Review by Edward Tanguay January 13, 1996

A green and yellow parrot repeating "Get out! Get out! Damnation!" in the first line is nice! Foreboding, too. The whole first scene which introduces Edna, her husband, and Robert immediately shows who is who and what each thinks of each other: Robert is inexperienced (talks too much about himself), Edna and Robert have an interest in each other ("Robert admitted quite frankly that he preferred to stay where he was and talk to Mrs. Pontellier") and Mr. Pontellier is simply unconcerned ("'Coming back to dinner?' his wife called after him. He halted a moment and shrugged his shoulders.").

Edna's crying outbursts are real and fit to her suppression and stress, but I can't really understand her character. I think she is not supposed to have a firm character--she wishy washy, she cares about the kids today, then not the next, then she flings a vase and stomps on her wedding ring. She at the end of her wits living a life without fulfillment. Her very problem is that she is not defined.

Mr. Pontellier is a society machine living for his business, a decent family, societal respect, and to collect possessions and admire them. The hammock incident caught him off guard but he showed him a bit of a creative character. After Edna adamantly insists on staying out in the hammock at two in the morning and refusing to listen to his suggestions, he gets some cigars and wine and sits out on the porch smoking and drinking. Then when she finally wants to go in:

"Are you coming in, Leonce?" she asked, turning her face toward her husband.

"Yes, dear," he answered, with a glance following a misty puff of smoke. "Just as soon as I have finished my cigar."

Cool. Mr. Pontellier is actually not so bad of a guy. He is usually well-meaning and doesn't outwardly force Edna or abuse her. If he errs, it is that he creates a vacuum in the marriage which doesn't give her anything or treat her as a human being. He treats her as he treats the cook, just enough attention to make sure she does the basic tasks that are expected of her.

That Robert left for no reason is important to this story in that it gives us a 20th century tone of meaninglessness. If he had had a reason and told everybody about it and seen everybody off on the big day along with a big good-bye with Edna, it would have been mushy and romantic. In the 20th century things just happen and that's it. So voop! Robert is gone. One hour he's there and the next he isn't. All intercourse stops and Edna has to deal with it. It contributes to her meaningless life.

The ocean scene was symbolic and beautiful. Edna is out for the first time swimming by herself yet in a vast void which she is both enthralled by and is scared to death by. She wants to be far away from her life. She expresses this again with her comment to Robert about sleeping 100 years.

Edna reminds me of a gorilla in a zoo that doesn't have enough natural habitat. She feels empty and crushed inside but continues to play but with more and more of a mock character. Her world is lacking. Something is going to happen. Pressure is building. She's already stomped on her wedding ring and broken a vase. I wonder if she'll blow her top. We'll see.

Edward Tanguay

*** The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
*** Notes on the SECOND half
*** by Edward Tanguay
*** January 19, 1996

As housewife Edna whips off her bathing suit and "for the first time in her life stood naked in the open air", you can almost hear the jaws of the 1899 St. Louis well-to-do hitting their respective floors. I'm sure this novel shocked many a puritan eye with its adulterous scenes of kissing hands and shoulders. But I don't think it was the book's sensual content that carried the greatest shock (after all, John Clelands _Fanny Hill_ had been around for 150 years and reads like a 220-page Penthouse Forum). The greatest shock of this book is the threat it poses to the institution of marriage and society. Chopin's readers were undoubtedly asking themselves, "What if women in large numbers begin to think like Edna? What if they all start telling their husbands that they want to "persue their talents" and begin moving out of their houses to 'find themselves', neglecting their roles?" And the scariest think about Edna's character is that she does not really have a goal. She's a feminist scud missle. She's a anarchist.

Edna retains her feelings of responsibility for taking care of the children, however. My introduction by Barbara Soloman states:

What Kate Chopin knows and writes so well is the truth of both women's experiences. The care of children is a great joy; it is also a great limitation on a woman's freedom.

The tenderness which Edna shows for her children, however sporadic, saves her from being an evil person. Instead she is a very gentle person expressing herself awkwardly and abruptly but in an innerly true way. She loves Robert freely and innocently and deeply. The feeling she has for her children is also true and unforced. This is what she discovers by letting her inner drives go. Mr. Pontellier seems to just die off and fall from her life as a leaf dies off and falls from a tree. She doesn't hate him. He really isn't that bad of a guy. He means well. But she simply has no use for him anymore. (Chopin makes this symbolically apparent by shipping him off to New York halfway through the book.) He does not fit into her new life paradigm. After reordering her priorities, he simply came out on the bottom while other things came out on top: a deep love and longing for Robert, her love for her children, self expression through art, and her own sensuousness.

The love between Robert and Edna is beautifully described. Red hot and unfulfilled, it is the love of Romeo and Juliet spanning ages, the kind so poignant that it can make a whole life worth living simply existing in the heart of the lover. Experiencing it expressed in the eight words left by Robert, Edna is transformed into a zombie:

"I love you. Good-by -- because I love you." Edna grew faint when she read the words. She went and sat on the sofa. The she stretched herself out there, never uttering a sound. She did not sleep. She did not go to bed. The lamp sputtered and went out. She was still awake in the morning, when Celestine unlocked the kitchen door and came in to light the fire.

Kate Chopin's biography is most interesting: she lost her very motivated and energetic and loving father in a terrible train accident when she was young. Then she married a man who had a father who used to beat his slaves and his wife. Affected by this, this man was extremely sensative to Chopin's needs and freedom as a woman. Then, starting at age 20, she had 6 children in 8 years! After that, her husband died and her mother died, leaving her with no family except her children whom she was left to raise. It was during this time that she began writing.

Kate Chopin is an interesting anomaly in American literature. This book is a little jewel sparkling amongst the other great works around the turn of the century. The New York Times describes it best: "It is uncanny, nothing else . . . a masterpiece."

Edward Tanguay

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