which a male speaker tells the tale “Of a fair, frail,
passionate woman who fell.” Narrated in neat couplets, the story seems at first merely an item for masculine delectation, an after-dinner diversion:
It may have been false, it may have been true. That was nothing to me—it was less to you.
But with bottle between us, and clouds of smoke From your last cigar, ’twas more of a joke
Than a matter of sin or a matter of shame
That a woman had fallen, and nothing to blame, So far as you or I could discover,
But her beauty, her blood and an ardent lover.
But surprisingly, as the night wears on, the speaker, left
alone with his thoughts, finds himself haunted by this fallen woman’s fate. When “the lights were low,” he confesses,
And the breeze came in with the moon’s pale glow The fair, faint voice of a woman, I heard,
’Twas but a wail, and it spoke no word.
It rose from the depths of some infinite gloom And its tremulous anguish filled the room.
Unspoken and unspeakable, the destiny of one lost lady symbolizes the wordless wail of every woman whose
passion for self-fulfillment has been forbidden or forgotten.
That such forbidden passion was a major theme for
Kate Chopin became clear to American readers two months later, when The Awakening—a novel that might be seen as
a book-length vindication of the rights of women like the “fair, frail” heroine of “The Haunted Chamber”—was
published on April 22 by Herbert S. Stone & Company. But the irony and urbanity of Chopin’s poem suggest that she was hardly prepared for the outrage that greeted her novel
on the same subject. Beginning with the remark that he has “an excellent story to tell,” the sardonically sketched narrator of “The Haunted Chamber” concludes with a sort
of impatient sympathy:
So now I must listen the whole night through
To the torment with which I had nothing to do— But women forever will whine and cry
And men forever must listen—and sigh—
From the first, however, reviewers of The Awakening made it very clear that they did not consider Kate Chopin’s masterwork “an excellent story,” that they felt no
compassion for “the torment” of her Edna Pontellier, and that, indeed, they intended neither to “listen” nor “sigh.”
The novel “leaves one sick of human nature,” complained
one critic; “it is not a healthy book,” declared another; “the purport of the story can hardly be described in language fit for publication,” asserted a third. Even a sister novelist like Willa Cather, who admired Chopin’s art and who was
eventually to produce her own tales of lost ladies, deplored the fact that the author had “devoted so exquisite and
sensitive . . . a style to so trite and sordid a theme.” Within a few more months, the libraries of St. Louis, Chopin’s
native city, had banned the book; Chopin was shunned by a number of acquaintances; and, according to her biographer Per Seyersted, she was refused membership in the St.
Louis Fine Arts Club.
At first the novelist attempted an insouciant self- defense:
Having a group of people at my disposal, I thought it might be
entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late.
But as time passed, the wound to Chopin’s aesthetic
morale apparently caused her ever more pain. Her royalties from the book were minimal ($102 in 1899, $40 in 1900,
and $3 in 1901), and her third collection of short stories, perhaps coincidentally but perhaps not, was rejected by The Awakening’s publisher. The “moving procession of
human energy,” Chopin finally confided in a sorrowful essay entitled “A Reflection,” “has left me by the roadside!” As if to confirm this point, she wrote only a few poems and short stories (and published even fewer) between 1899, the year of The Awakening’s disastrous failure, and 1904, the year
when she died. For almost three decades after her death, moreover, the novel that had created such a scandal was virtually ignored by a critical establishment that
maintained its stony indifference to the “torment” of both the author and her heroine, a “torment” with which most
seem smugly to have felt that they had, in the words of the speaker of “The Haunted Chamber,” “nothing to do.”
The daughter of a distinguished St. Louis family,
Katherine O’Flaherty Chopin was a surprising candidate for such controversy. Her mother, Eliza Faris, was the
descendant of French Creole aristocrats; her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, was an ambitious Irish immigrant who had become a prosperous and prominent merchant before his untimely death in an 1855 railway accident. Born in 1851, Kate herself received a strict Catholic education at
the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, learned early to speak fluent French (partly at school but mostly from her
formidable Creole grandmother, Madame Victoria Charleville), played the piano with exceptional elegance,
read voraciously both the French and British classics, and passionately supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1868, after graduating from the academy, she
“came out” in society, where, according to a contemporary reporter, she was quickly defined as “one of the
acknowledged belles of St. Louis, a favorite not only for her beauty, but also for her amiability of character and her
cleverness.” In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a twenty- five-year-old Creole cotton trader, with whom she moved first to New Orleans and then, in 1879, when Chopin’s business failed, to a plantation near Cloutierville, on the
Cane River, in the part of Natchitoches (pronounced Nack- uh-tush) Parish called “La Côte Joyeuse.”
The “conscientious mother” of six children, Chopin
loved her husband and led a “happy and industrious” life.
Indeed, like the model nineteenth-century woman
described by the British conduct-book writer Mrs. Sara Ellis, young Mrs. Chopin was, her daughter later remembered, the “Lady Bountiful of the neighborhood, dispensing advice and counsel, medicines, and, when
necessary, food to the simple people around her, and in this way learning to know and to love them too . . . .” When her husband died of swamp fever in 1883, she was at first
“inconsolable,” writes Seyersted. Returning to St. Louis with her children, she began to compose what a reviewer
from the Chicago Times-Herald called “delightful sketches” of her life in “Old Natchitoches,” partly to supplement her
income and partly to distract herself from her grief. Modest but charming, her early works must have seemed as blameless as her life had been. It is no wonder, therefore,
that in June 1899 the same Chicago journalist protested in a review of The Awakening that “It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and grace to enter the
overworked field of s*x fiction.”
Behind Kate Chopin’s exemplary façade as devout girl and devoted wife, however, there seems always to have
been another Kate Chopin, a young woman of
independence and irony who was haunted, as Edna Pontellier is, by vague dreams of spiritual liberation.
Complaining about the round of parties at which an
“acknowledged belle” was expected to appear, she worried when she was seventeen that “my dear reading and writing that I love so well have suffered much neglect,” and a year later, even more forcefully, she protested against having to “dance with people I despise; amuse myself with men
whose only talent lies in their feet . . . .” At around this time, moreover, she took a trip to New Orleans, where she learned to smoke cigarettes—then a daring gesture for
well-bred young ladies—and, even more daringly, she wrote the fable called “Emancipation,” in which she reimagined
herself as a “handsome” (male) beast escaping from a
comfortable cage on a “mad flight” into “the Unknown.”
