"A Language Which Nobody Understood": Emancipatory Strategies in "The Awakening"

Abstract

Despite the academy's growing commitment to producing and publishing feminist interpretations of literary texts, insofar as feminist critics read Kate Chopin's The Awakening as novel about sexual liberation, we read it with our patriarchal biases intact. Of course The Awakening's final scene is breathtaking; Edna Pontellier transcends her circumscribed status as sensual entity-as the object of others' desires-and stands before us as her own subject, as blissfully embodied being: ... she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.'1 It is because of this new dignity and visibility Chopin gives to women's desires that The Awakening has been celebrated as one of the great subversive novels-a novel belonging to the tradition of transgressive narratives Tony Tanner describes in Adultery in the Novel. But in this essay I will suggest that Tanner's ideas are inadequate to account for the real transgressive force of Chopin's novel. Instead, I want to locate this force in Chopin's representation of language Edna Pontellier seeks but does not possess, in her representation of a language which nobody understood.2 In Adultery in the Novel Tanner explains that eighteenthand nineteenthcentury novels derive narrative urgency from their power to interrupt the status quo by representing characters or ideas which impinge on society's stability. While most bourgeois novels affirm marriage, the nuclear family, or genealogical continuity as the source of social stability, these same novels gather momentum by representing energy that threatens to contravene that stability of the family on which society depends: an energy frequently embodied in the adulterous woman.3 While prostitutes, orphans, adventurers, and other marginal characters dominate the early phases of the novel and