Analyzing a Character: The Shadow

Analyzing a Character: The Shadow of Polite Society-Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin's The Awakening

The concept of the shadow, as analyzed by Robert Bly, is much like that of the ancient idea of a 'scapegoat.' A scapegoat is a creature ritually invested with all of the sins of a society, and cast out of society's midst, to purge society of its fears and sublimated desires. On a personal level, a person who is a scapegoat or shadow for another human being embodies what the person fears that he or she will become, if his or her desires were allowed to run rampant. Freud might say that the individual or collective superego uses a scapegoat to deny uncomfortable impulses of the id, or hidden, base desires. Thus the scapegoated person is shoved away, and the person of society defines him or herself as everything the scapegoat is 'not.' In Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, the character of Edna Pontellier, a young, dissatisfied married woman becomes a kind of shadow or scapegoat for the conservative New Orleans society in which she lives. Symbolically, like the scapegoat, Edna begins the novel in the heart of Creole society, and ends the novel at its margins-like the scapegoat she wanders and finally dies, drowing in the waters of the resort where she first experienced her sexual awakening. Freud might observe that the same society that gave her pleasure, namely the prospect of engaging in illicit social relations with a man other than her husband, ultimately gives Edna pain, thwarting her pursuit of the pleasure principle that is the aim of all human beings. Because Edna gives in to the desires of her id, rather than allowing the dictates of her superego to deny herself sexual pleasure, Freud would argue that Edna's personal desires or id cannot be accomodated by her society, so she must die, a victim of the collective superego. By giving up her social position as a wife to a respectable and wealthy man and living an independent existence, Edna fulfills the fantasies that other women and might desire to fulfill, but reject. If society were to validate Edna's decision to be a sexually fulfilled woman and to take a lover, or even to demand that women find equal pleasure in marriage as men, then the religious and social norms that hold together the entire social world would collapse. In fact, rather than approve her action, the man who first awakens her new-found sexuality, Robert Lebrun, rejects Edna. As an idealized object of desire from far away, Edna was attractive to Robert. When Edna makes himself available to him, in real, physical terms, Robert's superego dominates his id-driven desire for pleasure. Although he desires Edna as an object of fantasy, because of his intense sense of guilt, she also comes to embody all he fears, namely the complete liberation of his desires from all societal constraints. Edna thus becomes Robert's scapegoat, or shadow, rather than an object of fantasy. For a number of persons in the novel, Edna functions as a shadow. For example, Ad?le Ratignolle, a devoted wife and mother, willfully conforms to what society demands of a woman. Edna's eventual outsider status is what all Adele fears-solitude, loss of family, and the pursuit of sexual conquest. Yet for Edna, Adele in many ways is her shadow, because of Adele's unwavering compliance to her husband, which troubles Edna. On a personal level, even the 'shadow' of a society like Edna, can have her own, personal shadows.