The Awakening (1899) was bold and prescient. Chopin's heroine, Edna Pontellier, evolves and escapes the box in which her husband and New Orleans society see and keep her. She awakens to her own freedom and agency, sexuality and artistic voice.
Like Moby Dick, The Awakening came half a century before readers were ready to grasp it. Initial reviews were mostly hostile, and a decade later it was out of print. Kate Chopin had been building a career, but now the tide turned against her. Her next book contract was cancelled, and she had trouble publishing her short stories. She died 5 years later, aged 54.
The Awakening had strong feminist themes, modernist elements before they were popular, and was a Southern Novel decades ahead of Porter, Faulkner, Welty and Williams. It was rediscovered in the 1960s by more sympathetic readers, and has now achieved all the sales and acclaim Chopin wished for.
ST. LOUIS GLOBE DEMOCRAT May 13, 1899
The Awakening is not a healthy book; if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson, the fact is not apparent. . . . It is a morbid book, and the thought suggests itself that the author herself would probably like nothing better than to "tear it to pieces" by criticism if only some other person had written it.
WILLA CATHER, in the PITTSBURGH LEADER July 8, 1899
There was, indeed, no need that a second Madame Bovary should be written, but an author's choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. . . . next time I hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible iridescent style of hers to a better cause.
These reviewers find no fault with the style or craft of
The Awakening - instead they are disturbed by the theme, the heroine or her immorality. What repelled them most is what I most admire in Chopin: she refuses to judge her characters. Edna doesn't suffer for her sins and derelictions, and the narrator never preaches against them. Chopin cherishes her characters' full humanity, and she allows Edna time to get there. I was never bored along Edna's journey, I relished how Chopin let her take each faltering step necessary to grow organically from a trophy housewife into a brave iconoclast.
Chopin said that she wasn't a feminist or a suffragist. She is a humanist. She is concerned with individuals. She looks for all the humanity in paupers and outcasts, creoles and people of color - especially when we measure Chopin's insight against the shallow assumptions of her times. She's sharp at capturing differences and dialects. That said, all the black people we meet in The Awakening are cooking, cleaning or tending children, and we don't see past their surfaces. I suspect (?) this is deliberate, that we're in Edna's world, and Chopin is showing us Edna's privilege and all she takes for granted. In other stories Chopin draws black characters with much more sympathy and understanding.
Do you know Guy de Maupassant? If not, please try him. I've never read a finer story than his Boule de Suif (Ball of Fat). As Kate Chopin said, "I read his stories and marveled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinkable way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw."
Chopin learned a lot from Maupassant. Like him, she notes all of society's systems and currents, then looks beyond them to examine the complexity of individuals contending within them. I think Chopin allows her characters to breathe, she feels their hearts and hears their distinctive voices. Here Edna is talking with a suitor:
"Do you know Mademoiselle Reisz?" she asked irrelevantly.
"The pianist? I know her by sight. I've heard her play."
"She says queer things sometimes in a bantering way that you don't notice at the time and you find yourself thinking about afterward."
"For instance?"
"Well, for instance, when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. 'The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.'"
"Whither would you soar?"
"I'm not thinking of any extraordinary flights. I only half comprehend her."
"I've heard she's partially demented," said Arobin.
"She seems to me wonderfully sane," Edna replied.
"I'm told she's extremely disagreeable and unpleasant. Why have you introduced her at a moment when I desired to talk of you?"
"Oh! talk of me if you like," cried Edna, clasping her hands beneath her head; "but let me think of something else while you do."
Chopin brings Edna and Arobin perfectly to life, in themselves and in the energy playing between them. Nestled within the play is serious wisdom: Mademoiselle Reisz's words could serve as a motto both for Edna, and for all progressives.
"The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings."
For all the compliments I've given Chopin, I felt this was a good book, not a great one. In my research I've come across writers and critics praising The Awakening to the heavens, so there may well be more power and subtlety here than I've yet grasped. Or, The Awakening isn't quite to my tastes.
Edna Pontellier's personal journey reminded me of Janie Starks's; but Their Eyes Were Watching God is a bright vision, while The Awakening often feels like a hazy daydream. Chopin's a Romantic. This is innate to her own heart, and she can weave real magic in this vein - or, she can fall into sentimental mysticism.
The Awakening opens in Grand Isle, on the gulf coast of Louisiana. Edna, her two boys, and husband (on weekends) are staying in a cottage for the summer. She's been learning to swim, but has been too afraid to really kick off the shore and go for it. One beautiful moonlit night, she breaks free and finally gets it. Decide for yourself, dear reader, whether this is moving, swooning, or both:
She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.
Once she turned and looked toward the shore, toward the people she had left there. She had not gone any great distance—that is, what would have been a great distance for an experienced swimmer. But to her unaccustomed vision the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to overcome.
A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her senses. But by an effort she rallied her staggering faculties and managed to regain the land.
Chopin sometimes enters into the action and individuals of her story, and brings a scene fully to life, so that we readers are right there with Edna. At other times she loses balance, drifting into impressionism, where she loses the edges of her picture. Here's one detail to show that:
She acceded to the suggestion of bouillon, which was grateful and acceptable. He went himself to the kitchen, which was a building apart from the cottages and lying to the rear of the house. And he himself brought her the golden-brown bouillon, in a dainty Sevres cup, with a flaky cracker or two on the saucer.
This is Chopin's world, but she hasn't seen it clearly enough to show us exactly what's there. The dainty Sevres cup is fetching - but it either has
one flaky cracker on its saucer, or it has
two. What Chopin writes is too fuzzy. And this same indeterminacy happens twice more in
The Awakening: we see a concrete thing, which grows dimmer when Chopin tells us there are "one
or two" of them.
It's a shame that Kate Chopin died so young. The Awakening is an exceptional book, and a great leap forward in her writing. It was only her second novel. I wish she'd lived two or three decades more, so we could have seen her finish her own awakening.