The Escape of the "Sea": Ideology and The Awakening

Abstract

Nineteenth-century feminist discourse was an oppositional ideology, resistance to obstacles to female fulfillment. The hegemonic institutions of nineteenth-century society required women to be objects in marriage and in motherhood, existing as vessels of maternity and sexuality, with little opportunity for individuality. As critic Margit Stange asserts, self-ownership was central to project of nineteenth-century feminism (506). Self-ownership connoted woman's right to have possession of own fully realized human identity. Inherent in this concept was not only sexual freedom and other aspects of personhood, but also a sense of place in community and universe at large, through love, connection, maternity, and other aspects of fulfillment (Toth 242). Kate Chopin's The Awakening is, as Chopin biographer Emily Toth posits, a case study of nineteenth-century feminism (242). Indeed, Edna Pontellier's first consciousness of awakening is described in terms that echo nineteenth-century feminist concept of female identity: Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize position in universe as human being, and to recognize relations as an individual to world within and about her (Chopin 57). Her awakening makes visible position in patriarchal society and gives desire to seek alternative roles. The female roles portrayed in The Awakening are rooted in an ideological system. Louis Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses provides an ideological framework for female roles and experiences portrayed in novel. This framework also implicates ideological system of nineteenth-century society as ultimate culprit in Edna's fate. According to Althusser, mechanism of hegemony is interpellation, recognition and adoption of an ideology and its practices (299). Edna's awakening allows to resist various interpellations of dominant patriarchal ideology and experiment with both alternative and oppositional roles. Her new consciousness makes ill-suited for limited female roles, those of hegemonic ideal and those opposed to this ideal, offered by nineteenth-century society. Edna experiments with two roles in particular, embodied by central female characters in novel, Adele Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz. In addition, Edna also experiments with an oppositional role that, significantly, is not embodied by any female character in novel, role in she is both freely sexual and autonomous. Because of strong interpellation as mother, role dictated for married women by hegemonic ideology in society, she finds that she cannot exist in an alternative or oppositional female role. However, because of awakening to herself as an individual, she cannot exist in female roles sanctioned by patriarchal ideology. Her only escape from this ideology is death, and hence, Edna commits suicide at site of awakening, the sea (Chopin 57). Edna takes drastic action to elude ideological system into she is born. She is repressed by cultural forces that she does not understand and cannot articulate. Althusser's theory provides clear language, as well as systematic mechanism, to account for ubiquitous presence of nineteenth-century cultural force and its perpetuation of hegemonic ideology. Althusser's cultural theory explains structure and function of ideology, his central thesis stemming from Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. In cultural theory, term describes dynamic by which dominant class wins willing consent of subordinate class to system that ensures their subordination (Fiske 310). Consent is not static, but must be won and rewon (Fiske 310). Althusserian theory accounts for manner in ruling, or hegemonic, discourses and institutions perpetuate necessary consent for their dominance. Ideology, powerful force behind dominance of hegemonic institutions, is defined by Althusser as an imaginary relation to real relations of existence (299). …