Edna Pontellier Research Articles

The Bird that Came out of the Cage: A Foucauldian Feminist Approach to Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Using Foucauldian principles, this study describes a complex process; the birth of a feminist woman. Through an exploration of the uses of bird imagery, it traces the development of Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening. It shows how she begins by gaining awareness of being caged by patriarchal restraints, goes through the various stages of self‐reinvention, and finally escapes from a society that sought to confine her. Using a range of theoretical reference points, including Foucault's analysis of the modernization of power, Marilyn Frye's theory of oppression and the work of Sandra Lee Bartky on its internalization, this article analyzes the final drastic feminist resolution taken by Edna, the strong wife who ultimately belongs only to herself. This innovative analysis also reinforces the connection that exists between a woman's awareness and control of her body in order to achieve liberation from patriarchal oppression.

On Women, Bodies, and Nation: Feminist Critique and Revision in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Griqua are an ethnic group within the larger Khoi population of South Africa. They have mixed race origins resulting from relations between the native Africans and European colonisers dating back to the seventeenth century and aligning them with the coloureds of the apartheid era. Andrew Andries Stockenstrom Le Fleur, often referred to as the Reformer, led the Griqua rebellion against the British in 1898 and the 1927 trek from Kokstad. 2. David would also like to include, against his narrator's wishes, Krotoä-Eva, the first indigenous woman to appear in official Cape records. Unlike Baartman, Krotoä ultimately has a minimal presence in the text; however, she has also achieved iconic status in South Africa and her inclusion at all in Wicomb's novel is significant. See Kai Easton's article ‘Travelling through History, “New” South African Icons’ for a consideration of Krotoä, as well as Baartman, in relation to David's Story. 3. Numerous scholars have written about Baartman, colonial discourse on the Hottentot, and the Hottentot as icon. For example, see JM Coetzee's White Writing (1988), Saul Dubow's Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (1995), Sharpley-Whiting's Black Venus (1999), and Sander Gilman's essay in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference (1986). Baartman's story has also been fictionalised in Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel Hottentot Venus (2003) Chase-Riboud, Barbara. 2003. Hottentot-Venus: A Novel, NY: Doubleday. [Google Scholar], the title poem of Elizabeth Alexander's debut collection of poetry The Venus Hottentot (1990), and Suzan-Lori Parks's 1997 play Venus. 4. Baartman died at the age of twenty-five from small pox and alcoholism, five years after agreeing to exhibit her body in exchange for money and a return trip home to Cape Town. She was not the only African woman put on display in Europe in the nineteenth century but has become the most famous, due largely to Cuvier's work. Baartman's jarred remains were exhibited in Paris's Musee de l'Homme along with a plaster cast of her body until 1974. Her remains were finally returned to South Africa for burial in 2002. 5. The MK refers to the Umkhonto we Sizwe (translated as Spear of the Nation), the guerrilla military wing of the ANC, established in 1961 when the ANC split from its non-violent past in order to become ‘the fighting arm of the people against the government and its policies of race oppression’ (ANC 2006 African National Congress (ANC). 2006. Manifesto of the Umkhonto we Sizwe. Official Website of the African National Congress. 7 July <www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/manifesto-mk.html> [Google Scholar]). 6. Steatopygia, a genetic characteristic of Khoi women, is a high degree of fat accumulation in and around the buttocks. It is sometimes accompanied by an elongated labia. These bodily features, pathologised by Europeans, rendered Saartje Baartman a spectacle as the Hottentot Venus. 7. To readers of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, this scene starkly contrasts Edna Pontellier's discovery of and claiming a sense of power and sensuality in her body through learning to swim. Wicomb here may be criticising the trope of ‘awakening’ that Chopin's text established as central in the western feminist literary canon but that cannot accommodate the complexities of race and the postcolonial condition.

Venerable Sonority in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Kate Chopin's The Awakening is ostensibly a work of realism depicting the moral conflict that faces Edna Pontellier: selfhood in opposition to family. Edna's ultimate surrender to her emotional conviction signals more than the requisite ethical dilemma of a particular literary genre; it also contains strong elements of musical romanticism, which put a greater stress on human instincts and feelings than on intellect.1 The character piece for piano,2 a major contribution of this era, emphasizes spontaneous emotion, as do the Impromptus that Mile. Reisz plays for Edna. These compositions by Frederic Chopin underline the influence of the Polish pianist on the novel. Although allusions to operatic composers exist in the work, they are ancillary because on certain evenings during the week she [Edna] and her husband attended the opera.8 Essentially, this type of artistic expression is reserved for shared time with Mr. Pontellier whereas the intimate strains of