The following year, as she and Oscar began their wedding
journey, she quite fortuitously met one “Miss Claflin” on the train to New York. Soon to achieve notoriety as the feminist and free-love advocate Mrs. Victoria Woodhull, this “fussy,
pretty, talkative little woman,” wrote Chopin in her diary, “entreated me not to fall into the useless degrading life of most married ladies—but to elevate my mind [and] I
assured her I would do so . . . .” Living in New Orleans, she followed Miss Claflin’s advice in her own way,
adventurously exploring the city on foot or by streetcar and taking notes on scenes that impressed her, attending the theater and the opera, and continuing her copious reading during long summers at Grand Isle, the vacation resort on
the Gulf of Mexico where The Awakening is set.
When Chopin returned to St. Louis after her husband’s death, her family doctor, Frederick Kolbenheyer, became
one of her closest friends. A radical intellectual and,
according to Per Seyersted, a “determined agnostic,” he persuaded her to read Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer; to
abandon in all but name the faith of her Catholic girlhood; and to begin writing fiction in earnest. As Seyersted
observes, therefore, even her earliest stories were far more
than “delightful sketches.” From the first, they were studies of “emancipation” and often specifically of female emancipation. Stylistically, moreover, they were rather
more advanced than the works of a conscientious “Lady
Bountiful” might have been expected to be. For besides the scientific and philosophical treatises Dr. Kolbenheyer
recommended to her, this newly liberated St. Louis widow had begun to read much of the most influential fiction of her day—the works of women regionalists like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, the novels of naturalists like Zola and Howells, and, above all, what she
called the “direct and simple” stories of Maupassant, whom she defined as “a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out
upon life through his own being and with his own eyes.”
Significantly, that description of Maupassant, written two years before the composition of The Awakening but
recounting an insight Chopin claimed to have had eight years earlier, sounds not only like a description of her own literary program but also like a summary of Edna Pontellier’s emancipatory quest in The Awakening. For an escape “from tradition and authority,” as much as a
liberation from the comfortable cage of bourgeois
matrimony, was to be both problem and solution for Kate Chopin and her most famous heroine. In their
concentration on such issues, moreover, author and character alike became representative late-nineteenth- century figures; even more dramatically, they became
representative women of the fin de siècle.
By the turn of the century, both moral and literary escapes “from tradition and authority” were matters of major concern to writers of both s*xes, but perhaps
especially to literary women. Kate Chopin was born, after all, only four years after the publication of Charlotte Brontë’s surprisingly radical Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s
shockingly passionate Wuthering Heights, two years before the appearance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s revolutionary
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and six years before the publication of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s openly feminist epic poem,
Aurora Leigh. As for male artists, just four years after Chopin’s birth Walt Whitman was to publish his first
version of Leaves of Grass, a work whose sensual frankness and stylistic freedom made it at least as daring in 1855 as
The Awakening was in 1899. By 1851, moreover, Richard Wagner’s epochal Tannhäuser, with its shocking depiction of a fiery Venusberg, had already premiered in Germany,
and within little more than a decade it was to be performed in Paris, where it would be defended by Charles Baudelaire, whose own controversial masterwork, Les Fleurs du Mal,
had appeared a few years earlier, in 1857.
It seems important to review these scattered names
and dates because, just as The Awakening has lately been defined primarily as a political romance, Kate Chopin
herself has often in recent years been detached from the rich intellectual fabric of the age that produced and
nurtured her. Originally seen by her most sympathetic critics as a “local colorist,” she was later upgraded by keener enthusiasts to a sort of feminist sociologist but still defined as an artist whose principal sources of energy were empirical observation and political theorizing.
Paradoxically enough, however, in their instinctive dislike of the novel’s erotic boldness and their willful refusal to
sympathize with what we can now understand as Edna’s social and metaphysical “torment,” some of the earliest reviews of The Awakening came closer to understanding the complex aesthetic content and radical origins of its author’s art. The novel “is like one of Aubrey Beardsley’s
hideous but haunting pictures with their disfiguring leer of
sensuality,” declared a reviewer for the Los Angeles Sunday Times, for instance. Three decades later the writer of the
first full-length study of Kate Chopin elaborated upon this position. “The Awakening follows the current of erotic
morbidity that flowed strongly through the literature of the last two decades of the nineteenth century,” observed
Daniel Rankin, adding that Kate Chopin shared in “the
prevailing artistic vertigo,” and “the mania for the exotic” that turned so many fin de siècle imaginations toward femmes fatales like Salomé, Cleopatra, and Salammbô.
Rankin was thinking in terms that would be explored in Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1935), but his
descriptive phrases, like those of the Los Angeles Timesreviewer, had a distinctly Victorian moral cast.
Beneath the judgmental surface, however, we can discern an accurate definition of who and what Kate Chopin was: a woman of the nineties, a writer of the fin de siècle.
What did it mean, though, to be a female artist of the fin de siècle, with all that such a voluptuously apocalyptic French phrase implied? Superficially, at least, the phrase fin de siècle meant, for literary women as for literary men, a kind of drawing-room sophistication—smoking Turkish cigarettes, subscribing to the avant garde London
periodical The Yellow Book, reading (and translating)
French fiction, all of which Kate Chopin did, especially in the St. Louis years of her widowhood, the years of her
major literary activity. More integrally, the fin de siècle was associated, for women as for men, with artistic and
intellectual revolutionaries like Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, together with their most significant precursors: Swinburne, Pater, Whitman, Wagner, Baudelaire. 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,” a woman who
chose to be politically, professionally, and emotionally autonomous. In addition, to be a woman of the nineties
meant to have come of age in a new kind of literary age, an era whose spirit was, if not dominated by literary women,
at least shared and shaped by significant female imaginations.
Kate Chopin, like many of her female contemporaries, began quite early to read the masterworks of the quartet
Virginia Woolf calls “the four great novelists”—Jane Austen,
Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Early
and late, moreover, she admired the writings of the famous French iconoclast George Sand, after one of whose heroines, significantly, she named her only daughter, Lélia.
In addition, she belonged to a literary circle in St. Louis
where the writings of such figures, as well as the works of their American contemporaries and descendants, were
actively discussed. Like the fictions of so many women, however, her earliest full-length narrative—the 1890 novel At Fault—bears most clearly the mark of that most
inescapable of women’s novels, Jane Eyre. Indeed, like a number of other nineteenth-century female fictions, Chopin’s At Fault depends for its drama on crucial elements of the Jane Eyre plot: specifically, on a husband helplessly
shackled to a mentally “incompetent” wife (in this case an alcoholic rather than a madwoman), a “pure” woman who insists on the holiness of wedlock, a fire that destroys much of the husband’s property, and a providential death that
happily resolves the unhappy triangle.
