"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin (published 1899)

I don't think Kate Chopin's intention with her novel, The Awakening, published in 1899, was to shock or entertain. Both reactions indeed took over the masses when the book was published. But Chopin, I believe, meant to teach, meant to illustrate an example. I also do not think that Chopin's main character, Mrs. Edna Pontillier, was one to entertain or one who wanted to. However, Mrs. Pontillier did entertain by way of beginning to perform and act out her life for herself, and herself alone. Her witnesses and acquaintances looked on with curiosity and concern, and love. 

Put simply, The Awakening is a novel exploring societal values regarding women during the turn of the 19th century (1899). The lush backdrop of the Grand Isle in Louisiana only compounds the emotional turmoil the protagonist, Mrs. Edna Pontillier, finds herself coping with one oppressive summer. As a married woman with children, Mrs. Pontillier finds it difficult to express the psychological changes within, especially as these changes do not neglect the sensual. Bearing luxuriant symbolism between nature and humanity, The Awakening chronicles one woman's struggle for mental and social liberation as a feminine soul on one hand, against her duties and obligations as a wife and mother on the other. 

Mrs. Ratignolle, Edna's friend and neighbor, in contrast with Edna, takes pleasure in entertaining others, making others happy, especially her husband and children, which later on causes Edna to feel pity for her, for her life lived out so methodically and apparently reasonably. (Should Edna have pitied her so-called ignorance? Perhaps not, if lived in a kind of pure bliss. Mrs. Ratignolle is content with the world and its machinations, whereas Edna feels less content because of her awareness of control, and perhaps her lack of it. Something to consider.)

Aside from these concerns, I was impressed by Chopin's descriptions of an Earthly world that a lot of us don't know anymore - a beautiful Earthly world where the seasons are still supremely vivid and continuously sensual, with people and children languorously spending their time outside or near enough to that natural realm. It is a big part of the writing in the novel, this kind of nature writing, and so finely detailed that it should make the 21st century man's heart, mind, and body ache with longing for that biological tuning into the organic. The world of sun and sea and moon and wind, of dusk and humidity, of dreary days where the mood permeates the windows, the walls, the ceilings, the floors. Now we are more closed in, what we breathe is mixed in with conditioned air or artificial heat, with the occasional draft or sweaty day that is just as much pollution as it is the sultry sun, something we now call muggy. 

Back to the crux of this story: Mrs. Pontillier - our protagonist, a married woman with children - feels a physical and emotional change within herself one oppressively hot summer. This "awakening" we might deduce to a few causes: 1) the heat of that summer, 2) her newly arisen feelings for a young man named Robert - lusty feelings without a doubt, 3) her age - 29, and 4) her dull husband. Together, this is mix of things which might have, all at once, "triggered" her blossoming, budding into a different woman, a woman not so much interested in duty and obligation, safety and security - which her husband readily provided - but a woman more in interested in her own human body, her human soul, and all the feelings, terrible and beautiful, that come with really acknowledging and really getting to know the instinctual and the visceral without completely repressing these things, as women of that time were wont to do. I'd even say that many people (perhaps no longer the majority), man or woman, are wont to repress it in our world right now. 

Edna Pontillier has everything that is needed to live a full life. She is past the point of survival and surviving. I would say that this produced the exact conditions for her desire to break through to another kind of survival; the survival for something more than survival's own sake. True love, perhaps. Readers, we must give Mrs. Pontellier sufficient credit for her acknowledgment of this need:

"First of all, the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky, made a delicious picture that I just wanted to sit and look at. The hot wind beating in my face made me think - without any connection that I can trace - of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. Oh, I see the connection now!"

Mrs. Pontellier's whole summer, and time afterwards, is spent pausing to behold the world. In beholding it she is awakened to a newness of life, not without its own depressions: it is a stripping away of illusions, those being of societal norms. It is also a sensual awakening, and taking into consideration the question of Robert, well, the question is precisely this: is the way Edna feels about Robert purely sexual attraction? Or is there a different kind of tension, one which moves along the spectrum of sexual tension and this anxiety of remembering something pure, something child-like, something free that is not sexual but sensual none-the-less? That childlike newness of the young body, unknowing, yet feeling all the same? I think it is both - which makes the conclusion of the story completely understandable. The type of bond between Edna and Robert is not a relationship that could exist or persist in the world then, or as we know it now, due to many reasons. Some reasons are: 1. its impracticality: Edna is a woman of stature, Robert is not: there are class rules to be followed here which cannot be broken, 2. unrestrained passion, doomed to the bedroom for a while, hardly sensible at all: what would happen after? When do relationships of unrestrained physical passion ever truly work over time?, and 3. Edna's illness, of which I think there is truly a case to be made. Edna, even at the end, admits that seeing the doctor may have helped her in some way. Early on, there are signs of suicide: detachment from close relatives and friends, the giving away of one's things, the extreme changes in mood... 

But we know it was too late by the end. 

However, I don't see the ending as anything but liberating. Yes, we can read into what we are dealing with here: the letting go of one's life. But if taken as a literary conclusion (after the climax being Edna's kiss with Robert, which I might say was very innocent given the emotional build-up between them throughout the story), I'm left feeling utterly satisfied that Edna made her very own decision in response to a given circumstance: Robert's saying goodbye. And in response, Edna's decision was to save what could not be in the world for the dream that it was and is. 

Yes, Edna did awake to a world that she became demystified by. Disillusioned by. I wonder, though, perhaps the awakening was *into* the dream, rather than anything else...