The Birth of Tragedy and The Awakening: Influences and Intertextualities

The Birth of Tragedy and The Awakening:Influences and Intertextualities Patricia L. Bradley I For decades, scholars of Kate Chopin and her works have indirectly, or at least without much elucidation, acknowledged the Nietzschean strain they have observed in her canon, particularly in her masterpiece The Awakening (1899). One recent example of this type of reference appears in the introduction to a new edition of Chopin's first novel At Fault (1890), in which the editors make the sweeping claim that "[n]umerous critics have remarked on Chopin's familiarity with philosophical works, especially the German Romanticism of Friedrich Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche" (Green and Caudle xxi). Additionally, two essays from the collection Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou (1992) make glancing and, at times, downright elliptical references to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and certain of his works to illustrate images and metaphoric approaches Chopin shared with the radical nineteenth-century German philosopher. Martha Fodaski Black begins her essay "The Quintessence of Chopinism" by tracing the bird imagery Chopin uses to set the opening scene in The Awakening to similar uses in George Bernard Shaw's feminist essay "The Womanly Woman."Black suggests other possible source texts, such as Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women [End Page 40] (1772), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886); while recognizing these earlier texts and their uses of the image, however, Black favors the Shaw text as influence because, as she notes, Shaw's views were more immediately available to Chopin as she was writing her novel; indeed, "evidence of [Chopin's] reading [Shaw] is implicit in The Awakening" (97). Black's conclusion also reflects her own goal as essayist: to convince the reader of Chopin's clear convictions regarding the "woman question" during the late nineteenth century and thus counter Elizabeth Fox Genovese's claim that Chopin was not really a feminist (95). Writing for the same essay collection, Lynda Boren makes an even more tantalizing reference to Nietzsche in "Taming the Sirens: Self-Possession and the Strategies of Art in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." Boren's reference to the putative Nietzschean quality in Chopin's novel is even more elusively and literally elliptical. Well into the essay, she moves directly from one paragraph that deals with Edna Pontellier's unstinting response to "the strains of Chopin" to a subsequent but obviously related paragraph. In doing so, Boren uses the following transitional idea: Subscribing to Nietzsche's argument in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), it follows that Edna's latent Dionysian desires for irrational ecstasy are brought to the surface by certain types of music, while the Apollonian demand for order, required by art, is only feebly realized or negatively imaged as "encaging," "paternalistic," "silencing." (Boren 187) Boren's use of the paragraph's initial dangling modifier demands that we examine the utility of questionable grammatical structure in this context. Who is, after all, subscribing to Nietzsche's argument? Is it Boren and, by a hoped-for extension, her reader? Was it Chopin and, by extension, Edna? Is Boren grudgingly positing a relationship of influence between Nietzsche and Chopin? Or is she relying on her reader's appreciation for an intertextual connection between Nietzsche and Chopin? Indeed, Boren's syntactical lapse, conscious or otherwise, draws our awareness to a pattern of scholarly reticence when it comes to making too direct a connection between Kate Chopin and Friedrich Nietzsche. If nothing else, observing such evidences of reticence manifested by syntactical misdirection begs this question of Chopin studies: what would acknowledging a relationship of influence between The Birth of Tragedy and The Awakening imply for Chopin critics and the direction of their criticism? The critical stakes as we consider this question could well be [End Page 41] our cherished view of Chopin as feminist activist and the possibility that Edna's identity as feminist goddess is merely a construct. Lynda Boren's reference to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music has the potential to be doubly misleading to her reader in the sense that even though this text was, in fact, published in...

