Pandemonium reigned. In the confusion Ninette found herself down beneath piled-up benches. Still clutching the baby, she proceeded to crawl out of an opening in the canvas. She stayed huddled up against the fallen tent, thinking her end had come, while the baby shrieked lustily.
The rain poured in sheets. The cries and howls of the frightened animals were like unearthly sounds. Men called and shouted; children screamed; women went into hysterics and the negroes were having fits.
Ninette got on her knees and prayed God to keep her and the baby and everyone from injury and to take them safely home. It was thus that Mons. Perrault discovered her and the baby, half covered by the fallen tent.
She did not seem to recover from the shock. Days afterward, Ninette was going about in a most unhappy frame of mind, with a wretched look upon her face. She was often discovered in tears.
When her condition began to grow monotonous and depressing, her grandmother insisted upon knowing the cause of it. Then it was that she confessed her wickedness and claimed the guilt of having caused the terrible catastrophe at the circus.
It was her fault that a horse had been killed; it was her fault if an old gentleman had had a collar-bone broken and a lady an arm dislocated. She was the cause of several persons having been thrown into fits and hysterics. All her fault! She it was who had called the rain down upon their heads and thus had she been punished!
It was a very delicate matter for Grandmother Bézeau to pronounce upon—far too delicate. So the next day she went and explained it all to the priest and got him to come over and talk to Ninette.
The girl was at the table under the mulberry tree peeling potatoes when the priest arrived. He was a jolly little man who did not like to take things too seriously. So he advanced over the short, tufted grass, bowing low to the ground and making deep salutations with his hat.
“I am overwhelmed,” he said, “at finding myself in the presence of the wonderful Magician! who has but to call upon the rain and down it comes. She whistles for the wind and—there it is! Pray, what weather will you give us this afternoon, fair Sorceress?”
Then he became serious and frowning, straightened himself and rapped his stick upon the table.
“What foolishness is this I hear? look at me; look at me!” for she was covering her face, “and who are you, I should like to know, that you dare think you can control the elements!”
Well, they made a great deal of fuss of Ninette and she felt ashamed. But Mons. Perrault came over; he understood best of all. He took grandmother and grandfather aside and told them the girl was morbid from staying so much with old people, and never associating with those of her own age. He was very impressive and convincing. He frightened them, for he hinted vaguely at terrible consequences to the child’s intellect.
He must have touched their hearts, for they both consented to let her go to a birthday party over at his house the following day. Grandfather Bézeau even declared that if it was necessary he would contribute toward providing her with a suitable toilet for the occasion.
INSPIRED BY THE AWAKENING
KATE CHOPIN LIVED AND thought well ahead of her time. Known initially as a “local colorist” and a writer of short stories in the style of Maupassant, she eventually amassed a significant body of work and left a legacy that has only recently been realized. Chopin’s many stories display her natural craft as a writer, but it is The Awakening (1899) that dramatically presents her modern views about an individual woman’s need for fulfillment and the role of women in society. Widely and viciously panned by critics, the novel found a sparse audience when it was first published. After being reprinted once in 1906, it went out of print for more than five decades.
Then, in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chopin’s work was resurrected as the world finally caught up to her. The Awakening resurfaced in the 1960s and 1970s during the revival of the women’s movement, as women’s writing began to enjoy wider exposure and acclaim. The novel’s fiercely independent heroine, Edna Pontellier, inspired a new generation of readers to herald Chopin as a premiere, even prescient, voice of feminism. In The Awakening, Edna breaks with the spiritual and intellectual mores to which women in her society are traditionally bound, eventually going so far as to free herself from the physical bonds of life itself.
Edna boldly betrays the social contract, which dictates strict familial commitment, marital fidelity, and sexual passivity for women. Despite the fact that Chopin did not consider herself a feminist or a suffragist, finding such labels inhibiting and contradictory to the larger freedom she sought, in this character Chopin delivered a model for strong women to emulate. Additionally, she foreshadowed a sexual liberation that was nearly unthinkable in her own time, but one that would help shape the lives of women for years to come.
