Awakening Many of the Female

Awakening

Many of the female characters in literature were written by women so that the characters can be considered reflections of their creators. This may be because they are also attempting to express themselves as artists in a world that is hostile to their efforts, or it may be that some of their personal particulars match those of the writer. Such characters may show a lack of artistic or personal development that can be attributed to the imposition of certain social traditions and social roles which involve expectations placed on women, with such expectations either excluding certain types of expression or channeling women's energies into narrow and designated areas. Presumably the authors of these works have themselves experienced the same social pressure to conform that affects their characters. The fact that the authors have achieved a certain level of personal expression demonstrates that they have battled these pressures with some success. Their characters may or may not be able to do the same thing in their own lives.

The women in the novel the Awakening by Kate Chopin share certain experiences and attitudes with their creator both for good and ill. The pressures placed on women in Chopin's time were strong and often debilitating, and Edna, her main character, cannot live in a world that makes all her decisions for her and that stifles her impulses. She is contrasted with another woman in the novel, and how the two fare shows different ways in which women may cope with the demands of society.

The same issue has been addressed directly by different writers, and Virginia Woolf is an example of a writer who shows concern for the issue in her criticism and in her fiction. Woolf's approach to the issue of women and fiction was firmly grounded in a general theory of literature:

She argued that the writer was the product of her or his historical circumstances, and that material conditions were of crucial importance. Secondly, she claimed that these material circumstances had a profound effect on the psychological aspects of writing, and that they could be seen to influence the nature of the creative work itself. (Barrett 5)

The writer is not an abstract but a real person who must make a living in this world, and therefore material conditions are important. Material conditions can be influenced by writing -- the writer who can make a living sees those conditions affected -- and a failure to provide the necessary material conditions can prevent a writer from writing or force her to marry and commit herself to a domestic life as a way of surviving.

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis. Her father died when she was four years old. She lived in the South and turned to writing comparatively late in life, publishing her first work when she was nearly 40. Many of her works delve into the reality of women's emotions, and she approaches this subject in a frank way that actually caused her some trouble in the more prudish world of the end of the last century. She drew on her own reality as a woman in that time and society, though, and took inspiration and understanding from the world in which she lived. At the same time, she challenged conventional social behavior in many of her stories and did so simply by examining the way women react to the situations of life in the real world.

Chopin was born in 1854 and died in 1904. She was born Katherine O'Flaherty, but she wrote under the name Kate Chopin. Chopin was in fact her married name. She grew up in St. Louis, graduated from Catholic school in 1868, and later became more independent so that she questioned many Catholic doctrines. She wrote several novels and many short stories. She also wrote a number of poems. She has the reputation of being among the most important women in nineteenth-century American fiction, and in her work, she raised themes of female emancipation along with the earlier history of St. Louis and its environs.

Her life was marked by the loss of he father and by the pressures she experienced being an intelligent and soon-to-be accomplished woman in an era that did not place a high value on women. Society claimed to value women highly, of course, but only in a subservient and domestic role. Just as Chopin chafed under certain Catholic teachings, so did she feel frustration at the limited role women were given in her society. She reflects many of her frustrations through her character, Edna, who acts out the sort of difficulties faced by Chopin herself:

The protagonist of "The Awakening" understands that the cult of domesticity offers her no viable mechanism for a self-defined subjectivity or voice, and she reaches beyond it toward a new theory of language and identity. But Edna seeks a feminine, maternal language that is represented as existing outside of patriarchy; therefore she never finds a voice that functions in the everyday world she inhabits. (Cutter 88)

The book itself caused Chopin more problems, for after the Awakening appeared in 1899, "it was condemned as vulgar, morbid, and unwholesome. The book was allegedly banned from some libraries, and Chopin was ousted from social clubs. She eventually lost the contract for her next collection of fiction, a Vocation and a Voice, and it was not published until almost a hundred years later" (Cutter 87). Critics believe that the reason for this reaction was because Chopin showed "that feminine desire is an aspect of women's search for voice; Edna Pontellier drowns herself partially because she can find no one who understands the new sexual and social identity she is attempting to articulate" (Cutter 87).

Priscilla Allen notes how Victorian critics responded adversely to this novel in which the main character commits adultery, but she also finds that critics since have continued to be blinded to other aspects of the novel. She says they have tended to misread the main character because they focus on her sexual activity, and Allen denies that the book is about sex as many critics have claimed. Allen finds that a broader reading of the character provides greater insight not only into Edna and Chopin but into women in general:

Chopin] gives Edna a skill that she might realistically be imagined to have had and to have had training in. For the rest she is concerned to show Edna's sensuous response to physical reality, the world about her, to her own emotions and yearnings, responses which express her personhood, her previous individuality. Because freedom, individuality, self-expression are not rights to be reserved for gifted artists alone, Chopin shows us that Edna, conventionally brought up, conventionally becoming wife and mother, spontaneously... pursues her right to self-expression and cannot feel wicked for doing so. (Allen 230)

Society may ask that the woman feel wicked for expressing herself, but Chopin is one who shows the consequences of such self-repression.