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

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). …

The Awakening and A Lost Lady: Flying with Broken Wings and Raked Feathers

Since the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars have shown a renewed interest in the works of both Kate Chopin and Willa Cather. Although a renewed interest in both authors has resulted in a wide variety of publications, what has not been written is a thorough study placing the authors in conversation with each other. Perhaps these authors have not been studied together because new historicism is a relatively recent critical approach, or perhaps scholars select Cather's better-known works. For the most part, critics have examined the writers separately or with other authors such as Edith Wharton. (1) Chopin's and Cather's novels belong in conversation with each other because Cather was aware of Chopin, specifically her novel Awakening: she wrote a review of it in 1899 when the book was first published. While Cather praised Chopin's skill, she lamented that it was wasted: Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme (Books and Magazines 170). As the review continues, Cather compares Awakening to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and judges Edna Pontellier to be a hasty sketch (171). Cather is not the only critic to note similarities between Chopin and Flaubert, and after the publication of Cather's A Lost Lady in 1923, critics drew parallels between it and Madame Bovary. (2) While all three novels contain similarities--primarily the protagonist's struggle against the confines of her society--Chopin's Awakening and Cather's A Lost Lady employ birds as a metaphor for the entrapment the protagonists experience; however, the ideas the bird imagery communicates differ between the authors. bird symbolism in Awakening and A Lost Lady is complex. In addition to enhancing the story lines, the use of birds identifies both Chopin and Cather with women's writing. In The Quintessence of Chopinism, Martha Fodaski Black briefly traces the use of birds to represent women's entrapment in marriage and society. Black begins by positing that Chopin was probably aware of George Bernard Shaw's 1891 essay The Womanly in which he defends Ibsen's portrayal of feminist heroines by comparing women to parrots. Black, however, quickly notes that Shaw's connection between women and birds is not the first. In 1772, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft describes women: Confined then in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from to perch (98). use of bird imagery to represent entrapment is a metaphor established well before Chopin and Cather write. Chopin and Cather carefully craft all references to birds to reveal the positions the protagonists find themselves in and the movement they make over the course of the novels as they determine and pursue their dreams. More than a century after the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chopin in Awakening and Cather in A Lost Lady explore how women are kept in cages--albeit gilded--and what obstacles the protagonists, Edna Pontellier and Marian Forrester, encounter when they attempt to escape. Edna is associated with several birds over the course of the novel, but the most important are the parrot and mockingbird in the opening scene and the white bird that appears in her dream and then over the sea before her final swim. Unlike Edna, who is associated with several birds, Marian is coupled primarily with one bird, the blinded female woodpecker. Both Chopin and Cather spend time constructing intricate scenes with birds. Chopin begins her novel with a noisy and surprising scene: A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: 'Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! (3) That's all right!' He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence. …

A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler's Postfeminist Edna Pontellier in Ladder of Years

Following the 1995 publication of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, familiar comments about the author's much-debated stance on feminist issues once again appeared in book reviews. For example, in the Yale Review, Lome Moore described the Baltimore of Tyler's novel as “a land and time unto itself, untouched by such things as feminism […] or politics of any kind” (141). Brooke Allen, in the New Criterion, lamented that Tyler's characters “seem eerily untouched by any of the revolutions, be they sexual or feminist, of the last forty years.” Additionally, Allen complained, “Not only do none of Tyler's wives see themselves as feminists, they apparently do not even acknowledge that such a creature exists” (33). Similar observations have greeted the debuts of many of Tyler's novels since the 1970s, when her negative reviews of a number of feminist works and her published remarks about novels by “liberated” women—“I hate 'em all”—unsurprisingly earned her the reputation of being unsupportive of feminist concerns (Ridley 23).1

In Possession of the Letter: Kate Chopin's "Her Letters"

The scandal surrounding the publication of Kate Chopin's 1899 The Awakening tarnished its author's reputation and effectively removed the novel from wide circulation and influence for fifty years following its publication. (1) The book was derided by Chopin's contemporaries as trite and sordid, (2) and the behavior of its heroine, Edna Pontellier, was described by reviewers as shocking, sickening, and selfish. (3) The second half of the twentieth century has witnessed dramatic reappraisal of the text and of its main character, and regeneration of Chopin's reputation. In particular, feminist critics such as Elaine Showalter have embraced the text as one which depicts and contests restraints upon female expression and behavior. Showalter asserts for instance that in The Awakening, went boldly beyond the work of her precursors in writing about women's longing for sexual and personal emancipation, and thus she characterizes the text as a revolutionary book. (4) Given all the attention to and debate surrounding The Awakening, it is particularly interesting to note that, as Peggy Skaggs has observed, Chopin experimented with the same themes of female sexual awakening, adultery, and gender constraints in several of her short stories, including her obscure and brilliant short story Her Letters, published in Vogue in 1895. (5) Indeed, given the representation of Edna Pontellier as woman ruled by passion to the extent that she abandons all maternal and social obligations, conforming as it does to the stereotype of the female as irrational and easily swayed by passion, I will argue that Her Letters is in fact in many ways less problematically feminist statement than The Awakening. As in The Awakening, conflict is structured in Her Letters between social expectations that the wife's subordinate her personhood to the needs of her husband and female desire for independence and recognition of sexual and social equality. That is, contest is structured between possession by another and self-possession. The conclusions of the text are that women, like men, do indeed have sexual needs and desires, and that love, not social or financial status, is the foundation for marriage. At the same time, Her Letters also has more general and uncanny conclusion that also turns on the double meaning of the term possession, considered both in the sense of ownership and control of property by an individual and in its opposite sense of control of an individual by an entity or idea. While highlighting the desire for self-possession, the disturbing effects of bundle of letters on first the unnamed wife and then the equally anonymous husband demonstrate the ways in which subjectivity is constructed from without--that is, following psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the ways in which language and culture construct or constitute identity. Indeed, Her Letters is decidedly Lacanian text, one which demonstrates at every turn the manner in which the subject is subject to the signifier. (6) In Her Letters, the unavoidable conclusion of the text is that neither husband nor wife possess the letters; rather, the letters possess each--and deprive each of life--in turn. The truth of each character, the wife and the husband, is figured as that which comes from without. Her Letters opens with an upper-class woman contemplating and preparing to destroy bundle of letters. She manages to consign six letters to the flames of her fireplace before she is overwhelmed with emotion and unable to proceed further. The letters, to which the woman has powerful affective attachment, are the only evidence of passionate extramarital affair. The woman, who is dying from an unspecified disease, had hoped to be able to destroy the letters before her death, rather than let her husband, whom she regards fondly but does not love, discover the letters after her death. …

