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The Unawakening of Edna Pontellier
Author(s): James H. Justus

Source: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1978), pp. 107-122
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077590
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The Unawakening of
Edna Pontellier
By James H. Justus
Despite the recent popularity of The Awakening among feminist

critics, the story of Edna Pontellier is not primarily a study of a
woman victimized by an oppressive masculine society; indeed, the
continued fascination with this little novel is itself testimony, I think,
to Kate Chopin's substantial aesthetic achievement. Its appeal for
readers with a sociological orientation is certainly widespread, but to
judge not merely from published critical accounts but also from the
varied and eclectic reading experiences within the classroom, I am
convinced that The Awakening is a permanent "rediscovery," one
which can withstand the vagaries of critical fashion because of its
achieved wholeness. Its conceptual ambitiousness and the stylistic
restraint by which Chopin renders her theme of the pathology of
romanticism are a noteworthy combination, but perhaps its most
remarkable achievement is the way in which Chopin's coolly assured
psychological insight and technical skill of portraiture merge in the
study of one woman.
Although Chopin's decade-long practice of local color fiction
doubtless contributes to her success with Edna Pontellier, the pro
tagonist of her novel stands above and apart from such spirited
characters as Mildred Orme ("A Shameful Affair"), Mrs. Baroda ("A
Respectable Woman"), and Ath?na?se ("Ath?naise"). Though these
108 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL
and other characters of the short stories are not merely picturesque
(they are not "sweet and lovable" creatures which one reviewer,
shocked by The Awakening , urged Chopin to return to), they do de
pend upon the special circumstances of race, religion, and custom
which American local colorists so rigorously delineated in the latter
half of the nineteenth century.l Edna transcends the circumstantial
exigencies of her time and place in the same way that some of the
characters of Edith Wharton transcend their social and cultural
boundaries. Like Lily Bart of The House of Mirth and Newland Ar
cher of The Age of Innocence, Edna Pontellier is a figure beset more
by a divided will than by the circumstances of an environing world.
For some of Chopin's other female characters who suffer from a
radical imbalance, resolution is nearly always achieved in terms of
their environing world?and that world's values. The imbalance
which haunts Edna is within the self, and the dilemma is resolved in
terms of her psychic compulsions. Caught between conflicting urgen
cies?her need to succumb to her sensuality is countered by an equal
need for a freedom that is almost anarchic ?Edna never succeeds in
creating a new self. The spiritual movement in her story is at best
sporadic, halting, impulsive, and at worst regressive and passive.
What is it precisely which Edna Pontellier awakens to} It is clear

