Wrapping Up Chopin

My boyfriend is a big Seahawks fan, but he likes the Patriots almost as much. With the Seahawks out of the running, the Pats will have to do for him. With that in mind, we went to the nearby bar to grab some beers and check out the game.

Well, he checked out the game.

I was so disinterested and distracting, we were back before halftime with my leftovers in tow. Buffalo shrimp wrap with a side of curly fries. Oh, and don't worry: I grabbed his remaining onion rings before we left.

With my styrofoam box warm with fried goodies, I hunkered down in my bedroom to leave him to the game. I curled up in bed with Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Somehow I have made it through years of college and graduate courses without ever encountering Chopin.

Immediately I was taken with its depiction of motherhood as a defining identity for women. Mr. Pontellier, ruminating on his dissatisfaction with his wife, regards her as a poor mother:

"In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-woman seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels."

Chopin seems to almost anticipate Virginia Woolf's demand--thirty years later--that part of a woman writer's occupation is killing the angel in the house. But Chopin's text does not seem to call for the death of the angel in the same way Woolf does. Instead, she seems to lay out a case study for Betty Friedan and provides an in-depth exploration of what Friedan would name the Feminine Mystique. Edna Pontelllier is an educated woman who treated marriage as her coming-of-ritual that allows her to leave her childhood behind. As domestic life becomes increasingly oppressive, she becomes more desperate to find an escape.

It's enough to make me need a break for onion rings.

One of the most impressive things about this novel is how sensory it is. It isn't just the strong imagery. Chopin infuses the novel with an oppressive stickiness. It's hot, it's humid, it's fragrant, it's loud. Even when she is showing vast landscapes, everything is closing in on you. It allows the book to create this uncomfortable intimacy that is so effective at relaying the lack of escape. There's so much to see, smell, taste, but there isn't anywhere to go.

Despite this, Edna's mobility is constant and is key. She tells her friend, "sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided." Edna moves from her summer home to her stately New Orleans mansion to the ripe New Orleans streets to her tiny pigeon-house and back to the summer home. Her husband tries to control her routes: demanding she venture with him to Sister Janet's wedding and promising to take her to Europe the following the summer. Robert tries to travel to escape Edna's orbit, but circles back to her. The most important trajectory, obviously, is "the inward life which questions."

The novel's title draws attention to that inner journey. Named The Awakening rather than The Awaken or The Awoke, the title promises the process of transition. The Awakening is a verb, a liminal state. The reader watches Edna awake multiple times throughout the novel, but it is her gradual coming to terms that drives the movement of the plot. Finally, "she understood now clearly what she had meant [at the beginning of the novel] when she said to Adele Ratignole that she would give up the unessential, but she would never sacrifice herself for her children." Edna does not have a self to truly sacrifice at the novel's beginning, but she develops one over the course of the plot through art, sex, romance, and wandering reflection; however, it is a self that does not fit her current existence.

When Edna arrives back at Gran Isle once more, she pronounces herself starving. I'm hungry, too. These onion rings are not enough and I need the second half of the wrap. The blue cheese has seeped the wrap, making it squishily supple. It would be a terrible lunch to bring to the beach; the sand would stick to every silky bite. Edna wants fish, but I have another fry.

What to make of the ending? It's the end of Edna's journey, but is it one of empowerment or one of surrender? On one hand, Edna seems to be sacrificing her individual self to the mass of the ocean; on the other hand, she escapes the confines of the world that would have violently erased all her journeys. The key seems to be her children. Her children cannot journey with her, and in fact, would impede her journey. She is not a mother-woman in a world that demands such conformation. If she is to create a new life for herself, she must leave them behind, destroy their connection.

The novel consistently echoes and repeats itself as it unfolds, yet its strongest echo, for me, is unmentioned. Upon first returning from Gran Isle, Edna feels contained by her life. She begins wandering and doing as she pleases, much to her husband's displeasure. They fight, he leaves, and she "seize[s] a glass vase from the table and [flings] it upon the tiles of the hearth. She wanted to destroy something." Edna is a creator. She draws portraits, she sets up her own house, she is pleased by the independent life she constructs for herself. But she is also a destroyer. In her final act, she manages to do both.

#chopin #theawakening #motherhood #antimother #motherwoman