Articulation and Artistry: A Conversational Analysis of The Awakening

In Kate Chopin's Awakening, the ways in which the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, articulates her feelings about her social position indicate that to discourse is an important issue to consider in determining the causes of Edna's conflict. Edna's attempts to use language to reposition herself socially, especially in relation to the men in her social circle but also in relation to female characters, demonstrate the importance of language in defining social position. discourse analysis technique of Norman Fairclough's Language and Power helps to illustrate the ideological aspects of language in the text, and Michael Toolan's conversational turbulence model, presented in Analysing Conversation in Fiction, elucidates power struggles within conversations. Edna's failure to articulate her feelings and to gain to discourse contributes to her demise, as does being denied to her chosen profession of painting, another form of self-expression. Norman Fairclough suggests that ideologies become naturalized in society; that is, a system of values and subject positions comes to be accepted as natural, obvious, or correct, or as Fairclough puts it, as sense: Conventions routinely drawn upon in discourse embody ideological assumptions which come to be taken as mere sense, and which contribute to sustaining existing power relations.... The familiar common sense world of everyday life, [is] a world which is built entirely upon assumptions and expectations which control both the actions of members of a society and their interpretation of the actions of others. Such assumptions and expectations are implicit, backgrounded, taken for granted, not things that people are consciously aware of, rarely explicitly formulated or examined or questioned. (77) In Awakening, the subject position of women as wives and mothers is part of the ideology and is taken by the characters to be the most natural of assumptions. For an upper- or middle-class woman to work is a threat to her husband's social status and self-esteem. Lower-class women work because they need to, while upper-class women entertain and run the household. For a woman of Edna's social status to work would imply that her husband is not successful. It follows, then, that a point of conflict in Edna's marriage is her desire to paint. Fairclough raises the issue of access in social practice. dominant in a society has easiest to cultural capital, including discourse types and professions. In the terms of Chopin's text, the bloc is male (and white); therefore, Edna is denied freedom of choice regarding her productivity. She is not allowed to take painting as her main activity, nor does she have to the type of discourse that would give her kind a position of power against the ideology that defines her social position. This lack of lowers her publicly acknowledged status, and of course the status of women compared to that of men generally is an issue (64). Dr. Mandelet asks Edna's husband, Leonce, whether Edna is associating with a feminist group that he refers to as pseudo-intellectual women --super-spiritual beings (86-87). Mandelet's description represents what Fairclough refers to as overwording, which shows preoccupation with some aspect of reality--which may indicate that it is a focus of ideological struggle (115). Mandelet's classification scheme for women is euphemistic yet patriarchal. Women are pseudo-intellectual, not possessing the higher education or capability to be truly intellectual. Feminists are super-spiritual--above religious tradition. (This may refer to the spiritual connotation of the bird metaphor of Mlle. Reisz.) Feminists are also superior beings, not quite human or natural. His euphemism refers to otherness, difference, and alienation from male ideology as represented benignly by the doctor. …

