The Awakening Kate Chopin

1
The AwakeningKate Chopin

• A womans sexual and spiritual rebirth
• Born again or born?
• 15 March 2005

2
Sexual Spiritual (Re?)Birth

• The Awakening (1899, more than a century ago,
  described as sordid and immoral by reviews).
  See Kate Chopin A Re-Awakening
  http//www.pbs.org/katechopin/
• Awakened from what?
• Wedlock Deadlock, at least for Edna
• Edna young, beautiful, wife (and well married,
  too), mother
• Yet she is unhappy unfulfilled, and desires
  liberation from a cage of bourgeois matrimony

3
Ednas Awakening

• Chopins commentary Having a group of people
  at my disposal, I thought it might be
  entertaining (to myself) to throw them together a
  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.

4
Ednas Awakening

• Consider Chopins remark in light of Emile Zolas
  le roman experimental or the ideal of the
  naturalist stated as the selection of truthful
  instances subjected to laboratory conditions in a
  novel, where the hypotheses of the author about
  the nature and operation of the fores that work
  upon man can be put to the test.

5
Ednas Awakening, its symbols its metaphors

• Call of the sea (chap. III, p. 699-700)
• Passions are aroused
• you are the only one worth playing
  for(Mademoiselle Reisz to Edna)
• Bathing (swimming) at midnight (IX, 714)
• Robert he did not lead the way, however, he
  directed the way (X, 714)
• Edna learning to swim, determined to inhabit her
  physical self, to value it, luxuriate in its
  sinews and strengths (X, 714-715)
• Turning her face seaward. . .a quick vision of
  death smote her soul (715)

6
Ednas Awakening, its symbols its metaphors

• Expected to answer her husbands request,
  unthinkingly, as befits the daily treadmill of
  life
• I cant permit you to stay out here all night
• Awakening gradually, as if from a dream (XI,
  717-718)
• NOT a mother-woman (IV, 701)
• Idolizing her children
• Worshipping her husband
• Esteeming it a holy privilege to efface herself
  as an individual and grow wings as ministering
  angels

7
Ednas Awakening, its symbols its metaphors

• Edna (re)birthing herself (chap. XIII, 720-723)
• Revisionary mythmaking again this time of
  Sleeping Beauty
• Oppression of church service
• Madame Antoines cot
• Edna bathing herself, sleeping lightly at first
  (721)
• AWAKENING, with the conviction that she had
  slept long and soundly
• Hunger (722), eating bread wine

8
Ednas Awakening -- checklist for review

• Women Art
• I am becoming an artist (XXI, 740)
• Women Thinking
• pull myself together for a while and think--try
  to determine what character of woman I am
• Imagery of bird that would soar above the level
  plain of tradition and prejudice (XXVII, 754)
• Edna seeming like a child, acting without
  thinking (XXXIII, 763)
• Law of Society
• hair must be parted and brushed (IV, 701)
• Codes of society (XXVII, 754)