by Karen Simons

Critics of Kate Chopin's The Awakening tend to read the novel as the dramatization of a woman's struggle to achieve selfhood--a struggle doomed to failure either because the patriarchal conventions of her society restrict her freedom,(2) or because the ideal of selfhood that she pursue is a masculinely defined one that allows for none of the physical and undeniable claims which maternity makes upon women.(3) Ultimately, in both views, Edna Pontellier ends her life because she cannot have it both ways: given her time, place, and notion of self, she cannot be a mother and have a self at the same time. Though these critics provide valuable insights into many aspects of the novel which I do not wish to dismiss, I believe that the focus on gender/self limits the scope of Chopin's vision in The Awakening.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening tells the story of a woman who comes to understand her sexuality and its function in the larger scheme of things, a scheme which might best be understood as Lucretian. As an Epicurean, Lucretius "dismissed metaphysical abstraction, Divine Providence and the immortal soul as vain illusions.'"(4) believe that in The Awakening Chopin did the same thing.(5) Sexual desire is for both the force which keeps nature naturing, and is personified for Lucretius by the goddess Venus, and represented for Chopin, I would argue, by the statue of Venus that stood in her living room (Martin, p. 1). Edna comes to realize that this scheme offers no fulfillment of spiritual longing because there is no part of herself or her world that is not governed by natural forces. Having built her entire existence around her desire for something transcendent, when her new connection with her children--forged at Adele's birthing scene--penetrates and dissolves her illusory spiritual world, rather than continue without it, Edna rejects life itself.

Edna's "awakening" is cumulative and complex. The narrator describes the process this way: "Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her."(6) Edna's completion of this process occurs near the end of the novel when she witnesses with "an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature," the birth of Adele's child (p. 109). Dr. Mandelet understands the shock she has just experienced and explains:

create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost. (p. 110)

Several factors indicate that Dr. Mandelet's remarks are thematically central to the novel. Chopin's description of him lends weight to his words: "the doctor knew his fellow-creatures better than most men; knew that inner life which so seldom unfolds itself to unanointed eyes" (p. 71). He understands Edna "intuitively" (p. 109), and even Edna feels, when it is too late, that the doctor "would have understood if she had seen him" (p. 114). Kate Chopin's obstetrician played an important role in her own life. Under his influence she not only began to write (and sell) fiction, but began studying science as well, particularly Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer.(7) Through her reading of their works, she came "to see the human being as a higher animal" (p. 85), a view which underlies Dr. Mandelet's statement. It underlies her own theory of fiction as well. Regarding truth in literature, Kate Chopin wrote:

are mutable. (Quoted in Seyersted, pp. 86-87)

Chopin felt that art should portray basic, natural drives of humankind, and she makes explicit her attempt to do so in The Awakening through Dr. Mandelet's observation concerning the ways of nature.

The accuracy of Dr. Mandelet's remarks is borne out by Edna's experience. That Edna is the dupe of romantic illusions has already been adequately demonstrated by various critics with various interpretations.(8) What is important to note here, however, is that Edna's awakening sexuality is described in terms of animality and that her sexual impulses can operate without the involvement of her mind.

An early clue that Edna is a "higher animal" occurs in the Cheniere Caminada episode. Like the men who venture onto Circe's island, Edna is transformed into an animal. When she awakes, she eats some bread, tearing it "with her strong, white teeth" (Chopin, p. 39). Bert Bender, who stresses Chopin's keen interest in Darwin's theories, reads this strange reference to Edna's teeth as an echo of Darwin's observations about the canine tooth in human beings. He quotes from Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, the canine tooth "'no longer serves man as a special weapon for tearing his enemies or prey,'" but he "`reveal [s], by sneering, the line of his descent. For though he no longer intends, nor has the power to use these teeth as weapons, he will unconsciously retract his "snarling muscles". ...'"(9)

Edna does not like Arobin, but she is stimulated by him: "He sometimes talked in a way that astonished her at first and brought the crimson into her face; in a way that pleased her at last,, appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her" (p. 78). Significantly, the night she responds to Arobin is the night she is least present mentally. Edna exclaims, "Oh! talk of me if you like ... but let me think of something else while you do." She is, of course, thinking of Robert. Afterward, Edna feels regret "because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips" (p. 83).