The Awakening 's Signifying "Mexicanist" Presence

THE A WAKENING'S SIGNIFIYING "MEXICANIST" PRESENCE Phillip Barrish University of Texas at Austin Since the appearance in 1992 ofToni Morrison's paradigm-changing Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, critics have striven to respondtohermandate thatwe develop anew "critical geography." Playing in the Dark asks, how has the United States's pervasive Africanist presence helped to organize, to give texture and meaning, to "literary 'whiteness' "71 Trying to answerMorrison's question has produced remarkable results throughout U.S. literary studies, ranging for instance from Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Was Huck Black? to Kenneth Warren's Black and White Strangers to Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations.2 Yet despite the vast border shared between Mexico and the United States, comparatively little scholarship has been devoted to a question that might be taken as analogous to Morrison's: How has the centuriesold encounter between the United States and what José Limón calls GreaterMexico helped to shape whatMorrison dubbed "literary 'whiteness '" in the body of material that U.S. critics often think of simply as "American" literature? (By Greater Mexico, Limón means people of Mexican descent from "either side" of the border, "with all their commonalities and differences.")3 If a black population accompanied and, as Morrison emphasizes, in many cases preceded white settlers to this country, so too a Mexican population inhabited significant areas of what became the United States long before those areas' mid-nineteenth century incorporation. (Roughly 20% of the United States population now lives on land that was once part ofMexico.) Moreover, ofcourse, Mexican-descended people have continued to inhabit those and other parts of the U.S. ever since, exercising incalculable influence on the cultural, financial, and political economies of such regions. In the field ofliterary studies, much important work has been done by scholars associated with the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, as well as by other scholars, in locating and elucidating a richly diverse tradition ofMexican-American and Chicano literature . But few have asked how paying fuller attention to the abiding, signing "Mexicanist" presence (adapting Morrison's terminology) in 66Phillip Barrish the United States might also help us to reread certain "Anglo" texts, ones that are usually seen as unrelated to the nation's "Hispanic Literary Heritage." Again adapting Morrison's terms, how has "a real or fabricated" Mexicanist presence been used "to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness"?4 Explicitlyresponding to Morrison's challenge finally to see American literature's pervasive Africanist presence, the most powerful recent line of argument about Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) contends that the sexual, political, and creative dimensions of Edna Pontellier's "awakening" all depend upon an unacknowledged "racial midwifery."5 Citing, for instance, the domestic labor (childcare, cleaning , cooking, errands) provided for Edna by "nameless, faceless black women," Elizabeth Amnions insists that "the very liberation about which the book fantasizes is purchased on the backs of black women."6 Michelle Birnbaum, who has developed this line of argument about The Awakening most fully, emphasizes in particular how Edna's access to a freer, richer sexuality is facilitated, even structured, by the many black women who surround her. Highlighting a series of implicit , oblique, and even hidden textual connections, Birnbaum shows that Edna does not only take the physical labor of African-American women for granted. She "employs as well their tropological potential, their associations with the marginal and, ultimately, with the erotic."7 Birnbaum draws on Hortense Spillers' suggestion that the mere presence of a mulatto in works of American literature serves to evoke illicit sex: the mulatto presence permits the dominant white culture "to say without parting its lips that 'we have willed to sin.' " Using this logic, Birnbaum argues that the "quadroon" nursemaid who frequently appears near Edna carries a "literary inheritance" of libidinal connotation . Despite the fact that in Chopin's portrayal the nursemaid seems to lack both subjectivity and sexuality, for Birnbaum the aura ofillicit sex that hovers about the mixed-race woman's very existence helps to emphasize Edna's own awakening desires.8 I agree that racist cultural assumptions linking African-American women and ungoverned sexuality can...

Between Registers: Coming In and Out Through Musical Performance in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

