Catholic Fiction

reviewed by John Murphy

Pagan Goddess…or Vague and Godless?

I first encountered Kate Chopin’s New Orleans-set novella, The Awakening, in a course on twentieth-century literature. I recall a sense of gratitude to the author for her book’s merciful brevity. The Awakening was on the curriculum because of the proto-feminist implications of the storyline. Quick summary (warning: spoilers ahead!): a young, well-to-do wife experiences a spiritual “awakening” after falling in love with another man and determining that her life as a devoted wife and mother is a pretense. She slowly sloughs off the duties and obligations of matrimony and motherhood, has an affair with a disreputable womanizer, and ultimately commits suicide when her true love refuses her “because I love you.”

First published in 1899, Chopin’s book met with a firestorm of criticism over the perceived immorality of its heroine, Edna Pontellier, and the seediness of the storyline. In my Lit class, The Awakening was heralded as a courageous work by a misunderstood, ahead-of-her-time woman artist. Neither view seems to consider whether the book is good or not.

The Awakening, for a long time out-of-print and its author a footnote in the annals of American literature, was rediscovered in—you may have guessed it—the late 1960s. Chopin anticipated the feminist movement in her account of a woman struggling to attain personal independence from the stifling forces of a patriarchal society. Feminists also approved of Chopin’s apparent refusal to peg her heroine as a “fallen woman” because of her actions; Chopin instead seems to consider Edna a sort-of next step on the ladder of self-actualization.

A militant feminist friend of mine told me she chose her high school chums based on their reaction to The Awakening: if someone liked it, they were in; if not, out. (I find it a bit ironic that she also accused Catholics of being “blindly ideological”). In any case, Chopin’s recrudescence had less to do with the aesthetic value of her writing than the applicability of feminist thought to her book’s primary themes and characters.

In an introduction that would greatly please Dan Brown, Sandra M. Gilbert writes, “Abandoning both formal Catholicism and conventional “morality,” Chopin must have understood her own desire to tell a new kind of story about a woman’s life, a story that would revitalize and vindicate the pagan presence of the goddess of love.” Gilbert apparently has a hotline to Chopin’s inner life; a phrase like “Chopin must have understood her own desire…” strikes me as critical conjecture at its least helpful or insightful. Especially since earlier in the introduction Gilbert quotes Chopin as writing, “I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did.”

If I were Ms. Gilbert, I might conclude that Chopin (who was raised a Catholic and educated at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart) must have understood her own desire to create an anti-heroine who, far from being a “goddess,” was in fact a confused individual lacking in agency and who ultimately takes the easy way out. Chopin’s unequivocal description of her heroine’s fate as “damnation” strikes me, at the very least, as residual Catholicism and a moral condemnation of Mrs. Pontellier’s actions. But I will leave conjecture to the experts.

To uphold Edna Pontellier as a model feminist—a goddess, even—suggests that genuine heroines are in short supply. Yes, she is a character stuck in a restrictive society. So was Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, who was no less bright, opinionated or independent than Edna (a far sight more, actually) despite the fact that Regency England imposed at least as many restrictions on women (a far sight more, actually) as turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Well, Pride and Prejudice is little more than a romantic fantasy, you might argue. Well, The Awakening is little more than suicide fantasy, I would argue. Chopin should be congratulated on not only anticipating feminism, but also existentialism. Her heroine shares the self-absorbed detachment of Camus’ Meursault and Sartre’s nauseating Roquentin.

Chopin informs us that “Every step which she (Edna) took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life.” The reader must take Chopin’s word for it, since Edna’s spiritual growth, as Chopin views it, consists of her taking up painting, handing the kids off to an obliging relative, gambling at the horse races, initiating a loveless affair with a known rake, and finding it good “to dream and to be alone and unmolested.” Along the way, Chopin gives the reader very little access to Edna’s psychology. She remains a cipher, confused and aimless, unsure of what she wants but determined to not be beholden to anyone or to any of society’s mores.

Edna’s new, independent life becomes one of negation and retreat—“all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.” Is this the mark of a spiritually enlightened being? She wants to live her own life, but doesn’t know what that entails. She loves Robert, a young man who doted on her early in the novel, but does not know why. When pressed on this point by her companion, Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna answers, “Why? Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing; because he has two lips and a square chin…” and so on. What Edna describes is love divorced from reason, divorced from will, which is a faint echo of the true nature of love. If love is not a conscious and deliberate choice made of one’s own volition, then it is nothing more than a passing fancy, an evanescent emotion prey to whims and caprices. Indeed, Edna’s friend, Madame Ratignolle, observes, “In some way you seem to me like a child, Edna. You seem to act without a certain amount of reflection which is necessary in this life.”

Like a child, Edna is as much a slave to her passions as she is a slave to society. Chopin’s champions view this as progress. Edna determines that for her family she would give up “the unessential,” but she would never sacrifice herself for her children. Mrs. Pontellier’s rejection of self-giving love as the highest good is the kind of conclusion likely to tickle the fancy of anti-bourgeois intellectuals while alienating most everyone else.

Though Edna’s inner life remains a mystery, Chopin externalizes her interior conflicts by bludgeoning the reader with obvious symbolism. On the off chance that her reader didn’t intuit that Edna is unhappy in her marriage, Chopin helpfully includes a scene where Edna removes her wedding band and proceeds to stomp on it, “But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet.”

Edna is also compared, none too subtly, to birds both caged and crippled throughout the story. The first image of the book is a caged parrot. The house Edna buys is called “the pigeon house.” Mademoiselle Reisz tells her, “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.” Could it be that Edna is that bird, soaring above tradition? I wonder. And as Edna stands on that lonely stretch of beach, contemplating suicide, “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.”

Edna, a crippled bird, never inspires the same pathos as Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch or Isabelle Archer in Portrait of a Lady—another pair of brilliant, independent women suffocated by loveless marriages and patriarchal societies. Mrs. Pontellier’s inner life is as much a mystery to her, it would seem, as it is to the reader. Chopin never begins to approach the level of psychological insight Henry James or Jane Austen achieved in their work. As Edna strolls down to the beach to drown herself, “she was not dwelling upon any particular train of thought. She had done all the thinking which was necessary after Robert went away, when she lay awake upon the sofa till morning.” A creative writing instructor would say that Chopin “flinched”—she avoided writing the most important scene of the novel: Edna’s dark night of the soul. A superior artist such as James or Austen would have given the reader access to Edna’s thoughts and interior turmoil as she lay awake on the sofa, struggling to see a way out of her predicament.

As written, Edna is an empty vessel into which any ideology can be poured. Whether she is a damned soul or a pagan goddess is up to you. Be warned, however, that if you decide you don’t like The Awakening you may incur the wrath of your feminist friends.