what she awakens out of: the life of convention which denies her the
full expression of all that is latent within her. The roles she plays in
her life are defined not by her but by general circumstances, roles
which though not heinous are merely conventional: dutiful wife, lov
ing mother, gracious hostess, dependable friend. But in the course of
her emotional and intellectual struggle, her new role ?"free
woman" ?is never satisfactorily realized, and her specific lovers
finally become as irrelevant as her friends, husband, and children.
Edna's awakening is neither sudden nor momentous. It begins, in
fact, in childhood, during which time, Chopin tells use, Edna "lived
1. All biographical material in this paper derives from information in Per
Syersted's Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.
Press, 1969). All references to Chopin's The Awakening come from the standard two
volume collection, also edited by Per Seyersted, The Complete Works of Kate Chopin
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969).
EDNA PONTELLIER 109
her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had
apprehended instinctively the dual life?that outward existence
which conforms, the inward life which questions." Significantly, it is
not a passionate attachment to Robert Lebrun which first en
courages the breakdown of the conforming patterns of her outward
life, but place. It is setting, that most accentuated element of
American local color fiction?setting in its larger sense?which
serves that purpose. Grand Isle, a Creole summer resort, is a place of
langour, a place of hot sun enveloped by sea breezes from the Gulf,
the place of Creole spontaneity and candor. Representing that socie
ty, momentarily displaced from a tropically luxuriant Gulf city to an
even more tropically luxuriant island, is Ad?le Ratignolle, the very
epitome of the faithful Creole matron and presumably the one
least likely to stimulate discontent within Edna. This "embodiment
of every womanly grace and charm" does, however, strike a respon
sive chord in Edna, who has a "sensuous susceptibility to beauty."
But though Ad?le, like her sister Creole matrons, is marked by can
dor of speech, she is also like them, the very soul of fidelity. Atten
tiveness to husband, children, and home is so much the priority that
it leaves no room for what Edna sees as a necessity?the inward life,
an identity unconnected to matrimony. If these Creole women are
characterized by an "entire absence of prudery" and a total freedom
of expression which often embarrass the Kentucky Presbyterian, even
Edna recognizes that "inborn and unmistakable" in them is a "lofty
chastity" which can not be compromised. In a rare editorializing
note, Chopin wryly calls these Grand Isle matrons "mother-women
..., fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm,
real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were
women who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and
esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and
grow wings as ministering angels."
If Ad?le Ratignolle is one kind of foil for Edna Pontellier,
Mademoiselle Reisz is quite another kind. This "disagreeable little
woman, no longer young," with a self-assertive temper and a
"disposition to trample upon the rights of others," quarrels with
everyone at Grand Isle and is so visibly distressed by its general
domestic flavor that one wonders how she can possibly endure so
homogenous a watering place. And if Ad?le grows wings as a
ministering angel, Mademoiselle Reisz knows something about other
kinds of wings. After her return to the city, Edna cultivates
Mademoiselle Reisz, visiting her, reading Robert's letters, listening to
appropriate piano music. At the end of one of these visits,
Mademoiselle Reisz puts her arms around Edna and feels her
shoulder blades to see if "her wings were strong." "The bird that
would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have
strong wings," she says. "It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings
bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth." Although Edna pro
fesses to be thinking of no "extraordinary flights," the final natural
object she sees before her suicide in the Gulf is a "bird with a broken
wing . . . beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled
down, down to the water."
Mademoiselle Reisz is an artist of sorts who lives her own life in
modestly bohemian quarters, but despite her credo ?"The artist
must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies" ?she is no
more ambitious about her music than Edna is about her painting.
Ad?le, the sensuously handsome woman, keeps up her music "on ac
count of the children, . . . because she and her husband both [con
sider] it a means of brightening the home and making it attractive."
Unprofessionally, she plays waltzes for general enjoyment; the profes
sional Reisz, awkward, homely, tasteless, plays Chopin primarily for
the enjoyment of Edna. As a model for an alternative way of life,
Reisz has obvious disadvantages. Chopin's description of her at the
piano is clearly meant to suggest a spiritual impoverishment, despite
the talent and the courage to think and behave as she pleases: "She
sat low at the instrument, and the lines of her body settled into
ungraceful curves and angles that gave it an appearance of deformi
ty." Her dust-covered bust of Beethoven, his wizened frame, the
shabby artificial violets which she wears in her mousy hair, her
Pandarus-like function: these are hardly the marks of one who is suc
cessful in the push for complete freedom. She has freedom because
she is alone.
For Adele, complacent satisfaction?never being alone?comes
from having no identity beyond her given roles; for Reisz, the am
biguous satisfactions of having her own identity is the result of always
being alone. Relentlessly anti-domestic, Reisz is bored and annoyed
by children. Ad?le lives only for them. At the very moment Edna
EDNA PONTELLIER 111
seems destined to begin her affair with Robert, she is called to

Ad?le's bedside where the matron is giving birth to yet another child
and where, at the end of her labor, she whispers to Edna, "Think of
the children, Edna. Oh think of the children. Remember them!" The
injunction comes many months after the Grand Isle summer, where in
a confiding moment Edna had declared to Ad?le that she would
never sacrifice herself for her children: "I would give up the unessen
tial; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children;
but I wouldn't give myself."
Edna is caught between the claims of "mother-women" and those
of "artist-women," between the sensual aspects of Creole women,
who adjust to society by celebrating their procreative powers, and the
brittle independence of liberated artists, who resist their culture's
sociological limitations with their own kind of creative powers. There
is little comfort for Edna in either Madame Ratignolle or
Mademoiselle Reisz, despite the fact that between these two she un
consciously vacillates, instinctively seeking a model for her own in
choate longings for an identity lying somewhere unformulated and
undefined. There is only herself as she gropes for clarification of
what she wants. It is not surprising that Kate Chopin's original title
for The Awakening was "A Solitary Soul." The evidence suggests that
the powerful drive toward freedom, to that state where her real iden
tity can be released from the confines of social roles, is the impetus
behind Edna's sensual groping and blundering. Neither friends nor
lovers can release that identity, and the tragedy within the novel is
that even Edna Pontellier, despite her emotional changes, cannot
release that identity.
II
At the beginning of the novel, we learn that "Robert talked a good