For some us, it might be that most intense and important way we express or enact through circulation physical pleasure is in musical activity, and that our sexual identity might be musician more than it is lesbian' gay, or straight. Suzanne Cusick (On a Lesbian Relationship with Music 70) On November 27, 1897, Willa Cather's opinion Jules-Emile-Frederic Massenet's Herodiade appeared in Courier. Cather wrote, [The Herodiade is] full that present sensuous spirituality like Rossetti's verses, hinting warfare between flesh and spirit and giving victory quite frankly and joyously to flesh, Massenet always full vague, delicious (The World and Parish 520) While Cather's phrases, ever present, of his, and as Massenet always does, betray writer's condescension toward Massenet and Rossetti for their acquiescence to pull sexuality (the same reasons for which she overtly condemned Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and Kate Ghopin [1]), unobtrusive but reveals author's attraction to a liminal state unfulfilled and undefined desire, of vague, delicious yearning. Cather's success an outspoken journalist in a male-dominated profession and her decision to live rather openly, though ambiguously, with her lesbian lovers--first, Isabelle McGlung and then Edith Lewis--reveal that Cather was able to keep societal focus on her writing and off her sexuality. Her renunciation provocative pose she had adopted an undergraduate cross-dresser and cross-namer (she often signed herself William or more ambivalently Will) was first step in her public and literary detachment from clearly defined roles. Indeed, Cather has gained attention recently from performance and queer theorists who have shown gender to be a mutable boundary in her fiction. Gertainly it is complex. Her lesbianism challenged and yet accorded nicely with societal pressure to be outwardly both an unsexual Victorian woman and a successful masculine artist. Cather's early prose reveals that she did internalize Victorian cult manhood, [2] reviling effeminate men and feminine women's writing, and yet she loved women both in her fiction and in her private life. Many have read hypocrisy in Cather's condemnation Oscar Wilde's homosexuality, yet Cather also denounced heterosexual passion and marriage. [3] She deplored Chopin's The Awakening trite and sordid and went on to write, These people [female characters like Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovaryl really expect passion love to fill and gratify every need life whereas nature only intended that it should meet one many demands. They insist upon making it stand for all emotional pleasures life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, to contribute to their lives what arts and pleasurable exercise intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists. (The World and Parish 697-98) Ultimately, art is a more satisfying and faithful lover than romance. Cather's argument with Kate Chopin, whose other works she respects, is that strength Edna's passion is unnatural and cheapens Chopin's artistry a writer. Cather's censure Wilde, though addressing a homosexual man, is substantively identical: he took tapers from altar for festival lights and brandished them in wild melee a carnival night, and she sadly laments the chaos and confusion wasted life and wasted talent. Wilde's sin, she claims, is [ir] reverence for his own gift by offhandedly writing his insincere plays (The Kingdom Art 392). What Cather condemns more than gay or straight sex is unintellectual abandon to physical passion and life which is always destructive to interests art. …

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

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. …

The Metaphorical Lesbian: Edna Pontellier in The Awakening

The Metaphorical Lesbian: Edna Pontellier in The Awakening

Dominant Discourse and the Female Imaginary: A Study of the Tensions between Disparate Discursive Registers in Chopin’s The Awakening

DOMINANT DISCOURSE AND THE FEMALE IMAGINARY: A STUDY OF THE TENSIONS BETWEEN DISPARATE DISCURSIVE REGISTERS IN CHOPIN’S THE AWAKENING JACQUELINE BUCKMAN Trent University There are also more and more texts written by women in which another writing is beginning to assert itself, even if it is still often repressed by the dominant discourse. (Luce Irigaray, This Sex 134) InThe Awakening the dominant theoretical model of discourse is accompa­ nied by an occulted or marginal discursive practice that attempts to trans­ form the former’s social values and cultural assumptions by disrupting its symbolic structures. This dominant discursive system makes possible the patriarchal myths of motherhood, romance, and seduction that regulate the novel’s plot. However, the novel’s marginal subtext generates alternative discourses that attempt to create a space or a voice for transgressive ele­ ments that patriarchal culture has neglected and chosen not to symbolize. For the purposes of this paper, I have grouped these transgressive elements together under the rubric “the female imaginary,” and will show how the marginal discourses pertaining to Edna Pontellier’s evolving subjectivity in­ corporate these elements in order to give them access to their own specific symbolization. In the novel The Awakening, the image of “the Gulf,” the site of the hero­ ine’s sensual awakening, thematizes the impermeability of the boundaries that prohibit communication between reason and passion, body and mind, and consciousness and the unconscious within the dominant discourses of the plot.1 Since these are precisely the categories that the marginal sub­ text, or female imaginary, is attempting to interconnect, the Gulf can also thematize the ideological discrepancy that exists between these disparate discursive registers. I will argue that the tension produced by this ideolog­ ical discrepancy can account for the interpretative ambiguities that haunt the novel. According to Margaret Whitford’s interpretation of Irigaray, our culture is dominated by a male imaginary that is governed “by identity (quantitative or possessive), non-contradiction, binary opposition . . . (which is hierarchical) rather than difference (which is not)” (“Speaking” 5). Irigaray herself asserts 55 that “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ‘mascu­ line.’ When she submits to (such a) theory, woman fails to realize that she is renouncing the specificity of her own relationship to the imaginary” (Specu­ lum; 133). As Grosz explains, the male provides the model of subjectivity “by which all others are positively or negatively defined. Others are con­ structed as variations of this singular type of subject” (105). This dynamic is evident in the novel when Edna Pontellier’s scepticism and silent internal in­ terrogations of restrictive patriarchal institutions are repeatedly repressed or reappropriated for the dominant system of representation both by the mas­ culine “gaze” and by male fictions of romance, seduction, and motherhood. The discourses that present these fictions threaten to arrest and stultify the turmoil and flux of a female subjectivity that has been roused from its social definition and thrown into conflict or process. Irigaray’s project in postu­ lating a female imaginary is to seek out the excess, the residues, precisely those elements that have been neglected or repressed by masculine repre­ sentational systems, and use them to achieve a transvaluation of sexual, linguistic, and socio-symbolic systems that will reconceptualize femininity by validating new structures of knowledge and different discursive frame­ works. Therefore, it seems appropriate to analyse the marginal subtextual registers in the novel that reveal Edna as a “subject-in-process” and that are transgressive of rigid discursive practices, in the light of Irigaray’s remarks about the female imaginary. Although the female imaginary resists clear definition, Irigaray wishes to explore the conditions for its emergence, given that “[tjhere is no simple manageable way to leap to the outside of phallogocentrism, nor any possible way to situate oneself there, that would result from the simple fact of being a woman” ( This Sex 162). The transvaluation of patriarchal culture’s values and symbols in no way proclaims an overturning or a replacement of existing structures. As Irigaray suggests, the feminine rejects mastery of discourse, and, consequently, the female imaginary cannot be foundational. Rather, it functions by disrupting or destabilizing existing models of language and knowledge in order...