Unfortunately, though, what had worked so well in 1847 for Charlotte Brontë helped the apprentice Kate
Chopin not at all. The splitting of her female protagonist into a sober and noble heroine, on the one hand, and a
drunken ignoble double, on the other, seemed actually to block the sort of feminist speculation such a strategy had
made possible in Brontë’s novel. Equally hampering were
the Gothic elements of fire and providential death that had given intensity to Jane Eyre. In the forties, Brontë had used these plot devices to dramatize her heroine’s
unprecedented quest for autonomy. By the nineties, however, with New Women making both social and literary history, it had become clear that the “mad” rebellious
woman and the “sane” dutiful woman were really inhabitants of the same body, and their conflicts had to be depicted not through a series of theatrical events but
through an exploration of the troubled female consciousness itself, along with an examination of the
culture that had shaped that consciousness. How, though, could such psychological and cultural analyses be given
enough force so that they would be interesting to readers? After the failure of At Fault, Chopin must have realized that her most pressing task was to learn how to depict the
relationship between the individual and society in fictions
that would have both the dramatic vitality of Jane Eyre and the apparently objective, analytical restraint of Madame
Bovary. But how could she negotiate the passage from the clumsily derivative At Fault to such works? To put the
question another way, how could she move, and move as a woman writer, from the often melodramatic or sentimental conventions that characterized even the most “realistic”
nineteenth-century novels in England and America to the more elliptical structures of twentieth-century fiction?
At first, for Chopin, as for many other so-called regionalists, “local color” writing offered both a mode and a manner that could mediate between the literary structures
she had inherited and those she had begun, if only dimly, to envision. Because the “local color” writer is in a sense a
sort of anthropologist, the recounting of tales based on idiosyncratic customs, folk character, and regional behavior could let her learn to create and narrate stories with almost
scientific detachment. More important, by reporting odd events and customs that were part of a region’s “local
color” she could tell what would ordinarily be rather
shocking or even melodramatic tales in an unmelodramatic way and without fear of the kind of moral outrage that a
more “mainstream” work like The Awakening would evoke. Most important, by detaching herself from a specific set of customs she could learn to detach herself from all customs; like a few other regionalists—Mark Twain, for instance, comes to mind—she could move from theorizing about a particular subcultural group to theorizing about culture
itself.
Modest as they may seem, for instance, the stories collected here reveal that large issues had always been
implicit in Chopin’s “delightful sketches” at the same time
that the stylistic and thematic variety of these tales reveals the range of her narrative talents. “At the ’Cadian Ball,” for example, dramatizes the hierarchies that structure even so apparently simple a society as that of “La Côte Joyeuse.” “Désirée’s Baby” and “La Belle Zoraïde” go further and
interrogate the arbitrary race distinctions that could divide man from wife, child from parent, in such a culture. “At
Chênière Caminada,” set at the summer resort that was to play so crucial a part in The Awakening, and “Nég Créol,” set in a very different New Orleans from the quartier
inhabited by either Edna Pontellier or Kate Chopin herself, offer poignant portraits of southern ladies from the
sympathetically delineated point of view of working-class men—one white, one black—into whose consciousness a decorous lady like Chopin herself might not have been
expected to enter. “A Pair of Silk Stockings” and “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” sketch similarly poignant portraits of
ladies—one a genteel widow, the other an impoverished spinster—as they see themselves. “The Story of an Hour,” “Athénaïse,” and “The Storm”—the last so revolutionary in
its implications that its author never attempted to publish it in her lifetime—question the very institution of marriage.
“Lilacs” movingly delineates the love between two
strikingly dissimilar women while telling a tale notably
different from The Awakening or “The Haunted Chamber” of a “fair, frail, passionate woman who fell.” In all these pieces, although she appears to begin by setting herself a comparatively limited narrative task, Chopin ultimately presses herself to confront large, even (as in “Désirée’s
Baby,” “Lilacs,” and “The Storm”) apocalyptic questions
that many fin de siècle artists were approaching from other directions.
In a useful essay on “The Decadent and the New Woman,” Linda Dowling has suggested that both these turn-of-the-century intellectual “types” shared “the
fundamental desire of the fin de siècle avant garde: the dream of living beyond culture”—the dream, that is, of
living beyond patriarchal Victorian culture. To say this, however, is to say that artists like Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, with literary styles and goals quite distinct
from Chopin’s, had also begun to speculate on the nature of culture as well as on the nature of nature itself, especially
on the nature of impulses that might transcend the imperatives of nineteenth-century “morality.” Confronting such questions because of her quasi-anthropological work as a local colorist, Chopin must also have been influenced by related speculations she would have encountered in
French literature and in The Yellow Book as well as in
contemporary “New Woman” novels. Of course, however, as they dreamed of living beyond the strictures and structures of their own culture, two such different beings as the
“decadent” and the New Woman yearned for radically
different versions of a revitalized world. On the one hand, the New Woman characteristically dreamed of a
transfigured society where all “s*x distinction” had
dissolved away. On the other hand, the so-called decadents dreamed of a society transfigured not beyond but through s*x, and specifically through a reimagining of the erotic
that would return men and women to the Eden of s*xuality from which Protestant morality had expelled them.
As a woman writer, Kate Chopin clearly had a New Womanly distaste for the oppressions associated with
patriarchal “s*x distinction.” But because she had come to cultural theory through readings of publications like The Yellow Book, as well as through the antipuritanical
tradition of French literature and the observations of
literary anthropology, she was disinclined even to try to imagine a gender-free Eden. Rather, she dreamed of a
specifically s*xual culture “beyond culture.” At the same time, however, she must have seen that such an erotic Eden often might involve a misogynistic exploitation of the female. Aubrey Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, for instance, depicts a pornographic paradise
dominated by a nymphomaniac “Madam Venus” whose sensuality is often as perverse as the troop of satyrs, cherubs, dwarfs, and s*xually “doubtful creatures” who
serve her. Without denying or deriding the erotic, as many New Women tended to do, Chopin strove to purify it of such decadent misogyny.
To do this, as we shall see, she dreamed of yet a third Eden, a sacramental rather than a sacrilegious garden of earthly delights, a culture “beyond culture” whose energy would arise from the liberation and celebration of female
desire. And she insisted that this Eden should be ruled by a Venus who would be as regal as Beardsley’s was degraded.
Her vision of such a goddess probably gained its strength from the theology of feminist contemporaries who were
revising traditional religious ideas to create woman-
centered creeds. In addition, her sense of the goddess’s
sacramental s*xuality must have been fortified by the
revisionary erotics of feminist free-love advocates as well as by the radical s*xual politics of men like Walt Whitman. Most important, however, was the female aesthetic Chopin constructed as, in striving to imagine the healthy eroticism of a transformed culture, she searched through the myths
she had inherited from patriarchal history itself. For in
reexamining such myths, she began, if only half-consciously and tentatively, to create a narrative structure in which she might coherently dramatize the female struggle for identity that was her central subject. As her son sketched it in
1899, not long after the publication of The Awakening, the room in which she worked seems to have been emblematic of her philosophical as well as literary goals. “There were hardly any ornamentations in it,” her biographer tells us,
“apart from a few paintings on the wall and a candle and a naked Venus on the bookshelf.” Abandoning both formal
Catholicism and conventional “morality,” Chopin must have understood her own desire to tell a new kind of story about a woman’s life, a story that would revitalize and vindicate
the pagan presence of the goddess of love.