deal about himself. He was very young, and did not know any better.
Mrs. Pontellier talked a little about herself for the same reason." In
fact, neither one is very young: Robert is twenty-six, Edna twenty
eight. But the psychological implications of youth are the significant
ones here. Robert, since the age of fifteen, has each summer "con
stituted himself the devoted attendant of some fair dame or damsel";
this summer it is Mrs. Pontellier. Robert's role as Creole chevalier
strikes a sympathetic chord in Edna, who is as pointedly a victim of
romantic illusion as is Emma Bovary. Her marriage to L?once, we
are told, "was purely an accident," following a period of "absolute
devotion [which] 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 fur
ther for the motives which led her to accept Monsieur Pontellier for
her husband."
Marriage for Edna closes "the portals forever behind her upon the
realm of romance and dreams." But these portals are of course not
forever closed, since the burden of her story is the reopening of the
doors to the "realm of romance and dreams." I would suggest that
the awakening of Edna Pontellier is in actuality a reawakening; it is
not an advance toward a new definition of self but a return to the
protective, self-evident identity of childhood. Consider the careful
details with which Chopin sketches this process.
On the beach at Grand Isle, the undulating waves of the Gulf re
mind Edna suddenly of a summer meadow of high grass in Kentucky:
"Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green
meadow again, idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided." It is the
perfectly ordinary and proper state for childhood: unfocused drift is
possible because of the security of childhood. Needless to say, an
aimless and unguided drift is not the state appropriate for the willed
forging of a new identity. The re-creation of that childhood moment
of walking through the high grass of Kentucky triggers also the
memory of three unreturned passions: at an early age, a dignified
and sad-eyed cavalry officer with a Napoleonic face; some time later,
a young Mississippi gentleman already engaged to a young lady on an
adjoining plantation; and, after she is a grown woman, a "great
tragedian" whose face and figure "haunt her imagination and stir
her senses," whose picture under the "cold glass" she kisses pas
sionately. What all three have in common is their remoteness, the
safety, we might say, of implausible reciprocity: a father's friend, a
neighbor's suitor, an adoring public's stage hero. Each one, Chopin
notes, melts "imperceptibly out of her existence," going "the way of
dreams." At the age of twenty-eight, these dreams return? and final
ly in an emotionally destructive way. The charms of romance, the
magnetic pull of dreams, are powerful precisely because they are
EDNA PONTELLIER 113
free-floating, impulsive rather than calculating, responding to the