The Nullification of Edna Pontellier

HOPIN'S title, The Awakening, suggests immediately a number of questions, beginning perhaps with the traditional epistemological poser: How can we be sure that our lives, our world, our realities are not a dream, ours or someone else's? At another level we know that female awakening is frequently perceived as a metamorphosis into monstrous power.' Sleeping Beauty is safer to the public when she is asleep-Chopin's novel itself tells us this. And assuming that one can awaken into reality, what does it mean for a woman to open her eyes to the non-domestic world of masculinely defined values? I would suggest here that as Edna awakens, she does indeed stir up great powers. Yet while these masquerade as her own aroused strengths, they are in reality imperatives merely manifested temporarily and sporadically through her. She may be felt to awaken from her dreams into others' dreams as she takes to herself the language, the assumptions, the essential misogyny of a thoroughly masculinized vision. Thinking that she crafts an autonomous selfa solitary soul-she vivifies instead the mummified man, a hollow Schopenhauer, an echoing Nietzsche. She awakens all the sonorous spokesmen of a long tradition of epistemological anti-feminism in her repudiation of what has been defined as maternal thinking, with its implications of inclusiveness and preservation, for a system that functions primarily by its exclusivity.2 Thinking to escape the mundanities of female life and

The Contracted Heart

6T HEY ALL KNEW each other and felt like one large family, Kate Chopin writes of the society of Creoles Edna Pontellier marries into in The Awakening (1899).' Edna is not quite a member of this family and is in some degree scandalized by its behavior, which is to say, by the general absence of that characterizes Creole conversation and by the particular profusion of intimate detail in the harrowing story of the accouchements of the mother woman, Madame Ratignolle (53). When a sexually explicit book makes the rounds of the pension, she is moved to read [it] in secret and in solitude, though none of the others had done so (53) and when Madame Ratignolle tells about the accouchements, she blushes. But Edna's blush doesn't exactly express a prudery about sex, any more than her desire to read the novel in private expresses disapproval of it. It is to the public-the familial--discussion of such topics that she objects, and this on grounds that The Awakening only gradually makes clear. For solitude is not only the condition in which Edna reads, it is the name she gives to a piece of piano music she particularly likes, a piece that evokes in her imagination the figure of a naked

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

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

The Awakening and the Failure of Psyche

ESPITE the intense critical attention Kate Chopin's The AwakJLJ} ening has received in the last fifteen years, it is still not clear whether Edna Pontellier is a hero or a victim. One recent reader sees her suicide as a defiant act of will and another as a result of maternal longing.' A reading of the novel is possible which mediates the extremes of Edna as either tragic or pathetic. The Eros and Psyche myth is a useful pattern to illuminate the labor toward self of the female hero with the accompanying inner and outer threats to the attainment of selfhood. Several commentators have noted the irony of the title. Edna sleeps and lives in a world of romantic fantasy far more than she seems to awaken to self or reality. The magnetic Gulf of Mexico beckons her to a world of dreams and then destruction. Freudian and other psychological critics have helpfully detailed the infantile and regressive traits in Edna,2 but this line of interpretation tends to view Edna's struggle as narrowly pathological rather than universally human. If, however, we view Edna as a Psyche figure, it is more clear that heroism is necessary for the nascent self to resist the lure and power of the unconscious.