Toward the end of The Awakening there is a dinner
party scene that has been ignored by many critics, though
it has fascinated and puzzled a few. On the verge of leaving her husband’s house for a nearby cottage that she hopes
will become both a spiritual and material room of her own, Edna Pontellier has invited a group of friends to join her at a birthday dinner that will also be a ceremonial celebration of her departure from one household and her entrance into another. Splendid in gold satin and lace “the color of her
skin,” she presides over an equally splendid table, lit by “wax candles in massive brass candelabra,” and heaped
with “full, fragrant roses.” The “ordinary stiff dining chairs”
have been “discarded for the occasion and replaced by the most commodious and luxurious which could be collected
throughout the house” while “before each guest [stands] a tiny glass that [sparkles] like a garnet gem,” containing a special, magical-looking cocktail. Enthroned at the head of
the table, Edna herself appears equally magical, for there is “something in her attitude, in her whole appearance . . .
which [suggests] the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.” At the same time, however— even in the midst of merrymaking that climaxes in one of
the women guests weaving a pagan garland of roses to
crown the curls of the handsome young man beside her— we are told that Edna feels an “old ennui overtaking
her . . . . a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed” (Chapter XXX).
Perhaps it is because so many recent critics would agree with Lawrence Thornton’s description of The
Awakening as a “political romance” that few have paid
close attention to this scene. Though in the last decade The Awakening has become one of the most persistently
analyzed American novels, writers about the book
commonly describe Edna’s party as just one more occasion on which Chopin’s half-mad housewife experiences
“unfocused yearning” for romantic transfiguration or social liberation. Besides occupying an exceptionally elaborate chapter in a novel of economical episodes, however, Edna’s dinner party is described in a scene whose images and allusions suggest rich veins of symbolism. What does it mean, after all, when the narrator of this apparently
“realistic” work suddenly calls her heroine “the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone”? The vocabulary of such a description seems more appropriate to a fantasy or a fairy tale, and yet this mysterious definition seems also to evoke the narrator’s
next perception of the “chill breath” her queenly heroine
feels, together with Edna’s equally mysterious sense of
“acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one . . . .” Who or what, indeed, is the oddly vague “beloved one”? And why, finally, does the enigmatically wise Mademoiselle Reisz take her
leave of Edna with a French sentence—“Bonne nuit, ma reine; soyez sage”—that seems to confirm our feeling that this magical hostess is clothed in a paradoxical veil of power and vulnerability?
As a speculative explanation of these puzzles I want to suggest that The Awakening is a female fiction that both
draws upon and revises fin de siècle hedonism to propose a feminist myth of Aphrodite/Venus as an alternative to the
patriarchal myth of Jesus. In the novel’s unfolding of this
implicit myth, the dinner party scene is crucial, for here, as she presides over a Swinburnian Last Supper, Edna Pontellier in a sense “becomes” the powerful goddess of
love and art into whose shape she was first “born” in the
Gulf near Grand Isle and in whose image she will be borne back into the sea at the novel’s end. Thus when Victor, the young man who was ritually garlanded at the climax of the
feast, tells his friend Mariequita that “Venus rising from the foam could have presented no more entrancing a spectacle
than Mrs. Pontellier, blazing with beauty and diamonds at the head of the board,” he is speaking what is in a strange way the truth about Kate Chopin’s heroine.
To see The Awakening in these terms is not, of course, to deny that it is also the work most readers have thought it is: a “Creole Bovary,” a feminist “critique of the identity of ‘mother–women,’ ” a New Orleans version of “the familiar
transcendentalist fable of the soul’s emergence, or ‘lapse’ into life,” “a eulogy on s*x and a muted elegy on the female condition,” a turn-of-the-century “existentialist” epiphany,
and “a tough-minded critique of the Victorian myths of
love.” Taken together, all of these definitions of the novel reveal the range of political, moral, and philosophical
concerns on which Chopin meditates throughout this brief but sophisticated work. What unifies these issues, however, is the way in which, for all its surface realism, The
Awakening is organized by Kate Chopin’s half-secret (and perhaps only half-conscious) fantasy of the second coming of Aphrodite.
To be sure, Chopin’s “Creole Bovary” has always been seen, like its French precursor, as a novel that both uses
fantasy and comments upon fantasy in order to establish
the character of its heroine and the nature of her character.
From the severest early reviewers to the most enthusiastic recent writers, however, most critics consider such fantasies, as they do Emma Bovary’s, symptoms of an
“over-idealization of love” and a “susceptibility to romantic codes.” People like Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary,
wrote Willa Cather in her 1899 review, “are the spoil of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment.” Despite Cather’s censoriousness, however, a careful reading of The
Awakening suggests that the details of desire it records shape a tale of romantic transfiguration that not only
comments upon fantasy but actually becomes a fantasy, if only a shadowy one. Both seriously and ironically this
fantasy of Kate Chopin’s shows, from a female point of view, just what would “really” happen to a mortal, turn-of- the-century woman who tried to claim the erotic freedom that Greek mythology attributed to the classical queen of love.
Appropriately enough, Kate Chopin’s portrait of
Aphrodite as a Creole Bovary begins and ends at a seaside resort where a lucky few may be given the chance to witness the birth of such mythic freedom in the foam. To
start with, however, despite the nearness of the sea and the
incessant sound of its “seductive” voice, Chopin offers scenes that seem determinedly realistic, landbound. In addition, as if acknowledging Flaubert’s influence, she opens her novel about a woman’s fateful transformation by examining her heroine from a male perspective. Madame
Bovary begins with a brief summary of Charles Bovary’s
history, including a description of the way Emma Rouault looks to the young physician whom she will soon marry.
Similarly, The Awakening’s author-omniscient first chapter emphasizes the point of view of Edna Pontellier’s
conventional husband, Léonce. In both cases, the woman appears first as an object, and Edna in particular is
presented as she seems to Léonce: valuable, even treasured, but nevertheless, a thing to be possessed rather than a person to be heard or heeded. Even this early in her novel, however, and even while acknowledging her debt to Flaubert, Chopin swerves from him by emphasizing this
last point. For where the French novelist creates sympathy for Charles with his devastating portrait of the first
Madame Bovary, Chopin immediately characterizes Léonce as an impatient businessman who scrutinizes his wife for
sunburn “as one looks at a valuable piece of personal
property which has suffered some damage” (Chapter I).
