The Unawakening of Edna Pontellier

Despite the recent popularity of The A wakening 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 protagonist of her novel stands above and apart from such spirited characters as Mildred Orme (A Shameful Affair), Mrs. Baroda (A Respectable Woman), and Athenaise (Athenaise). Though these 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 depend upon the special circumstances of race, religion, and custom which American local colorists so rigorously delineated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. (1) 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 Archer 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 urgencies--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, loving 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 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 encourages 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. …