Though disappointed by her body's animality and its disregard for her more lofty longings, Edna imagines that when Robert returns, both aspects of her being, physical and spiritual, will be fulfilled in his love. Her yearning, however, is less for him than for that unattainable something that he symbolizes. She does not think about him in any concrete way:

filled her with an incomprehensible longing. (p. 54)

Predictably, when Robert does at last return, their romance does not blossom as Edna thought it would. She finds herself thinking that in "some way he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico" (p. 102). Given her propensity for loving the unattainable, directed in earlier years to the "sadeyed cavalry officer," the "engaged young man," and the "great tragedian" (pp. 18-19), one suspects that her infatuation for Robert would never have grown so strong if he had not gone to Mexico, if he had remained flesh and blood instead of becoming dream material.

Edna has protected herself against this void by cultivating an emotional and mental privacy which allowed her to contemplate the unattainable. But the sheer, inescapable reality of childbirth breaks into that space and roots her entirely to the here and now. A physical relationship has at last invaded her thoughts. Whereas she could once weep "for very pleasure when she felt their [the children's] little arms clasping her; their hard, ruddy cheeks pressed against her own glowing cheeks" (p. 93), yet utterly forget them within a few hours of leaving them (p. 94), their presence will always be with her now. Adele's plea that she "think of the children" will always intrude; "that determination had driven into her soul like a death wound" (p. 110).

It is not, finally, society that infringes on her autonomy and individuality, but the very forces of nature and the very existence of her children. Edna rebels against "the biological imperative a woman feels to care for her children,"(12) an imperative that she has never felt until now. Edna does indeed dread "being reduced to her biological function," but this is not merely what the Creole culture does to women, as Priscilla Leder suggests.(13) Her "position in the universe" is that of a sexual being capable of procreation. Nature does not care whether or not "Fate" has "fitted her" to be a mother (Chopin, p. 20); she is one, and her awakened sexuality practically guarantees that she will become one again.

So Edna renounces her new-found sexuality when she learns that it does not exist expressly for her fulfillment. She is not a "mortal, turn-of-the-century woman who tried to claim for herself the erotic freedom and power owned by the classical queen of love," as Sandra Gilbert would have us believe (p. 45). The goddess of love in The Awakening is a force which stimulates people to procreation, and is best personified by Adele. For though Edna may be "born" from the sea like Hesiod's Aphrodite, the similarities end there.(14) Hesiod says of the goddess:

love and gentle enticements.(15)

Furthermore, the imagery in The Awakening stresses fecundity at least as much as sexuality. The novel teems with life, both animal and vegetable. The description of the walk to the beach furnishes one apt example:

afar in the sun. (p. 15)

The "little wriggling gold snakes ... and lizards" sunning themselves at Grande Terre provide another example (p. 35). That Chopin's descriptions of living things often have sexual overtones(17) only emphasizes that in this novel sexuality and procreation are inseparable. Even the horses which excite Edna so much are symbols of fertility associated with Poseidon, the god of the sea.(18)

Edna's awakening is described as the beginning of a world, "vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing" (p. 15). And Aphrodite is present at the formation of this world just as she is near the beginnings of the world in Hesiod's Theogony. For Adele's "excessive physical charm" (p. 15) is the force that first "muddled her like wine" (p. 20). Addle awakens in Edna the sensuality she ultimately rejects.

The Awakening may indeed be a modem myth about the goddess of love, as Gilbert proposes, but she is not a goddess of self-gratifying sexuality. She is the Venus sung by Lucretius, the voluptas that makes the world go round. In his invocation in On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius portrays the forces of love in a manner strikingly similar to Chopin's. Because he states his view, rather than embodying it in fiction, Lucretius helps to clarify the issues under examination in The Awakening. For this reason I quote a lengthy portion of the invocation:

The Venus of Lucretius's invocation is a personification of the life principle, and likely the statue of Venus which stood in Chopin's living room was, too. The Awakening explores this life principle and its implications for Edna Pontellier, a woman who experiences its power but never its joy. Since she has never engaged her mind and emotions in the experience of the present moment, she has never really drunk from "the cup of life." Dr. Mandelet seems to believe there are alternatives open to Edna, reasons to go on living, even though he is the one who says that love is an illusion. He offers her help in finding a way. But even now she cherishes that absolute privacy which has characterized her life: "some way I don't feel moved to speak of things that trouble me" (p. 110). She tries to get free of the wreckage of her world by herself but can think of only one way to do it.