Most of The Awakening is told from Edna’s perspective, with occasional editorial interpolations from the narrator,
but despite its unrepresentative point of view and its air of almost impressionistic improvisation, this opening chapter includes many of the major motifs of the work to follow: symbolic objects (houses, clothing, jewelry, food); symbolic activities (piano playing, swimming, housecleaning, gambling); symbolic figures, both human and inhuman (the birds, the lady in black, the twins, Edna and Robert, Mr.
Pontellier, Madame Lebrun); symbolic places (the Gulf, the beach, the city, the summer colony on Grand Isle), and
crucial relationships (husbands and wives, mothers and
children). First encountered here, most of these elements
seem ordinary enough, or rather they seem as vividly literal as objects in a painting by Renoir or Seurat. It is only as
one scene dissolves into another, as the narrative point of view gradually enters Edna’s consciousness, and as objects and activities recur like elements of a protracted dream,
that they begin to gain what eventually becomes an almost uncanny power. Porches and pianos, mothers and children, skirts and sunshades—all these are the props and properties of domesticity, the key elements of what in the
nineteenth century was called “woman’s sphere,” and it is in this sphere, on the edge of a blue gulf, that Edna Pontellier is caged when she first appears in the novel that will tell her story. In a larger sense, however, she is
confined in what is not only literally a “woman’s sphere” but, symbolically speaking, the Woman’s House—the place to which in many cultures women are ritually assigned at
crucial times in their lives. Here, therefore, every object
and figure has a distinctively female symbolic significance.
The “mother-women” who “prevail that summer at Grand Isle” (Chapter IV), the young lovers who always
appear in the neighborhood of the sepulchral lady in black, Edna’s own children trailed by their quadroon nurse with her “faraway, meditative air” (Chapter I), imperious
Mademoiselle Reisz in her “rusty black lace” and artificial violets (Chapter IX), the Farival twins “always clad in the Virgin’s colors” (Chapter IX), the skirt-dancing little girl in black tulle, even Edna herself sharing out her husband’s
gift of friandises—all seem like faintly grotesque variations on the figures from “La Vie d’une Femme” who appear in
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette: the young girl, the bride, the mother, the widow. That the pension in which all these
women have gathered is ruled by the pretty widow
Madame Lebrun, who sews and oversees in a light airy room with a view at the top of the house, seems quite
appropriate. At the same time, however, it also seems quite right that the novel begins with the comical curse of the
caged parrot—“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!”—
and with the information that this same bird also speaks “a language which nobody understood, unless it was the
mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door ”
(Chapter I). For these birds together prefigure Edna’s restlessness and her irony, her desire for freedom and her sense that freedom may ultimately be meaningless, her
yearning for solitude and her worries about loneliness.
Before these desires and fears become fully conscious, however, and even while it is slowly becoming clear that
the domesticity of these early chapters is symbolically as well as literally important, Chopin begins to dramatize her heroine’s summer of discontent through a series of
traditionally “realistic” interactions between Edna and her husband. Though these scenes may be partly influenced by the style of French writers like Flaubert and Maupassant,
they are most thematically indebted to the female literary tradition in English of which Kate Chopin was also an heir. Depicting Léonce’s casual self-absorption and Edna’s mild rebelliousness, the narrator of The Awakening at first seems mainly concerned to represent with Austenian
delicacy a marriage on the edge of Eliotian fissures. To
begin with, therefore, Edna’s “awakening” is both domestic and prosaic. Like Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s
Middlemarch and Gwendolen Harleth in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, she awakens from the romantic dreams of
girlhood first to find herself a married woman and then to find that the meaning of marriage is very different from
what she had supposed. Like another nineteenth-century heroine—Catherine Earnshaw Linton in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights—she experiences what Chopin calls “an indescribable oppression” that seems to come at least in
part from her sense of herself as, in Brontë’s words, “the
wife of a stranger; an exile, and outcast . . . from what had been [her] world.” For when, like the subject of one of
Emily Dickinson’s poems, she rises to “his requirements” and takes on “the honorable work of woman and of wife,” she seems to have accepted a spiritual confinement that excludes all visions of “amplitude and awe.”
For George Eliot’s comparatively docile Dorothea and her chastened Gwendolen, even for Emily Brontë’s fierce Catherine, such a recognition of domestic entrapment is
the climax of a long process of social reconciliation that must end in these heroines accepting their own
comparative powerlessness. For Edna, however, this
recognition of “her position in the universe as a human being, and . . . her relations as an individual to the world
within and about her” (Chapter VI) is only the beginning of a more metaphysical awakening to the implications of her own femaleness. Like Emily Dickinson, Chopin wants to
record not only the body’s rebellion at confinement but also the soul’s “moments of escape” along with the visions of power that motivate such escapes. In addition, because she is a fiction writer, she wants to create a narrative that will
dramatize those visions. After her first discoveries of spiritual uneasiness, therefore, Edna’s “awakenings”
become increasingly fantastic and poetic, stirrings of the imagination’s desire for “amplitude and awe” rather than protests of the reason against unreasonable constraint.
Paradoxically, however, it is just Edna’s domestic
confinement itself that makes possible these later, more visionary awakenings. Specifically, Edna awakens to the
possibilities as well as the problems of “her position in the universe” not only because she finds herself enclosed in “woman’s sphere” but also because she has come to spend the summer in what is in a sense a female colony. In fact, Madame Lebrun’s pension on Grand Isle is very much a
woman’s land not only because it is owned and run by a
single woman and dominated by “mother-women” but also because (as in so many summer colonies today) its
principal inhabitants are actually women and children whose husbands and fathers visit only on weekends. No
wonder, then, that, as Chopin observes, “That summer at Grand Isle [Edna] began to loosen a little the mantle of
reserve that had always enveloped her” (Chapter VII) and had begun to do so under the influence, first, of beautiful
and sensual Adèle Ratignolle and, later, of more severe and spiritual Mademoiselle Reisz. Responding to Adèle’s questions in Chapter VII, for instance, she begins to
describe the search for meaning that has shaped her life.
Similarly, responding in Chapter IX to Mademoiselle Reisz’s music, she becomes conscious that “the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it,
lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her . . . body.”