The Awakening: A Political Romance

T IS OBVIOUS by now that The Awakening echoes characters and events in Madame Bovary, but even though she is deeply indebted to Flaubert, Chopin goes beyond merely imitating Emma and the problems Flaubert imagined for his heroine. While Edna Pontellier and Emma are both narcissists, Edna becomes aware of political crises related to her position within Creole society that sharply distinguish her from Emma, who responds to French provincial society only as a mirror of her romantic fantasies. These differences become immediately apparent through a comparison of two important passages. Twelve pages into The Awakening we encounter the well-known evocation of the sea that becomes a central motif in the novel:

The Structure of Kate Chopin's At Fault

THE STRUCTURE OF KATE CHOPIN'S AT FAULT Bernard J. Koloski Mansfield State College Even a casual reading of Kate Chopin's early novel Ar Fault (1890) is enough to convince us that the book lacks the intensity of The Awakening (1899) and that it shares litde of the later work's beauty of language. Its resolution seems contrived and melodramatic, while its tone, as Per Seyersted points out, strikes us as inconsistent.1 Yet At Fault is emphatically not a book we would look for in 1890, not a book like the one Chopin refers to as "the latest novel of one of those prolific female writers who turn out their unwholesome intellectual sweets so tirelessly, to be devoured by the girls and women of the age."2 It is in many ways a rewarding book, with a keenness of insight and a sureness of structure characteristic of Kate Chopin at her best. Like The Awakening, At Fault is developed through a well conceived succession of contrasts which gradually delineates the plight of a woman struggling with a seemingly irreconcilable difference between the social reality of an "outward existence"—to use the language of the later novel—and the private vision of an "inward life" (p. 893), an imaginative ideal. Edna Pontellier's struggle leads inevitably to alienation, isolation, and ultimately death. The heroine of Ar Fault, largely through chance, manages to unify her two realms and achieve a sense of peace. Edna yearns for an existence in which she can fulfill herself by escaping from what she comes to see as the restrictions and conventions of an essentially static society. Her plight is, therefore, the result of an interior change, the result of her awakened consciousness, her newly transformed vision of the possibilities of life. For Thérèse Lafirme, however, it is not a vision of life but life itself which is changing. Thérèse becomes increasingly sensitive to the dynamic character of her society, to the economic, cultural, and sometimes natural pressures which are altering not only the land about her but the nature of the communities which evolve on the land.3 Compelled by circumstance to assume the role of a major stabilizing force in such a society, she yearns for a world in which the old traditions and customs help preserve order and harmony. It is a threatened breakdown in the social order which provides the 90Notes impetus for the heroine's actions in At Fault. The newly-widowed Thérèse is shocked by the realization that people are stealing even the cotton seed from her plantation and that the cotton itself seems sure to disappear next. Convinced that she has inherited not only the land but also the "weight and sacredness of a trust" (p. 741), she reacts quickly to the disorder gathering about her and makes herself into what "Lafirme," her late husband's family name, suggests sheshould be: "the firm one," a tough and respected administrator. The experience, like Edna Pontellier's months with Robert Lebrun and the outgoing Creoles amid the sensuousness of the Grand Isle environment, proves to be a critically important one in the life of the heroine. Nearly every incident throughout At Fault illuminates some aspect of Thérèse Lafirme's efforts to maintain order, continuity, and peace in her community and her private life. Determined to prevent a recurrence of thenear chaotic situation that she faced when herhusband died, Thérèse tries her best to placate the half-Negro, half-Indian Joçint, who is enraged because his father forces him to work at a sawmill and give up the daily jaunts he once took in his beloved woods. She tries to rehabilitate her nephew Grégoire, who sets out to drink and brawl himself to death after he loses his nearby plantation to creditors. Most important, she tries—because she believes strongly in the social necessity of those moral supports provided by traditional Catholic precepts—to salvage the marriage of David Hosmer, the man who loves her and whose love she reciprocates, by persuading him to return to the alcoholic woman he has divorced. The twelve chapters ofPartI ofthebook depictThér...