Critical Analysis and Literary Themes of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899)

Narrative Overview and Plot Synopsis of The Awakening. The narrative of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899) begins with Edna Pontellier, a young, attractive, and sensitive mother of two small boys, who is vacationing at Grand Isle, Louisiana, alongside her husband, Léonce Pontellier, a staid, steady, and somewhat older businessman. During her stay, she meets and begins to fall in love with Robert Lebrun, a young, attractive, and sensitive bachelor. When Robert realizes that his growing closeness to Edna may cause a scandal, he suddenly departs for Mexico. Meanwhile, Edna and Léonce return to New Orleans, where Edna’s dissatisfaction with her marriage becomes increasingly obvious and where she eventually begins an affair with Alcée Arobin, whom she finds sexually exciting but does not love. When she unexpectedly meets Robert in New Orleans, they declare their love, but once again Robert shrinks from the consequences of adultery and leaves Edna, who, despondent, finally drowns herself.

Exposition and Character Introduction in Chapter 1. The Awakening opens with a chapter that typifies the skillful construction, incisive characterization, subtle symbolism, and economical style of the novel as a whole. The "green and yellow parrot" (521) who appears in the very first sentence symbolizes not only the exotic opening setting but also the colorful, romantic nature of Edna, the protagonist. Before meeting Edna, however, we meet her husband, Mr. Pontellier, who is characteristically disgusted by both the parrot and a mockingbird and who seems to be working even on Sunday, the proverbial day of rest. He has been applying himself "to the task of reading the newspaper," paying special attention to the "market reports" (521).

Socioeconomic Dynamics and Patriarchal Authority. His appearance implies his practical, serious nature, as well as the physical limitations of a middle-aged man. He is a businessman whose life revolves around his business—a man whose economic success not only allows him to treat his wife and children to summer vacations at comfortable resorts but also permits him to employ a cook, a butler, and even a nurse to look after his children. All these servants are either black or of mixed race; in relegating them to the periphery Chopin accurately describes their place in the racially segregated society she knew and had observed, especially in Louisiana, where status depended as much on ethnic background as on wealth. Mr. Pontellier’s white race, male gender, and financial comfort give him power (symbolized by his large cigar) over his wife, his children, his servants, and many other characters in the novel.

The Patriarchal Gaze and Marital Alienation. Our first glimpse of Mrs. Pontellier is, significantly, through the "gaze" of her husband, who sees her walking up from the beach with her new young friend, Robert, whom she resembles both physically and in her playful, imaginative temperament (522). In describing the interactions of husband, wife, and wife’s friend, Chopin typically makes every word count: Surveying his sun-burned wife, Mr. Pontellier (whose first name, Léonce, we do not learn until later) looks at her "as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage" (522). He cannot understand the joke she and Robert share, and when he invites Lebrun (he characteristically addresses Robert by his last name) to join him at billiards with other men, he cannot understand why Robert would prefer Edna’s company or why Edna might be interested in Robert.

Irony and Structural Foundations of the Opening Chapter. Speaking to his wife about Robert, Léonce instructs her to "send him about his business when he bores you, Edna" (523), not realizing the irony of his words: Edna is far more likely to become bored with Léonce than with Robert, despite Léonce’s wealth, status, and genuine (if generally undemonstrative) regard for her and their children. By the end of the opening chapter, we have been introduced to three central characters, many central themes and images, and much of the essential tension of the book. Chopin, as always, sketches quickly but deftly: No word is wasted, and no detail fails (on close examination) to add meaning or symbolic significance.

Contrast of Character Profiles in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 introduces, in more detail, Edna and Robert themselves, who not only resemble each other in looks, personalities, and outlooks but also jointly contrast in nearly every way with Léonce. Whereas he seems humorless, they can laugh and joke (at least when he is absent); whereas he is prim, proper, and practical, they are relaxed and playful; whereas Léonce tends to issue censures or offer instructions, Edna and Robert can talk comfortably, both with each other and about themselves. Whereas the wealthy Léonce smokes cigars, Robert, who is much less well off, must roll his own cigarettes.