The oceanic imagery Chopin uses to illustrate Edna’s feelings about Mademoiselle Reisz’s music suggests yet another way in which Madame Lebrun’s predominantly
female summer colony on Grand Isle awakens this Creole Bovary. Chopin’s Aphrodite, like Hesiod’s, is born from the sea, and born specifically because the colony where she
comes to consciousness is situated, like so many places that are significant for women, outside patriarchal culture,
beyond the limits and limitations of the city where men make history, on a shore that marks the margin where
nature intersects with culture. Here the sea can speak in a seductive voice, “never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward
contemplation” (Chapter VI). It is significant, then, that not only Edna’s silent dialogue with Mademoiselle Reisz but also her confessional conversation with Adèle Ratignolle employs much sea imagery. Reconstructing her first
childhood sense of selfhood for her friend, Edna remembers “a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean” in which as a little girl she “threw out her arms as if
swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water” (Chapter VII). Just as significantly, she speculates that, as she journeyed through this
seemingly endless meadow, she was most likely “running away from prayers . . . read in a spirit of gloom by my
father that chills me yet to think of.” She was running away, that is, from patriarchal theology, and running into the wild openness of nature. Even so early, the story implies, her
search for an alternative religion, or at least for an
alternative mythology, had begun. In the summer of her awakening on Grand Isle, that quest is extended into the process of learning not to run but to swim.
Edna’s education in swimming is, of course, obviously symbolic, representing both a positive political lesson in
staying afloat and an ambiguously valuable sentimental education in the consequences of getting in over one’s
head. More important, however, is the fact that swimming immerses Edna in an other element, an element in whose
baptismal embrace she is mystically and mythically reborn.
That Chopin wants to emphasize this aspect of Edna’s education in swimming is made clear by the magical
occasion on which her heroine’s first independent swim takes place. Following Mademoiselle Reisz’s evocative concert, “someone, perhaps it was Robert [Edna’s lover-to- be], thought of a bath at that mystic hour and under that mystic moon” (Chapter IX). On this night that sits “lightly
upon the sea and the land,.” then, the previously timid
Edna begins for the first time to swim, feeling “as if some power of significant import had been given her” and
aspiring “to swim far out, where no woman had swum before” (Chapter X). Her new strength and her new
ambition are fostered by the traditionally female mythic
associations of moonlight and water, as well as by the romantic attendance of Robert Lebrun and the “heavy perfume of a field of white blossoms somewhere near” (Chapter X). At the same time, however, Chopin’s
description of the waves breaking on the beach “in little foamy crests . . . like slow, white serpents” (Chapter X)
suggests that Edna is swimming not only with new powers but into a paradise that depends on deliberate reversals of conventional theological images, while her frequent reminders that this sea is a gulf reinforce our sense that its waters are in some sense metaphysical. Thus, even more
important than Edna’s swim are both its narrative and its aesthetic consequences. For in swimming away from the
beach where her prosaic husband watches and waits, Edna swims away from the shore of her old life, where she had
lingered for twenty-eight years, hesitant and ambivalent. As she swims, moreover, she swims not only toward a female
paradise but out of one kind of novel—the work of Eliotian or Flaubertian “realism” she had previously inhabited—and into a new kind of work, a distinctively female fantasy of
paradisal fulfillment.
In a literal sense, of course, the scenes that follow Edna’s first independent swim merely seem to record
playful fantasies expressed by Robert and Edna as part of a “realistically” rendered courtship. As one reads the novel, though, they come to have a surprising metaphorical
intensity, even a mythic power, and thus they create a kind of ghostly story that begins with Edna’s baptismal
swimming scene in Chapter X and ends with her last,
suicidal swim in Chapter XXXIX. For when Edna says, “I wonder if any night on earth will ever again be like this one,” she is starting to place herself in a tale that comes poetically “true.” Her dialogue with Robert, as the two
return from their moonlit midnight swim in the Gulf, opens this story. “It is like a night in a dream,” she says. “The
people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings. There must be spirits abroad to-night” (Chapter X).
Robert’s reply develops her idea. It is the twenty-eighth of August, he observes, and then explains fancifully that on
that date, “at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is
shining . . . a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf . . . . [and] seeks some one mortal
worthy to hold him company . . . . to-night he found Mrs.
Pontellier. Perhaps he will never wholly release her from
the spell.” Fanciful as it seems, this fantasy of Edna’s and Robert’s is associated, first, with a real change in their relationship, and, then, with a real change in Edna. Sitting on the porch in the moonlight, the two fall into an erotic
silence that seems to be a consequence of the tale they have jointly told. And the next day, when Edna awakens, she finds herself “blindly following whatever impulse
moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility” (Chapter XII).
The scenes that follow—Edna’s awakening of Robert (in Chapter XII), their voyage (in the same chapter) to the
nearby island called the Chênière Caminada (the island of live oaks), their attendance at church (in Chapter XIII),
Edna’s nap at Madame Antoine’s cottage (again in Chapter XIII) and their return to Grand Isle (in Chapter XIV)—
constitute a wistful adult fairy tale. Journeying across the Gulf to mass on the Chênière Caminada, Edna feels “as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening” (Chapter XII), and together with Robert she dreams of
“pirate gold” and of yet another voyage. Then, when she finally arrives at the “quaint little Gothic church of Our
Lady of Lourdes,” she is overcome by “a feeling of
oppression and drowsiness,” so that she struggles—as she did when “running away from prayers” through the
Kentucky meadow—to escape its “stifling atmosphere . . .
and reach the open air.” Everything that happens after she leaves the church further implies that she has abandoned
the suffocation of traditional Christian theology for the rituals of an alternative religion. Attended by Robert, she strolls to “Madame Antoine’s cot,” where, almost
ceremonially, she undresses, bathes, lies down “in the very center of [a] high, white bed,” and, like a revisionary
Sleeping Beauty, sleeps for almost a whole day. When she awakens, for the fifth or sixth but most crucial time in this novel of perpetual “awakening,” she wonders, “How many years have I slept? . . . A new race of beings must have
sprung up . . . .” (Chapter XIII). Again she bathes, almost ceremonially, and then she eats what appear to be two
ritual meals, after which she and Robert sit at the feet of
fat matriarchal Madame Antoine, who tells them “legends of the Baratarians and the sea.”
Having bathed, slept, feasted, communed, and received a sort of religious instruction, Edna seems to have entered a realm where extraordinary myths are real and ordinary
reality is merely mythical. Yet of course this imaginary
world is quite incompatible with the fictions of gentility and Christianity by which her “real” world lives. Metaphorically speaking, Edna has become Aphrodite, or at least a devotee of that goddess. But what can be—must be—her fate?
Shadowing her earlier “realism” with the ghostly romance she has developed in these fairy-tale chapters, Chopin devotes the rest of her novel to examining the difficulty of the struggles for autonomy that she imagines would have engaged any nineteenth-century woman who experienced such a fantastic transformation. If Aphrodite—or at least
Phaedra—were reborn as a fin de siècle New Orleans housewife, says Chopin, Edna Pontellier’s fate would be her fate.