Emily Toth notes the critical discussion around Chopin in the 1990s and notes how some saw her as a precursor to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and after. Readers in the 1980s saw her as "an independent woman who moves out of her husband's house, lives on her own, and makes a living from her art" (Toth xx). Critics in the 1990s took different points-of-view so that some saw both Edna and Chopin as "nsufficiently aware of her own race and class privileges, while others called her brilliantly attuned to women's silences and inexpressible longings" (Toth xx).

Chopin herself had to be a pioneer or do nothing at all. In her social class, few women worked outside the home. The women did work inside the home, "administering mammies, nurses, cooks, laundresses, maids, and yard men. But the ladies of Chopin's social class did not work for wages, nor did their names appear in newspapers and magazines until the advent of society columns in the 1870s" (Toth 121). Chopin went outside this private realm, however, and when she started publishing fiction in national magazines, she was doing what no women in St. Louis had done before.

The Awakening

In the Awakening, Kate Chopin contrasts two characters, Edna Pontellier and Adele Ratignolle. Edna is a young woman who makes an important discovery about the nature of her marriage, her role as a woman in her society, and the degree to which her circumstances and the social setting have constrained her. Because of her inability to break free from the prison into which she now feels she has been placed simply by virtue of her being a woman, she commits suicide. Adele Ratignolle is the woman in whom Edna confides. She is a motherly figure who revels in her roles as wife and mother, a contrast to Edna, who more and more chafes at those roles. Madame Ratignolle is a contrast to Edna, but her lifestyle is not a real choice for the latter, given the artistic temperament Edna possesses and her awareness that Madame Ratignolle is unaware of the fact that she as well should have greater choices than have been offered to her.

It is Edna who achieves both the awakening of the title, the awareness of how the social traditions imposed on her are stifling her and preventing her from expressing herself as she would wish, and also fails in that she cannot overcome these traditions and so chooses suicide rather than continue under such a repressive system. Chopin implies that there is a danger in awakening, in understanding the nature of the female role in society, and in trying to overcome that role. Chopin believes that some people possess the energy to keep up with their times and in effect to accept whatever may be their lot in life. These people do not need to examine reality or its meaning -- they indeed may not be able to do so, and instead they simply live. Madame Ratignolle is such a person, but Edna is not. Edna questions and examines, and the answers she finds do not allow her to continue as before, or to emulate her friend Madame Ratignolle and simply live. Edna corresponds to the artist, the artist who is always questioning, always examining, and in a way always discovering that the world does not live up to the ideal sought. The artist awakens, and the result is either the production of art or the death of the stifled artist.

Edna is a character caught between different poles of femaleness in her time, between the class of "mother-women" and the class of "artist-women."

On the one side stands Adele Ratignolle, the sensual Creole woman, a woman who adjusts to society by celebrating her procreative powers. On the other side is the less stable independence of liberated artists, who resist their culture's sociological limitations with their own kind of creative powers. The predicament in which Edna finds herself is evident in the opening passages -- she is first like the colorful parrot which hangs outside the door, warning others away, a woman in a cage who has not heeded this warning. The husband sees her after she has been in the sun and looks "at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage" (Chopin 4). He also believes that this piece of personal property does not take proper care of the children, though he cannot say how or why specifically, only that he feels this is so. Chopin makes clear the difference between Edna and Adele on this issue:

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-woman seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle... They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels (Chopin 19).

Adele Ratignolle is such a woman:

There are no words to describe he save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams (Chopin 19).

The two choices that are represented in the novel are embodied in Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, the latter being the artist who has only half-awakened and who puts on more of a show of artistry than she manages to be an actual artist. This makes the choice faced by Edna less clear in some respects, but it demonstrates how even the artist-woman in society has been shaped and controlled by what society will allow an artist-woman to be.

One of the issues raised with reference to the Awakening concerns the suicide of the main character, the issue being whether this is to be seen as the act of a strong woman who chooses to die rather than capitulate to the social restrictions of her time or as the defeat of a woman too weak to face disappointment and to create a life for herself.

It is possible to see Edna as the triumphant woman who makes her own choice in spite of rather than because of social pressure. The result may be self-destruction, but it is still more of a choice than Edna has been able to exercise in her life to that point. Chopin's novel shows, however, that the choices open to women are not as wide as for men, leaving her heroine with the choice to live in repression or die.

Though Edna and Madame Ratignolle become friends, Edna sees the other woman as living in a different world, and it is not a world she wants to enter herself, as indicated after a visit to Madame Ratignolle's home:

The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui. (Chopin 145)

Later, when she is contemplating suicide, Edna remembers many of the things that were told to her by Madame Ratignolle. Madame Ratignolle had told her to think of the children:

She meant to think of them; that determination ha driven into her soul like a death wound -- but not to-night. (Chopin 294)

The last we see of Madame Ratignolle is when she has another baby and Edna witnesses the event. This is very unnerving to Edna, and the response of the two women to the birth women clearly shows their differences in outlook. For Madame Ratignolle, the birth of another child is a wonderful moment, an affirmation of her role as wife and mother, and a continuation of the life she has been leading. The event reminds Edna of her own experiences in giving birth, and she shows an aversion to the experience that Madame Ratignolle so openly embraces:

Edna began to feel uneasy. She was seized with a vague dread. Her own lime experiences seemed far away, unreal, and only half remembered. She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go. (Chopin 288)

Madame Ratignolle revels in the sensations of childbirth, and Edna remembers her senses being deadened. She remembers awakening to find a new life, and in her own life she is now awakening to find the meaninglessness of that life. It is at this point that Madame Ratignolle tells her to remember the children.