heart's desire in whatever shape they may take, and unburdened by
the head's responsibility.
If her fancy is mistaken in believing that there was "a sympathy of
thought and taste" between her and her husband, the coming of her
children is apparently just as disillusioning. Though she loves her two
sons, it is an "uneven" love, appreciated better in their absence,
which frees her of a "responsibility which she had blindly assumed
and for which Fate had not fitted her." The sporadic expressions of
her love for them are proportionate to her growing dissatisfaction as
wife and mother; pervasive neglect is compensated for by spurts of
concentrated attention. When she is most involved in her affair with
Alc?e Arobin, she lavishes the most intense love on her children.
When she confesses her love for Robert openly to Mademoiselle
Reisz, she goes to a confectioner's and orders a "huge box of bonbons
for the children." After she moves into her pigeon house?an act of
impulsive but undifferentiated desire?she goes to visit her children,
who are temporarily living with their grandmother in the coun
try?an act of conventional and well-defined responsibility. And
though she leaves them "with a wrench and a pang," carrying the
sound of their voices with her "like the memory of a delicious song,"
by the time she reaches the city "the song no longer echoed in her
soul."
One can hazard the guess, I think, that Edna is so often un
concerned about her children because she herself is becoming more
and more a child. This is not a distorted description of her so-called
awakening if we think of childhood as that stage in which dreams are
delicious and self-contained whether they come true or not, a period
of suspended self-fulfillment when satisfactions are gained at the ex
pense of others, when desires are unanchored and the imagination is
free to attach these desires to whatever shapes and forms the fancy
dictates, above all, a time?perhaps the only time in human
life?when self-indulgence has no costs to threaten its pleasure.
This re-awakening to the self-fulfilling desires of childhood can be
measured by the narrative logic of Edna's actions and the internal
awareness on the part of Edna and others within the narrative. At
one time, after Robert's return from Mexico, Edna herself feels that
she has been "childish and unwise" to worry over her lover's reserve.
114
THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL
Madame Ratignolle, who as a "mother-woman" should be an
authority on the subject, comments on Edna's action in moving out
of her husband's house and into the little pigeon house a few blocks
away: "In some way you seem to me like a child, Edna. You seem to
act without a certain amount of reflection which is necessary in this
life." For Edna, of course, that move is an impulsive act performed
without any great deliberation; but its significance is clear, even to
Edna: it is one more step taken "toward relieving herself from obliga
tions," and she equates that relief with her "expansion as an in
dividual." As Chopin puts its, "She began to look with her own eyes,
to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer
was she content to 'feed upon opinions' when her own soul had in
vited her." From this moment on, she indeed acts upon that formula:
the fewer her obligations, the greater her individuality.
Psychologically, Edna does not will herself forward to embrace
new experiences attendant upon her sensual and spiritual awaken
ing, but drifts languidly backward, to the realm of romance and
dreams. The circumstances of that summer at Grand Isle could not
possibly be more propitious. Lazy days of desultory activity, with a
husband absent in the city except for weekends, with children at
tended by a quadroon nurse, and with a devoted swain who enter
tains her with Creole love songs and stories of enchanted islands, Gulf
spirits, and buried pirate treasure. Moreover, this perfect situation is
abetted by nature: "Strange, rare odors abroad?a tangle of the sea
smell and of weeds and damp, new-plowed earth . . ., the heavy per
fume" of orange and lemon trees; and above all, the "everlasting
voice of the sea" whose "sonorous murmur reached her like a loving
but imperative entreaty."
It must be admitted that Edna responds rather slowly to these
dream-making circumstances. She cries without apparent cause, but
does it after midnight on her cottage poreh while her husband and
children sleep, listening to the hooting of an owl and the mournful
lullaby of the sea, responding to an "indescribable oppression, which
seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness
. . . ." Even her "vague anguish" is romantic, this shadow "passing
across her soul's summer day," but her creator disallows her the easy
immersion in that romantic moment: "She was just having a good cry
all to herself. The mosquitoes made merry over her, biting her firm,
EDNA PONTELLIER 115
round arms and nipping at her bare insteps." Even when Chopin
takes another opportunity for authorial comment, it is laced with
detachment rather than sympathy: "In short, Mrs. Pontellier was
beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being,
and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within
and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to
descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight?perhaps
more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to
any woman." It is certainly more wisdom than Kate Chopin finally
allows her protagonist.
If this is the story of the sensual awakening of a woman, two
peculiarities of the narrative should be noted: (1) the growth of
dissatisfaction in Edna which develops concurrently with her
grand love for Robert Lebrun and for her affair with the convenient
sexual partner, Alc?e Arobin; and (2) her concomitant realization of
the fact of aloneness. Her awakening to her own physicality is a
response that is, in the usual sense of the terms, neither markedly
emotional nor intellectual, but self-sufficient, indulgent, enclosed.
Chopin's rather detailed account of Edna's love of music serves as a
clue to this self-absorption in its wider aspects.
We are told early on that Edna's response to music is recreative in
an almost pictorial manner.
Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in

her mind. She sometimes liked to sit in the room of mornings
when Madame Ratignolle played or practiced. One piece
which that lady played Edna had entitled "Solitude." It was a
short, plaintive, minor ?train. The name of the piece was
something else, but she called it "Solitude." When she heard it
there came before her imagination the figure of a man stand
ing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His
attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a
distant bird winging its flight away from him.
This is a scene rooted in romantic iconography?or, on a less