Because it mainly dramatizes the results of Edna’s metamorphosis, the rest of The Awakening can be
discussed quite briefly. Having awakened to her “true” self,
Edna begins “daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.” Yet as the self-consciously fictive episode on the
Chênière Caminada reveals, neither she nor her author has rejected fantasy altogether. Rather, Chopin has allowed the moon, the sea, the female summer colony, and Madame
Antoine to recreate Edna Pontellier as a character in
search of a story that can contain her and her power. That such a tale will be both hard to find and hard to tell, however, is revealed almost at once by Robert Lebrun’s
abrupt departure from Grand Isle. As the would-be lover of a proper “lady,” he strives to do what is both morally and fictionally “right,” accurately perceiving that because he is a “good” man and not a seducer, the traditional plot in
which he imagines himself enmeshed now calls for renunciation. By the end of the novel, Edna will have
created a different story, one in which Robert plays Adonis to her Venus, and, “no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not,” she can declare that, like the Queen of Love, “I give myself where I choose” (Chapter XXXVI). But in Chapter XV, as she struggles toward such an ambitious self-definition, she finds herself incapable of
deciding on any serious action. Significantly, she retires to her cottage to tell her children a story which she does not, perhaps cannot, end, so that “instead of soothing it excited them.”
The tale of Edna’s own life moves just as haltingly to its strange conclusion. As she becomes aware that she is
“seeking herself and finding herself,” she seeks to discard and even destroy the conventions by which she has lived—
her wedding ring, her “reception day” for visitors, even her “charming home” that has been so well-stocked with Mr.
Pontellier’s “household gods.” Her painting, her gambling, and her visits to the races as well as her relationships with Mademoiselle Reisz and Adèle Ratignolle, with Alcée
Arobin and his friends Mr. and Mrs. Highcamp, represent similar attempts to create a new identity. Yet none of these efforts succeeds in yielding what we might call an open
space in the plot where Edna finds herself, and none is
equal to the intensity of what is by now quite clearly the metaphysical desire that has made this heroine into, as
Chopin’s original title put it, “a solitary soul.” Having been visited by the Holy Ghost of the allegorical-sounding “Gulf,” who rarely offers so much “ponderous” wisdom “to any
woman,” Edna can only struggle to express her needs by making up stories like the one she tells at a party about “a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a
pirogue and never came back” (Chapter XXIII). As she eventually realizes, however, such a fiction risks
descending into the banalities of second-rate romance, so
that ultimately the dinner party she gives in Chapter XXX is her most authentic act of self-definition. Here, she actually plays the part of the person she has metaphorically
become: “the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.” Yet of course, as we saw earlier,
Edna’s dinner party is in a sense a Last Supper, a final
transformation of will and desire into bread and wine, flesh and blood, before the “regal woman’s” inevitable betrayal
by a culture in which a regenerated Aphrodite has no meaningful role.
Finally, therefore, Edna can think of only one way “to elude” a society that keeps trying to put her back in her proper domestic place, and that is through her much-
debated suicidal last swim. Once again, however, our feelings about this action depend on our understanding of the myth that enriches it. Certainly if we see Edna’s
decision to swim into the sea’s “abysses of solitude” as
simply a “realistic” action, we are likely to disapprove of it, to consider it, in the words of Suzanne Wolkenfeld, “a
defeat and a regression, rooted in a self-annihilating instinct, in a romantic incapacity to accommodate . . . to the limitations of reality.” It is possible, though, to
speculate that Edna’s last swim is not a true suicide—that is, a death—at all, or, if it is a death, it is a death that points toward a resurrection, a pagan female Good Friday that promises a Venusian Easter. Certainly, because of the way it is presented to us, Edna’s suicide expresses not a refusal to accommodate to reality but a subversive questioning of
both reality and “realism.” For, swimming away from the white beach of Grand Isle, from the empty summer colony and the equally empty fictions of marriage and maternity, Edna swims, as the novel’s last sentences tell us, not into death but back into her own life, back into her own vision, back into the imaginative openness of her childhood.
Interestingly, in depicting Edna’s last swim Chopin seems to have revised precursors like Flaubert and Pierre Louÿs as well as such a descendant as Edith Wharton, all of whom not only show the deaths of “fair, frail, passionate
[women] who fell” but also linger over the unpleasant details of those deaths. Flaubert, for instance, records
horrifying visions of Emma Bovary’s dead mouth “like a black hole at the bottom of her face,” pouring forth “black liquid . . . as if she were vomiting.” Similarly, in Aphrodite Pierre Louÿs undercuts his Chrysis’s triumphant
impersonation of Aphrodite with a ghastly picture of her dead body, a “thread of blood” flowing from one
“diaphanous nostril” and “some emerald-colored spots . . . softly [tinting] the relaxed belly.” Even Wharton, in The
House of Mirth, though she depicts the dead “semblance of Lily Bart” more gently, imagines her heroine’s “estranged
and tranquil face” definitively motionless and, through that motionlessness, offering her watching lover “the word
which made all clear.” By contrast, Kate Chopin never allows Edna Pontellier to become immobilized. Neither estranged nor corrupted, she is still swimming when we
last see her, nor does she ever—in Emily Dickinson’s phrase
—“stop for death.” To be sure, we are told that “her arms and legs were growing tired,” that “exhaustion was
pressing upon and overpowering her” (Chapter XXXIX). It is clear enough that both reality and realism will contain her by fatiguing her, drowning her. Yet Chopin seems
determined to regenerate Edna through a regeneration of myth.
No wonder, then, that as she enters the water for her
last swim, this transformed heroine finally divests herself of “the unpleasant, pricking garments” of her old life as a
“real” woman—a wife, mother, and mistress—and stands “naked under the sky! . . . like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never
known.” Together, her ceremonial nakedness, the
paradoxically unknown familiarity of the world she is entering, and the “foamy wavelets [that curl and coil] like serpents about her ankles” (Chapter XXXIX) tell us that she is journeying not just toward rebirth but toward an
imaginary world beyond the restrictive culture of the
nineteenth century, a world in which women might be as free as the mythic Aphrodite was. Even in the last sentences of Chopin’s novel, Edna Pontellier is still swimming. And how, after all, do we know that she ever
dies? What critics have called her “suicide” may be simply our interpretation of her motion, our realistic idea about
the direction in which she is swimming. Yet as Chopin’s last words tell us, that direction is toward the pagan, the paradisal: “There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.” Defeated, even crucified, by the
“reality” of nineteenth-century New Orleans, Chopin’s resurrected Venus is returning to Cyprus or Cythera.
