Nudity and Nakedness: The Gaze of Edna Pontellier

Abstract

The description of Edna Pontellier’s unclothed body is a recurring metaphor in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The correlation between nudity and nakedness implies a different status of how a person surveys himself, and is surveyed by others. Moreover, the tradition of men as the surveyor and women as the surveyed shapes the social expectation of women always striving to please the male gaze. Chopin’s Creole society is a sphere where women are surveyed and disciplined. This essay aims to demonstrate how Edna achieved an extraordinary awakening of how women are appraised by men and how they perfect their manners accordingly, under the inspiration of art and the ocean. This awakening is both liberating and detrimental for Edna, for she found only the incompatibility between her quest for selfhood and society. This discordance deepens Edna Pontellier’s solitude and leads to her final suicide. However, the physical destruction is not an act of surrender because, through her nudity, we witness powerful feminist awakening and rebellion.