Chopin’s writing is also remarkable for its humanity. All of her characters—men and women, white and black—are made vivid through speech and action; she simultaneously strives to reproduce authentic dialect and to reveal the soul of a character through his or her actions. Chopin’s treatment of African-American characters in particular reveals a sensitivity no writer could express who was not attuned to the individuality and dignity of her characters.
Chopin’s focus on strong characters and their humanity may be what has given her work such endurance. The latter half of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in all of it-more than 100 novels, short stories, and poems—and The Awakening has become a paradigm of feminist literature that now appears on the required reading lists of college courses across the country.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Kate Chopin’s The Awakening through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
ST. LOUIS GLOBE-DEMOCRAT
[The Awakening] is not a healthy book; if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson, the fact is not apparent. But there is no denying the fact that it deals with existent conditions, and without attempting a solution, handles a problem that obtrudes itself only too frequently in the social life of people with whom the question of food and clothing is not the all absorbing one.... It is a morbid book, and the thought suggests itself that the author herself would probably like nothing better than to “tear it to pieces” by criticism if only some other person had written it.
-May 13, 1899
TIMES-HERALD
Kate Chopin, author of those delightful sketches, “A Night in Acadie,” has made a new departure in her long story, “The Awakening.” The many admirers whom she has won by her earlier work will be surprised—per—haps disagreeably—by this latest venture. That the book is strong and that Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phases of feminine character will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.
-Chicago (June 1, 1899)
WILLA CATHER
A Creole Bovary is this little novel of Miss Chopin’s. Not that the heroine is a Creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a Flaubert—save the mark!— but the theme is similar to that which occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a second Madame Bovary should be written, but an author’s choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme.... Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary are studies in the same feminine type; one a finished and complete p
ortrayal, the other a hasty sketch, but the theme is essentially the same. Both women belong to a class, not large, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr. G. Bernard Shaw would say that they are the victims of the over-idealization of love. They are the spoil of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment. The unfortunate feature of their disease is that it attacks only women of brains, at least of rudimentary brains, but whose development is one-sided; women of strong and fine intuitions, but without the faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about things. Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a rest from feeling. Now with women of the Bovary type, this relaxation and recreation is impossible. They are not critics of life, but, in the most personal sense, partakers of life. They receive impressions through the fancy. With them everything begins with fancy, and passions rise in the brain rather than in the blood, the poor, neglected, limited one-sided brain that might do so much better things than badgering itself into frantic endeavors to love. For these are the people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of the poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas’s great creation, Marguerite Gauthier. These people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists. So this passion, when set up against Shakespeare, Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have staked everything on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the blood until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves up to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation is impossible. Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then “the awakening” comes. Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic, as it came to Emma Bovary, sometimes it is carbolic acid taken covertly in the police station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads. Edna Pontellier, fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea on a summer night and went down with the sound of her first lover’s spurs in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible iridescent style of hers to a better cause.
- from the Pittsburgh Leader (July 8, 1899)
Questions
1. Are the Globe-Democrat and the Times-Herald reacting against Chopin’s treatment of her subject or the subject matter itself?
2. The critics above assert that a writer of Chopin’s talent should have chosen a more appropriate subject matter. Are talent as a writer and choice of subject matter so easily separable?
3. Willa Cather says that Edna Pontellier, like Emma Bovary, is one of those people who “really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life” and that she is a victim “of the over-idealization of love.” Does the text of The Awakening justify that description of Edna Pontellier?
4. Are Edna Pontellier’s dissatisfactions the product of (a) her individual personality—that is, she’s spoiled; (b) her particular circumstances—that is, her husband is a drag; (c) the situation of middle-class women of the time—that is, she is given comfort in exchange for self-determination and freedom; or (d) human nature and the human condition, which generate longings they cannot satisfy?
5. Even her detractors praise Kate Chopin’s style. Describe its characteristics. Is it dated? Chopin does not fill up her scenes with inventories of concrete detail. Does she lack interest in material actuality? Or is she simply a poor observer?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biography
Rankin, Daniel S. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932.
Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
Toth, Emily Rines. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Walker, Nancy. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Critical Works
Barrish, Phillip. “The Awakening’s Signifying ‘Mexicanist’ Presence.” Studies in American Fiction 28:1 (Spring 2000), pp. 65-76.
Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Bimbaum, Michelle A. “ ‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race.” American Literature 66:2 (1994), pp. 301-323.
Culley, Margo. The Awakening: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Delbanco, Andrew. “The Half-Life of Edna Pontellier.” In New Essays on The Awakening, edited by Wendy Martin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 89-108.
Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Kate Chopin.” In Modern American Women Writers, edited by Elaine Showalter, Leah Baechler, and A. Walton Litz. New York: Collier Books, 1993.
DeKoven, Marianne. “Gendered Doubleness and the ’Origins of Modernist Form.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8 (1989), pp. 19-42.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “Kate Chopin’s Awakening.” Southern Studies (1979), pp. 261-290.
Gilbert, Sandra. “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin’s Fantasy of Desire.” Kenyon Review 5:3 (1983), pp. 42-66.
Gilmore, Michael T. “Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening.” In New Essays on The Awakening, pp. 59-88.
McCullough, Ken. Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Petry, Alice Hall, ed. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. New York: G. K. Hall/Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Pizer, Donald. “A Note on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as Naturalist Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal 33:2 (Spring 2001), pp. 5-13.
Rowe, John Carlos. “The Economics of the Body in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” In Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, edited by Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
Showalter, Elaine. “Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book.” In New Essays on The Awakening, pp. 33—58.
Walker, Nancy. The Awakening: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Second edition. New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2000.
Works Cited in the Introduction: Reviews of The Awakening
“The Awakening.” The Nation 69 (August 3, 1899), p. 96.
Deyo, Charles L. Review of The Awakening. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (May 20, 1899), p. 4.
Review of The Awakening from “100 Books for Summer.” New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art (June 24, 1899), p. 408.
Review of The Awakening. Public Opinion 26 (June 22, 1899), p. 794.
“Mrs. Chopin’s ‘Night in Acadie.”’ The Critic 29 (April 16, 1898), p. 266.
“A Night in Acadie.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (December 11, 1897), p. 4.
1 Go away! Go away! For God’s sake! (French [henceforth, Fr.]).
2 An island located in southeastern Louisiana, about 50 miles south of New Orleans, between the Gulf of Mexico and Caminada Bay. In the early 19th century it was the head-quarters of pirate Jean Lafitte’s smuggling operations.
3 A romantic opera about love and betrayal by the French composer Ferdinand Hérold (1791-1833); it was first performed in 1831.
4 A popular vacation resort located on the Louisiana coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
5 A small sailboat.
6 A person with one-quarter black ancestry.
7 Delicate fabric of cotton or linen.
8 A musical composition by the Austrian Franz Suppé (1819-1895), known as a composer of operettas.
9 commercia
l institution involving finance or trading.
10 The French Quarter (Fr.), the oldest part of New Orleans, settled in the 1700s.
11 Robe (Fr.).
12 Slippers (Fr.).
13 A light, low, four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage.
14 The financial and commercial center of New Orleans. Chopin’s husband, Oscar, who worked as a cotton broker, moved his office to this prime location.
15 Delicacies (Fr.).
16 Filled pastries (Fr.).
17 Nougat; a chewy candy traditionally flavored with pistachios or almonds.
18 French-speaking descendants of the early French settlers in Louisiana.
19 Childbirths (Fr.).
20 Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), a French novelist whom Chopin admired.
21 For goodness’ sake! (Fr.).
22 Go on! Good-bye! Go awayl (Fr.).
23 Joker-comedian-silly, come off it! (Fr.).
24 Not bad at all! Not bad at all! She knows what she’s doing, she has talent (Fr.).
25 Dressed.
26 Coarse linen fabric.
27 A triangular sail.
28 A peninsula near where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
29 My dear (Fr.).