elevated plane, it synthesizes several tendencies of nineteenth-century
calendar art in America ?the kind of art which reaches its natural
growth in "September Morn," the posters of Maxfield Parrish, and
LP record jackets of the 1950s. But what is important about this pic
ture, "Solitude," is its solely personal reality. The dreaming self ap
propriates the initiating music, renames it, and attributes a tangible
meaning to the created picture. The picture itself can be seen as a
transsexual projection: the naked man is Edna as well as the vaguely
identified, wished-for, would-be lover: a kind of redaction of the
twenty-eight-swimmers plus one in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself2
The ability to imagine pictures when she listens to piano music is
the case normally?when, say, Ad?le plays in her competent but un
professional way. When Edna listens to Mademoiselle Reisz,
however, something else happens. "Material pictures" refuse to
"gather and blaze before her imagination," no pictures of "solitude,
of hope, of longing, or of despair" can be summoned. Chopin's
description is vivid: the very passions themselves "were aroused
within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon
her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears
blinded her." Whereas "material pictures" safely distance her from
the passions when Madame Ratignolle plays, the playing of
Mademoiselle Reisz releases the naked passions themselves. The pic
torial mode is itself a referent, a cushioned and imaginative one, but
in the case of Reisz's playing, the response has no referent, and Edna
is at the mercy of her senses.
A more direct, less displaced clue to Edna's growing solipsism also
occurs early in the narrative. The circumstances of the setting con
spire to make Edna susceptible. It is midnight, and some attentive
male suggests "a bath at that mystic hour and under that mystic
moon." But the accompanying male is superfluous to Edna's ex
perience of personal exultation, joy, release. For the first time she
swims alone, "daring and reckless," far out, "where no woman had
swum before. . . . She would not join the groups" near the shore, but
"intoxicated with her newly conquered power, she swam out alone."
Her "excited fancy" responds to the "space and solitude" of the
water, and as she swims, she reaches "out for the unlimited in which
to lose herself." That moment is significant not only because her will
blazes up for the first time, amazing her husband, but also because
2. This is not the only mental picture Edna creates when she listens to Ad?le's
playing? there are also scenes of domestic life: children playing, demure women strok
ing cats, dainty women in Empire gowns mincing through tall hedges. Edna may have
an obvious romantic imagination but, despite Freudian critics, it does not come across
as a particularly obsessed one.
EDNA PONTELLIER 117
the emphasis is on desire as a thing in itself, something to respond to

egoistically without the tangible aid of another person, even Robert.
The "mystic spirit" allows her the freedom to drift; she blindly
follows "whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in
alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility." The
romantic day later on the Ch?ni?re Caminada ? another island in the
bay?is a willing bestowal of herself to those "alien hands,"
manifested magically as an old Acadian in touch with the "mystic
spirit abroad" who spins local legends.
Ill
The fact of aloneness becomes more and more pronounced in Ed

na. Her willful behavior puzzles her husband, who seeks advice from
the old family doctor. His advice to L?once is "let your wife alone for
a while . . . Don't contradict her . . . ." L?once does just that?"let
ting her do as she [likes]." It is advice calculated to annoy Edna's
father, who is visiting them: "Your are too lenient, too lenient by far)
L?once," he tells him. "Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put
your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife."
What is interesting here is that both theories?letting her do as she
likes and coercing her "good and hard" ?sound as much like child
rearing policies as they do wife-managing ones, an equation which
will be familiar to students of Victorian domestic culture. But Mr.
Pontellier is not a cruel husband?there are no conventionally cruel
husbands in Chopin's fiction?and he refrains from chastizing her
about the neglect of housekeeping, the cancelling of her Tuesdays at
home, and her determination not to attend her sister's wedding ("a
wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth," she tells
him), all in the hopes that her behavior is a passing whim. But if
"leaving her alone" is a mildly enlightened way to handle Edna
Pontellier, it is also appropriate in a poignant and even tragic way.
Has she been associating with "pseudointellectual women?super
spiritual superior beings?" the doctor asks L?once. "That's the trou
ble," he replies; "she hasn't been associating with any one." This
observation is truer than even Edna might perceive. Once her hus
band leaves for an extended business trip to New York, "a radiant
peace settled upon her when she at last found herself alone .... she
breathed a big, genuine sigh of relief." An unfamiliar but "delicious"