The final irony is that Edna has come to be associated with the very force which has reduced her life to chaos. To Victor, she is a love-goddess. But Edna leaves behind the mating rituals which Victor and Mariequita are enacting on the shore and swims out into the ocean. She would rather be dissolved by nature than defined by it. She would rather die than live without a soul. Yet, even on the threshold of the void, Venus is there, in the "hum of bees" and the "odor of pinks."

(1) I am grateful to William R. Macnaughton for the opportunity to explore some of these ideas in seminar form, and for his careful, helpful, and encouraging reading of this paper.

(2) See, for instance, Joyce Dyer, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings (New York: Twayne, 1993), pp. 106-107; Wendy Martin, Introduction, in New Essays on The Awakening, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1-31; and Michael T. Gilmore, "Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening," in New Essays, pp. 59-87.

(3) Among the critics arguing this position are Barbara C. Ewell, "Kate Chopin and the Dream of Female Selfhood," in Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, ed. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 157-165; and Katherine Kearns, "The Nullification of Edna Pontellier," American Literature, 63 (1991), 6288.

(4) R. E. Latham, Introduction, in On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1951), p. 10

(5) The words with which Chopin recalled the birth of her first son reflect this inclination to believe in her senses only. She wrote this description twenty-three years after the fact:

How different from Edna's vague memory of despair!

The quotation is taken from Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow, 1990) pp. 127-128.

(6) Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 14-15.

(7) Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Oslo: Universitetforlaget, 1969), p. 49.

(8) See Dyer, Novel; Lawrence Thornton, "The Awakening: A Political Romance," American Literature, 52 (1980), 50-66; and, Suzanne Wolkenfield, "Edna's Suicide: The Problem of the One and the Many," in The Awakening, ed. Culley, pp. 218-224.

(9) Bert Bender, "The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and The Descent of Man," American Literature 6 (1991), 468-469.

(10) Sandra M. Gilbert, "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire," Kenyon Review, 5, no. 3 (1983), 44.

(11) The view taken by Kearns, pp. 76-77.

(12) Kathleen Margaret Lant, "The Siren of Grand Isle: Adele's Role in The Awakening," in Kate Chopin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), p. 123.

(13) Priscilla Leder, "An American Dilemma: Cultural Conflict in Kate Chopin's The Awakening," Southern Studies, 22 (1983), 95.

(14) Gilbert points out this similarity (p. 51). Bender, on the other hand, sees Edna's connection with the sea as another indication of Chopin's ongoing dialogue with Darwin. He notes that the image with which Chopin introduces her to us is an evolutionary one--"`advancing at a snail's pace from the beach.'" See Bert Bender, "Kate Chopin's Quarrel with Darwin before The Awakening,' Journal of American Studies, 26 (1992), 204.

(15) Hesiod, Theogony, in The Poems of Hesiod, trans. R. M. Frazer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 11. 203-206.

(16) R. M. Frazer, Introduction, in The Poems of Hesiod, p. 32.

(17) Joyce Dyer, "Lafcadio Hearn's Chita and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Two Naturalistic Tales of the Gulf Islands," Southern Studies, 23 (1984), 414416.

(18) Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 3rd ed (New York: Longman, 1985), p. 104.

(19) Perhaps co-incidentally, Chopin also speaks of animals sunning themselves or waking up in the sun (pp. 35, 70, 113). Even more striking is her description of Edna the moment before her final swim: "for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun .... She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known" (p. 113). But Edna wants to swim out of the world she has just been born into.

(20) The Latin title is De Return Natura, which translates literally into our familiar phrase "the nature of things." When Lucretius calls Venus the "delight of men and gods" he uses the word voluptas, which is the Latin equivalent of Greek hedone, "pleasure," the chief good in Epicurean philosophy.