Un-Utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in The Awakening

Abstract

Because novelists are particular about beginnings, we should notice that The Awakening opens with two things: sumptuous sensory images and an outpouring of babble--words that resemble ordinary speech, but which really have meaning for no one, not even speaker. A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside door, kept repeating over and over: vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right! He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood. [1] Although an onlooker is able to enjoy this vivid scene, parrot cannot; moreover, there is a sense of enigma (or fraud) about this bird who seems able to communicate, but is not. Indeed, absolute discontinuity among bird's discourse, its exotic plumage, and its feelings (whatever they may be) is even more significant to larger themes of novel than fact that he is caged. Or perhaps this very disconnectedness (and bird's consequent isolation) defines cage. Critics admire modernism of Chopin's work, strong spareness of prose and ';minimalism of a narrative whose absences are at least as important as its action and whose narrator maintains strict emotional and moral neutrality. What we may not fully appreciate is relationship between these elements and Edna Pontellier's personal tragedy, a relationship whose terms are announced by apparent disarray of novel's brilliant beginning. This is a tale about not speaking, about disjunction--about denials, oversights, prohibitions, exclusions, and absences. Not merely about things that are never named, but most significantly about stories that cannot be told and things that can be neither thought nor spoken because they do not have a name. After about 1849, notion of a woman's sexual awakening became, by definition, an impossibility--a contradiction in terms--because medical establishment in America began to promulgate view that normal females possessed no erotic inclinations whatsoever (and cannot awaken something that does not exist). William Acton, acknowledged expert on nature of women's sexuality and author of one of most widely quoted books on sexual problems and diseases in English-speaking world, [2] wrote: I have taken pains to obtain and compare abundant evidence on this subject, and result of my inquiries I may briefly epitomize as follows:--I should say that majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their consequences. [3] Acton's work elaborated a comprehensive system of women's inequality to men; and it was so universally respected that his sentiments can be taken to represent opinions that were held throughout much of America during second half of nineteenth century. Certainly they define attitudes of that stem Presbyterian world in which Edna Pointellier grew to maturity. [4] In fact, Edna's particular religious background could not have been chosen casually by Chopin, for a woman reared in this faith during 1870s and 1880s (the years of Edna's youth) would have been preternaturally susceptible to most crippling elements of Acton's strictures. American Calvinism always preached that although woman was to be as equal to man. in her title to grace, she was nonetheless the weaker vessel, and was thus obliged to pursue all endeavors as a subordinate to husband. [5] During later nineteenth century, Presbyterianism was generally regarded as a conservative bastion for such ideas, and many Presbyterians themselves construed their mission as of upholding precisely these conservative-religious values. …