Kate Chopin may not, of course, have consciously
intended to structure her daring novel of a woman’s s*xual and spiritual awakening around a myth of the second
coming of Aphrodite. Yet it seems more than coincidental that this novelist sat in a drawing room decorated by “a
naked Venus” and imagined her Edna Pontellier as a goddess rising from the foam of a ceremonial dinner party in the same year that another American artist, Isadora
Duncan, was beginning to dance the dances of Aphrodite in London salons while the feminist classicist, Jane Ellen Harrison, who would soon recover the matriarchal origins
of ancient Greek religion, chanted Greek lyrics in the background. As Elizabeth Kendall has pointed out, Duncan was the daughter of a “bold-minded St. Louis Irish girl
about the same age as . . . Kate Chopin,” and she had always been affected by her own birth “under the star of Aphrodite.” On her first trip to Europe, she tells us in her
autobiography, she mused “for days before the Primavera, the famous painting of Botticelli,” dreaming of the “sweet,
half-seen pagan life, where Aphrodite gleamed through the form of the gracious but more tender mother of Christ.”
Like Chopin, she was trying to imagine what Linda Dowling calls “a culture beyond [patriarchal] culture,” to see the power of the pagan through the constraints of the Christian and the triumph of the female through the power of the pagan. And like Chopin, she was striving, as the poet H.D. later would, to “relight the flame” of “Aphrodite, holy
name.” At one time or another, all three of these artists were to be excoriated as “fair, frail, passionate [women] who fell.” Yet the myths they made from their desire to
relight a lost flame are still resonant. Certainly, despite the critical torment that put an end to Kate Chopin’s literary career, her tale of Edna Pontellier’s ambiguously
triumphant awakening will continue to haunt the chambers of many readers. For even Edna’s final swim can be seen in terms of a metaphor Florence Nightingale had used in her
visionary Cassandra, decades before Chopin had begun to imagine this heroine’s “solitary soul”: “rather, ten times,
die in the surf, heralding the way to [a] new world, than stand idly on the shore.”
—Sandra M. Gilbert
Suggestions for Further Reading
THE WORKS OF KATE CHOPIN
Seyersted, Per, ed. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin.
Two volumes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
BIOGRAPHY
Rankin, Daniel S. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932.
Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
CRITICISM
Allen, Priscilla. “Old Critics and New: The Treatment of Chopin’s The Awakening.” In The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn
Diamond and Lee R. Edwards. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977, pp. 224–38.
Arms, George. “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in the Perspective of Her Literary Career.” In Essays on
American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, ed. Clarence Gohdes. Durham: Duke University Press, 1967, pp. 215–28.
Cantwell, Robert. “The Awakening by Kate Chopin.”
Georgia Review, 10 (1956), 489–94.
Culley, Margaret. “Edna Pontellier: ‘A Solitary Soul.’ ” In
The Awakening: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Margaret Culley. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976, pp. 224– 28.
Dowling, Linda. “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1979).
Eaton, Clement. “Breaking a Path for the Liberation of Women in the South.” Georgia Review, 28 (Summer 1974), 187–99.
Eble, Kenneth. “A Forgotten Novel: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” Western Humanities Review, 10 (1956),
261–69.
Fletcher, Marie. “The Southern Woman in the Fiction of Kate Chopin.” Louisiana History, 7 (1966), 117–32.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin’s Fantasy of Desire.” Kenyon Review, 5 (1983), 42–56.
, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Jones, Anne Goodwyn. “Kate Chopin: The Life Behind the Mask.” In Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another
Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981, pp.
135–82.
Kendall, Elizabeth. “Before the World Began.” Ballet Review, 6 (1977–78), 21–32.
Koloski, Bernard J. “The Structure of Kate Chopin’s At Fault.” Studies in American Fiction, 3 (1975), 89–95.
. “The Swinburne Lines in The Awakening.” American Literature, 45 (1974), 608–10.
Leary, Lewis. Southern Excursions: Essays on Mark Twain and Others. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971, Chapters 9 and 10.
May, John R. “Local Color in The Awakening.” The Southern Review, 6 (1970), 1031–40.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Ringe, Donald A. “Cane River World: Kate Chopin’s At Fault
and Related Stories.” Studies in American Fiction, 3 (1975), 157–66.
. “Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” American Literature, 43 (1972), 580–88.
Scott, Anne Firor. “The ‘New Woman’ in the New South.”
South Atlantic Quarterly, 61 (1962), 473–83.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British
Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Skaggs, Peggy. “ ‘The Man-Instinct of Possession’: A
Persistent Theme in Kate Chopin’s Stories.” Louisiana Studies, 14 (1975), 277–85.
. “Three Tragic Figures in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” Louisiana Studies, 13 (1974), 345–64.
Spangler, George. “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: A Partial Dissent.” Novel, 3 (1970), 249–55.
Springer, Marlene. Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976.
Sullivan, Ruth, and Stewart Smith. “Narrative Stance in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” Studies in American Fiction, 1 (1973), 62–75.
Thornton, Lawrence. “The Awakening: A Political
Romance.” American Literature, 52, 1 (March 1980),
50–66.
Tompkins, Jane P. “The Awakening: An Evaluation.”
Feminist Studies, 3 (1976), 22–29.
Toth, Emily. “The Independent Woman and ‘Free’ Love.”
Massachusetts Review, 16 (1975), 647–64.
. “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as Feminist Criticism.”
Louisiana Studies, 15 (1976), 241–51.
. “Timely and Timeless: The Treatment of Time in The Awakening and Sister Carrie.” Southern Studies, 16 (1977), 271–76.
Watson, Barbara Bellow. “On Power and the Literary Text.”
Signs, 1 (1976), 111–18.
Webb, Bernice Larson. “The Circular Structure of Kate Chopin’s Life and Writing.” New Louisiana Review, 6 (1976), 5–14.
Wheeler, Otis B. “The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier.”
The Southern Review, 11 (1975), 118–28.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Kate Chopin and the Fiction of Limits: ‘Désirée’s Baby.’ ” The Southern Literary Journal, 10 (1978), 123–33.
. “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” American Quarterly, 25 (1973), 449–72.
Wolkenfeld, Suzanne. “Edna’s Suicide: The Problem of the One and the Many.” In The Awakening: A Norton
Critical Edition,ed. Margaret Culley. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976, pp. 218–24.
Ziff, Larzer. “An Abyss of Inequality: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin.” In Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: The Life and Times of a Lost Generation. New York: The Viking Press, 1966.
The texts of The Awakening and of the stories reprinted here are taken from Per Seyersted’s definitive The
Complete Works of Kate Chopin, published in two volumes by Louisiana State University Press in 1969. A number of
the stories appeared first in periodicals, and The
Awakening itself was first printed by Herbert S. Stone & Co., Chicago and New York, in April 1899; further
bibliographical information can be found in the useful appendix to Seyersted’s The Complete Works.