feeling comes over her. Chopin's characterization here is as brilliant
ly acute as the prose is economical:
She walked all through the house, from one room to another,
as if inspecting it for the first time. She tried the various chairs
and lounges, as if she had never sat and reclined upon them
before. And she perambulated around the outside of the house,
investigating, looking to see if windows and shutters were
secure and in order. The flowers were like new acquaintances;
she approached them in a familiar spirit, and made herself at
home among them. The garden walks were damp, and Edna
called to the maid to bring out her rubber sandals. And there
she stayed, and stooped, digging around the plants, trimming,
picking dead, dry leaves. The children's little dog came out, in
terfering, getting in her way. She scolded him, laughed at him,
played with him. The garden smelled so good and looked so
pretty in the afternoon sunlight. Edna plucked all the bright
flowers she could find, and went into the house with them, she
and the little dog.
If both the diction and the syntax here suggest the picture of a little
girl playing house, the implications are more serious. Regression to
childhood rather than progress toward a new self-fulfillment is the
dominant key.
Going to the races with a faster crowd than she is accustomed to
brings back memories of her Kentucky childhood, with its "at
mosphere of the stables and the breath of the bluegrass
paddock. . . ." Her slightly bohemian companions bore her?Mrs.
Highcamp's ignorance, Mr. Highcamp's unresponsive plainness,
Miss Highcamp's mechanical beauty and indifferent talent. (In play
ing Grieg, we are told, "She seemed to have apprehended all of the
composer's coldness and none of his poetry.") Except as a sexual part
ner, even the Creole rou?, Alc?e Arobin, does little to supplant
Edna's growing mood of aloneness.
In Edna's state of dissatisfaction the present Alc?e, for all his sex
ual attractiveness, is no competition for the absent Robert, who
seems nearer to her "off there in Mexico" than when he returns; his
very absence, nourishing in Edna a "dreamy, absent look," allows her
the frequent luxury of being "alone in a kind of reverie?a sort of
stupor." Dreamy, reverie, stupor, these words and their analogues
EDNA PONTELLIER 119
pervade The Awakening. It was George Arms a few years ago who
perceptively observed that for a novel called The Awakening, much
of its action consists of its heroine's sleeping.3 It is a state which
neutralizes any determined struggle to construct a new self, or even
to uncover deeper levels of the old one. In a fine touch of
characterization, Kate Chopin never allows her protagonist to
understand fully what it is she is awakening to. Sometimes it is an
"awakening sensuousness," sometimes an "animalism that stirred im
patiently within her," and certainly for Alc?e Arobin it is the "latent
sensuality" which, once detected, unfolds under his tutelage "like a
torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom." On the other hand, "expansion as
an individual" is the grander way Edna sees the process. But the
gradual awakening to any or all of these?sensuousness, sensuality,
consciousness as an individual ?carries with it the promise of no
spiritual peace. If anything, Edna becomes more and more confused.
Her earlier life as a wife and mother she describes as a dream out of
which she has come; but, once awakened, we are told she likes to
"wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places," discovering
"many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she [finds]
it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested." Which is the
dream? To be awakened from a Ratignolle-like domesticity is not to
experience "life's delirium," as Edna vaguely anticipates, but to be
assailed with "the old ennui" which comes "like something ex
traneous, independent of volition . . . , overpowering her . . . with a
sense of the unattainable." Even when she gives a grand but intimate
dinner to celebrate her leaving her husband's house, she does not join
in the good cheer: "There was something in her attitude . . . which
suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who
stands alone."
The one thing which Edna consistently is able to articulate about
her awakening, however, is that it means a release from respon
sibilities. And this realization comes early. As soon as she returns
from her summer at Grand Isle, we are told "she began to do as she
liked and to feel as she liked. . . , going and coming as it suited her
3. George Arms, "Kate Chopin's The Awakening in the Perspective of Her Literary
Career," Essays on American Literature in Honor of fay B. Hubbell, ed. Clarence
Gohdes (Durham, N.C: Duke Univ. Press, 1967), p. 219. This is the single most satisfy
ing essay on Chopin's novel, and I am indebted to many of Arms's insights.
fancy, and, so far as she was able, lending herself to any passing
caprice." What this means in social terms is that she spends more and
more time alone; what it means in psychological terms is that she
spends more and more time fashioning an ideal state of romantic
self-fulfillment which, practically speaking, requires not even
Robert. By the time this conventionally love-sick swain returns from
Mexico, avoiding Edna because of their "impossible" love, she has
already "resolved never again to belong to another than herself." In
Robert's eyes, L?once Pontellier is an impediment; it means Edna is
"not free." His dream, as he calls it several times during their last
evening, is to marry her?but that dream is clearly not consonant
with Edna's: " You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your
time dreaming of impossible things when you speak 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.' " Her love must be manifested on her own terms. As she
confesses to the old doctor, "I don't want anything but my own way."
And Chopin observes, "She could picture at that moment no greater
bliss on earth than possession of the beloved one." That is, she would
possess, but she would not be possessed. It is finally only a mature
version of childish self-sufficiency?"I don't want anything but my
own way."
Edna's process of awakening is a kind of enlightenment, but it can
hardly be called growth. What she discovers does not set her free but
binds her even more tightly to a destined end. Moments before her
death, she responds again to the seductive murmuring of the sea,
which "invit[es] the soul to wander in abysses of solitude." Her final
thoughts return not to Robert but to the clanging of the spurs of the
cavalry officer, her childish first love, and to the bluegrass meadow
of her childhood, with "no beginning and no end," her child-like
longing for a state of being stripped of restraints.
IV
Although Kate Chopin may have been an 1890's bluestocking, her