Creole Culture and Incipient Intimacy. Yet, whatever Robert lacks in money he more than makes up for in his genuine interest in Edna and her children, and although he is a Catholic Creole and she is from Kentucky Presbyterians, their mutual attraction becomes increasingly obvious to the reader, if not at first to the couple themselves. They drift into intimacy, partly because Léonce is so often physically and emotionally absent—whether he is away in New Orleans at his work or is off playing billiards with his male friends. By the end of the second chapter it is clear why Edna and Robert are becoming mutually attracted and why trouble is probably in store for the Pontellier marriage.

Psychological Awakening and Domestic Discord in Chapter 3. That trouble erupts openly in chapter 3, when Léonce (tipsy, full of himself, victorious at billiards, and perhaps sexually aroused) returns home and awakes Edna from a sound sleep. Her literal awakening here is just the start of a more profound process of inner transformation that begins after she and Léonce argue and she stays awake, crying, long after he has gone to bed. She starts to realize that she is increasingly dissatisfied with her present life. Although her routine with Léonce soon seems to return to normal, the chapter ends with superb irony: The other wives at the resort, delighted with presents Léonce has sent from New Orleans, declare that "Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world," upon which Chopin immediately notes, "Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit that she knew of none better" (528). Edna is becoming disenchanted not only with Léonce but with marriage itself and all the other social conventions that marriage symbolizes and enforces.

Foil Characters and Social Conventions in Chapter 4. In chapter 4 we meet another of the book’s central characters, Adèle Ratignolle, a beautiful, amiable "mother-woman" (529) who has become Edna’s good friend even though they increasingly differ not only in their attitudes toward maternity and marriage but also in their domestic circumstances. Adèle is happily married and continuously pregnant; indeed, she derives much of her identity and self-worth from her roles as wife and mother. She enjoys Robert but does not take him seriously; she admires Edna but grows more and more worried when she realizes that Edna is starting to drift away from Léonce and toward Robert.

Foreshadowing and Stylistic Evolution in Chapter 6. Later, in chapter 8, Adèle even warns Robert to keep his distance from Edna and not mislead her, but, before that happens, Chopin inserts in chapter 6 some of most famous paragraphs she ever composed as she lyrically describes the transformation now beginning to occur within Edna:

... The beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. (535)

Although these sentences are not entirely typical of Chopin’s style (they lack the humor, irony, wit, and sardonic bite that so often prevent her works from seeming sentimental, trite, or unwise), they do exemplify many common features of her writing and many particular traits of this specific novel. They illustrate, for instance, her careful attention to design and her skillful use of foreshadowing: Much of this same phrasing will reappear at the end of the book, just before Edna drowns herself, and the echo of the present passage at that later moment is a brilliant effect. The present sentences also suggest (especially in the first quoted paragraph) the vagueness and imprecision of many of Edna’s thoughts and feelings. Indeed, it seems important to emphasize that these are Edna’s thoughts and emotions, not necessarily Chopin’s. Edna is a romantic; Chopin could appreciate the beauties of romanticism without overlooking its flaws, and in the present passage she seems to be warning us that Edna’s longings for love, enchantment, pleasure, and fantasy may lead ultimately to disaster.

Rhythmic Stylistics and Symbolic Motifs. The passage is typical, too, in its sure sense of rhythm and sound, as Chopin re-creates the experience of the sea itself in her surging verbs, her alliterative use of m and s, and the clauses that seem to roll in relentlessly, one after the other. The key themes of solitude, loss, the soul, and sensuality are all mentioned, and the passage is one of many in which the ocean obviously functions in symbolic ways. Chopin’s debt to Walt Whitman and other romantics is evident in passages like this, but so are her own precision, economy, clarity, and craft. Here as elsewhere she displays admirable reticence: She never openly judges Edna, instead giving us enough information to draw our own conclusions.