Madame Ratignolle stands for a whole class of women who accept their roles as wives and mothers, and indeed who revel in those roles. She is precisely the sort of woman that Edna's husband would want as a wife, and he does indeed admire her for the way she adapts to men and the way she cares for her children. Chopin sees this female role, however, as necessarily being one that remains unexamined by the women who lead this life. They have to accept without question, for the question is to discover the imprisoning nature of these roles and the falsity of the way society demands that women fulfill these roles. The domestic role is contrasted with the artistic role, and the artist always questions. Edna is an artist, and this places her in a particular kind of hell because she has attempted to fulfill social roles which she now sees as strangling her.

Madame Ratignolle thrives in her roles because they are socially approved, while Edna never can escape from the socially-accepted roles to become what she wishes. Indeed, having grown up in this society, she is not even certain what it is she does wish. Mademoiselle Reisz is another example of the artist-woman, though not a fully successful one. She has devoted her life to music and has shunned the domestic role. Society views her as eccentric, which seems to be the best Edna could hope for if she continued to develop herself as an artist and sublimated other drives. Edna's decision to commit suicide comes because neither Madame Ratignolle nor Mademoiselle Reisz stands as an appealing choice for Edna, and yet there does not seem to be any other choice allowed in the society in which she lives.

Edna thus can be seen as making a positive statement by leaving such a world. The last thing that comes to her mind are memories of good times and people about whom she cared:

Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (Chopin 303)

She has rejected the world she has known, and the world of Madame Ratignolle is one that makes her even more uncomfortable. In her time, there seems to be no better choice, and so she chooses to leave it.

Kate Chopin's protagonist in the Awakening achieves the awakening of the title and also fails, as noted. Chopin clearly implies that there is a danger in awakening, in understanding the nature of the female role in society, and in trying to overcome that role. Chopin makes this clear in a sort of epilogue to the story as she writes,

Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace. They are fortunate beings. They do not need to apprehend the significance of things. They do not grow weary nor miss step, nor do they fall out of rank and sink by the wayside to be left contemplating the moving procession. (Chopin, 1992 edition 207)

The artist is not so fortunate -- the artist does need to apprehend the significance of things. The artist awakens, and the result is either the production of art or the death of the stifled artist.

James H. Justus considers the manner in which Edna awakens in this novel and finds contrasts between different sorts of women. Justus writes,

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. (Justus 111)

The two choices are represented in the novel by Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, the latter being the artist who has only half-awakened and who puts on more of a show of artistry than she manages to be an artist. This makes the choice faced by Edna less clear in some respects, but it demonstrates how even the artist-woman in society has been shaped and controlled by what society will allow an artist-woman to be.

One of the issues raised with reference to the Awakening concerns the suicide of the main character, the issue being whether this is to be seen as the act of a strong woman who chooses to die rather than capitulate to the social restrictions of her time or as the defeat of a woman too weak to face disappointment and to create a life for herself. James E. Rocks addresses a pattern he perceives in Chopin's fiction that relates to how women deal with social pressures when he writes,

The paradox that out of self-denial comes well-being is a more common situation in Mrs. Chopin's fiction than many readers... might realize... Whenever an individual chooses to deny her potential for continued growth and experience in a Kate Chopin story, she must do so only after a consideration of alternative actions, and when she does so she must be allowed to make the choice herself, unencumbered by the pressures of individuals or society. (Rocks 117)

Rocks would thus seem to come down on the side of Edna as the triumphant woman who makes her own choice in spite of rather than because of social pressure. Chopin's novel shows, however, that the choices open to women are not as wide as for men, leaving her heroine with the choice to live in repression or die.

The original critical response to Edna in 1899 was that she was a selfish woman who did not appreciate a good husband and who also took lovers, making her unsympathetic, wicked, and foolish. Chopin saw the issue differently and wrote that Edna, 28, was married to a 40-year-old New Orleans businessman who provides for her and her two small sons. Chopin makes no apologies for the fact that part of Edna's awakening is because of her affair with Robert Lebrun as he teaches her to swim. She has a physical awakening at the same time as she begins to feel "power and sensuality in her body" (Toth 210). Edna begins to see how certain aspects of her life have brought her to her present situation, those being the fact that she was raised without a mother (as Chopin was without a father), that she is an intellectual in a non-intellectual world, and that she is a loner. She begins to see that her marriage was not out of love for Pontellier but was a way to annoy her family and to isolate herself not from society but from her dreams and ambitions, ambitions she believed could never be fulfilled. She is now a mother and does not particularly want to be a mother, and her reaction to the act of birth of her friend shows how much she opposes her own accomplishment in this regard. She has in effect silenced her own artistic voice in a sea of domesticity.