most important work is not a novel of protest. The Awakening is
devoid of authorial special pleading for any social or political pro
EDNA PONTELLIER 121
gram; indeed, even internally, the discontent with a specific condi

tion which we see unfolding in Edna Pontellier is never elevated to
any general state of things which needs correction. Edna herself
could not care less if her own "ragged condition of soul" is to be
found in other women. Though the problem of the woman's identity
in America's institutionalized domestic state is obviously a powerful
concern of Kate Chopin?it is the subject of several pieces and lurks
about the edges of several more ?the focus in The Awakening is
upon one woman's response to one woman's dilemma. Edna's discon
tent is made to seem credible at the same time it is seen from a
distance.
It might be useful to remind ourselves that the qualities of crafts
manship which make Kate Chopin's local color stories so memorable
are the same ones which distinguish The Awakening: a sureness of
touch in portraiture; an economically evoked sense of place; and a
mastery of language (including dialect forms) which renders firmly
and precisely both character and setting; and perhaps most impor
tant of all, a commendable refusal to match the play of passion and
the aroused will of her characters with authorial passion and
willfulness. Not even Sarah Orne Jewett, whose work Chopin ad
mired, is so relentlessly detached from the urgencies of her
characters.
Finally, behind and controlling The Awakening there is a quality
of vision which sets its author apart from even her literary betters.
This little novel is a tough-minded minority report, a demurring
gloss on what has often passed in twentieth-century American
literature as one of our abiding pieties: that self-knowlege is the
threshold to psychic health, the instrument by which the trapped
sensibility may be freed. One of the tendencies of our second genera
tion of realists is to depict the baleful effects of heredity and environ
ment upon the spiritually obtuse and the inarticulate. Stephen
Crane's Maggie, Frank Norris's McTeague, Theodore Dreiser's Car
rie and Clyde: all embrace their fates without benefit of self
knowledge. They yearn, desire, grope, hope, dream ?but they do
not learn. Their fates are accompanied by pathos born of their
passivity.
But if to suffer dumbly is to share the common lot, what of the un
common lot?those creatures who are articulate, who can learn, and
who do discover the presumed fruits of self-knowledge? Jack London's

Wolf Larsen and Martin Eden, Dreiser's Hurstwood, Norris's
Presley, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart: their fates are better only in the
sense that they know more and can speak better than their fictive
cousins. But self-knowledge does not ease the way to their fates; if
anything, it exacerbates their feeling of helplessness and ineffectuali
Chopin's Edna stands somewhere between these two groups. She

learns enough to take only a half-step toward the reshaping of her
life. Chopin allows her heroine just enough insight to be able to sense
that her real identity is smudged as she plays wife and mother and to
begin the search for a satisfying alternative. But that alternative can
not be conceived in terms of maturity but only in the regressive
reenactment of the egoism of childhood. Edna is given enough
knowledge to destroy herself but not enough to save herself.

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The Unawakening of Edna Pontellier

Author(s): James H. Justus

Despite the recent popularity of The Awakening among feminist

What is it precisely which Edna Pontellier awakens to} It is clear

seems destined to begin her affair with Robert, she is called to

At the beginning of the novel, we learn that "Robert talked a good

free-floating, impulsive rather than calculating, responding to the

Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in

This is a scene rooted in romantic iconography?or, on a less

the emphasis is on desire as a thing in itself, something to respond to

The fact of aloneness becomes more and more pronounced in Ed

breathed a big, genuine sigh of relief." An unfamiliar but "delicious"

Although Kate Chopin may have been an 1890's bluestocking, her

gram; indeed, even internally, the discontent with a specific condi

who do discover the presumed fruits of self-knowledge? Jack London's

Chopin's Edna stands somewhere between these two groups. She

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