Autobiographical Background and Relational Pairs in Chapters 7–9. Chapter 7 is especially important. In it we learn (through Edna’s beach-side conversation with Adèle) much about Edna’s childhood and adolescence, including the early death of her mother, the authoritarianism of her father, her estrangement from her sisters, her detachment from conventional religion, her fundamental isolation, her love of nature, and her series of unspoken infatuations with attractive but unavailable men (including a dashing soldier, a distinguished young gentleman, and an accomplished actor, whose portrait she would secretly kiss). Her eventual marriage to the dull but dependable Léonce was partly inspired, ironically, by rebellion against her father and older sister, whom she shocked by marrying a Catholic. Moreover, as "the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams" (541). Those portals, of course, have now reopened through her closeness with Robert, who can now be seen as merely the latest in a long series of Edna’s romantic obsessions. Little wonder, then, that in chapter 8 Adèle warns Robert to leave Edna alone—advice Robert at first resents and does not heed. Later, for instance (in chapter 9), we see Robert encouraging Edna to listen to seductive music of Mademoiselle Reisz, an accomplished pianist, who, in her physical unattractiveness, assertive personality, lack of a husband or children, and total devotion to her art, is in many respects the polar opposite of Adèle Ratignolle. Reisz is another of the novel’s central figures, and she and Edna soon establish a close if complex friendship; as Edna becomes closer to Reisz, she loses much of her earlier intimacy with Adèle. It is typical of Chopin’s practice in this book to create opposed pairs—Adèle and Reisz, Robert and Léonce, Robert and Alcée, young lovers and an old "lady in black" (559)—and to position Edna between them. Edna is drawn now in one direction, now in another, until finally she withdraws from life altogether.

Physical Epiphany and Domestic Rebellion in Chapters 10–13. Crucial to Edna’s development is the scene, in chapter 10, in which she finally, after weeks of effort, learns to swim during a late-night excursion to the beach. Léonce, characteristically, minimizes her achievement, and his condescension is significantly juxtaposed with Robert’s lyrical attentions. Edna’s new sense of achievement leads to another argument with Léonce (in chapter 11), which recalls their disagreement in chapter 3. Now, however, Edna is much more confident and even dismissive. The contrast between the two chapters is typical again of Chopin’s sure sense of structure and design. That same talent for design is on display once more in chapter 13, when Edna, having sailed to a nearby island with Robert to attend church, becomes faint during the service, retires to an old woman’s cottage, sleeps for a time, and then reawakens in a scene full of sensuous detail that emphasizes her new appreciation of her own body, her renewed comprehension of the beauty of nature, and her growing intimacy with Robert. Thus, she is all the more shocked when she learns, in chapter 15, that he has suddenly decided to leave for Mexico on business. She argues with him but to no avail; off he goes, and she again feels isolated, especially after she, Léonce, and the children return (in chapter 17) to their stately New Orleans home. However, though Edna returns back to her old house, she never returns to her old routine: She dresses as she likes; she begins to devote more and more time to her painting; she ceases her former habit of staying home once a week to greet visitors (including the wives of Léonce’s business associates); and she fails (in Léonce’s view) to supervise the hired help properly. Inevitably they quarrel again, and when Léonce departs angrily for dinner at his "club" (580), Edna smashes a vase, throws her wedding ring on the floor, and tries to crush it. However, "her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the glittering circlet" (581).

Escalation of Independence and Alternative Guidance. Yet, despite the ring’s apparent imperviousness, the Pontellier marriage is increasingly damaged. Edna and Léonce communicate less and less, and she begins to spend more time with Mademoiselle Reisz, the pianist whose powerful music excites Edna’s passions and whose ongoing correspondence with Robert allows Edna to learn of his doings and thoughts in distant Mexico. Meanwhile, even Léonce has begun to notice that his wife now differs fundamentally from the person she once was, and so he seeks advice from an old physician, Doctor Mandelet. Mandelet is the male counterpart of Mademoiselle Reisz: Both are older; both possess distinct modes of wisdom (Reisz’s is associated with art, while Mandelet’s is associated with science); and both are figures in whom Edna can confide. Although Mandelet advises Léonce to leave Edna alone, he secretly fears that she may be having an affair. Ironically, his fears prove accurate when Edna meets and eventually becomes involved with Alcée Arobin, a well-known rake whose interests in women are mostly physical and usually successful. When Léonce leaves New Orleans on extended business, Edna takes the opportunity not only to set up house in a small cottage but also to consummate her affair with Arobin. The experience, however, leaves her fundamentally dissatisfied.

Rejection of Patriarchal Authority and Tragic Resolution. Not until she unexpectedly meets Robert at Mademoiselle Reisz’s does her original passion reignite, but when Robert expresses the hope that Léonce may somehow be persuaded to release her so that she can become Robert’s wife, Edna informs her astonished lover that she now rejects all male authority (even Robert’s) and will make her own choices. However, just as the couple reach this crucial turning point, a knock at the door summons Edna to keep a promise to Adèle, who is about to give birth to her latest child. When Edna eventually returns from this "scene of torture" (648), she finds a note from Robert, expressing affection but telling her good-bye. Depressed, she soon returns to the seashore, where her transformation began and, with calm deliberation, walks into the sea. The Awakening is short and extremely powerful. Edna excites both interest and debate, and Chopin never reveals whether she approves of Edna’s choices, especially her final decision. Each secondary character is vividly sketched, yet each also serves his or her role in the larger design. The novel potently blends romanticism and irony, sympathy and detachment, tragedy and humor, local color and universal themes. Edna has been seen as both a heroine and a victim, and her death has been interpreted by some as a triumph, by others as a defeat. Some readers commend her independence; some condemn her alleged selfishness; some praise her pursuit of authenticity; others consider her a deluded fool. What seems undeniable, however, is the skill with which the book is written: In its imagery, structure, diction, dialogue, tones, and characterization, it rarely makes a misstep. Every word works, no detail is superfluous, and the book stands as a nearly perfect gem of American literature.

Academic Study Prompts and Analytical Questions. The following prompts are designed for scholarly discussion, thematic analysis, and academic writing regarding the structural and literary features of the novel:

1. Trace a particular pattern of imagery—such as the imagery of sleep and awakening—throughout the novel, showing how each new appearance of the pattern contributes to the larger meaning of the whole work. How, for instance, does Edna’s literal awakening in chapter 3 resemble and/or differ from her awakening in chapter 13?

2. Compare and contrast the transformations experienced by Edna with those experienced by the central figure of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How are the experiences of the two women affected by their different circumstances, including their differences in race, class, physical appearance, and regional backgrounds? How do their ultimate fates differ, and why?

3. Research some of the varied reactions to, and interpretations of, the final chapter of The Awakening. How and why do different critics arrive at such distinct, and often contradictory, interpretations? What are the strengths and weaknesses of their varied arguments? Which argument do you finally find most persuasive, and why?

4. Compare and contrast Edna with the title character of one of Chopin’s longest stories, "Athénaïse." How are the two women both alike and different, especially in their attitudes toward marriage, in their class backgrounds, and in their ultimate fates?

5. Closely examine the final chapter of the novel and then explore all the ways in which details of that chapter are prepared for, or foreshadowed by, details earlier in the book. In particular, discuss the phrasing of the final paragraph; how does that paragraph allude to or echo earlier passages from the novel, and why?

6. Compare and contrast The Awakening with Chopin’s first novel, At Fault. In particular, discuss the two works in terms of the effectiveness of their use of characterization, style, imagery, symbolism, and theme.

7. To what degree is Edna in The Awakening passive or active, driven by impulse or motivated by conscious choice, and justified or unjustified in her final behavior?

8. Compare and contrast Edna, in The Awakening, with Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In particular, discuss the women in terms of their fundamental motives, their attitudes toward their children, their involvement in illicit romance, and any strengths or weaknesses of character each displays.

9. At least two films have been made of The Awakening; one is called Grand Isle, and the other is called The End of August. Compare and contrast the novel with either or both of these films. In particular, discuss the faithfulness of the film(s) to the book and the effectiveness of the acting, directing, cinematography, music, and presentation of theme(s).

10. Compare and contrast The Awakening with Walt Whitman’s The Song of Myself. In particular, discuss their symbolism, imagery, themes, and tones, especially as these relate to their depictions of the sea.

11. Compare and contrast The Awakening with Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. In particular, discuss the two writers in terms of their tones, their styles, their conclusions, and the degree to which the lead characters seem appealing or unappealing.