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"Abysses of solitude": Acting naturally in Vogue and The Awakening
College Literature, Fall 1998 by Harmon, Charles
It is hard to imagine a literary text that has affected the study of nineteenth and twentieth-century American culture more profoundly than Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899). Those who have taught it know that however the novel is framed-as local color, as women's writing, as fin de siecle literature-the question that still engages most readers is simultaneously very naive and very sophisticated. This question, of course, is why does Edna Pontellier kill herself? The burden of providing a satisfactory answer to this riddle has often led readers to interpret the text in widely dissimilar ways. Sandra M. Gilbert, for example, has elevated Edna toward "the mythic, the pagan, the aphrodisiac" (1987, 105), regarding her suicide not as a defeat of a specific character but as the triumphant return of a modern Aphrodite. Michael T. Gilmore has argued, by contrast, that "Kate Chopin and Edna Pontellier retain their culture's deference to nature and the real. They have no inkling of the decentered, internally conflicted self made familiar in the twentieth century by Freud" (1988, 83). Whereas Gilbert sees Edna's suicidal longing for self-identity as a salutary reversion to the ecstasies of the queen of love, Gilmore sees it as the symptom of an undiagnosed not particularly self-aware neurotic.
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By combining Gilbert's style of mythic redemptiveness with Gilmore's style of modernistic suspicion, other critics-including Elaine Showalter, Mary E. Papke, and Patricia Yeager-have sought to escape the limitations of either extreme. The result has been the proliferation of a critically nuanced and pedagogically useful outlook on Chopin's novel, an outlook which views Edna's career neither as an absolute and transcendent triumph nor as a case study in repression. Instead, critics have generally come to regard the denouement of Chopin's novel as a consequence of the protagonist's misplaced yet politically significant anger with American culture's wildly bifurcated attitudes toward women. Showalter has argued that instead of seeing Edna as either a symbolic hero or a realistic victim, readers need to recognize that "Both the author and the heroine oscillate between two worlds, caught between contradictory definitions of femininity and creativity. . " (1985, 83). Likewise, Papke notes that "Edna's death is unspeakable tragedy, yet one does hear in her story the constant murmur, whisper, clamor of another vision of life" (1990, 87). Yeager strives for a similar balance, arguing that Edna's "awakening begins with and returns at her death to the rich and painful lure of desires that are still outside speech and beyond the social order" (1993, 292). These critics all share the conviction that Edna is a transitional fictional figure and that the inconsistencies of The Awakening are historically conditioned. Instead of imposing any a priori coherence upon the novel, such critics represent it as a socially informed text in which the oppressive nature of traditional cultural structures (public/private, male/female, irony/earnestness) is usefully highlighted. Noting that Chopin's protagonist searches for as-yet-unrealizeable forms of experience, each of these critics implies that Chopin's text tries but fails to situate itself in what Showalter has elsewhere called the feminist "wild zone" (1985, 262). Not able to clearly represent "the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men . . ." (262), the best Chopin's novel can do, these readings imply, is to gesture tragically toward this developing ideal.
This mode of interpretation is now the orthodox approach to The Awakening, and in my classroom practice I have until recently been content with it. I tend to encourage students to see literary texts (Chopin's as well as those of other writers) as what Raymond Williams called structures of feeling-as far-from-objective snapshots of complex cultures in transition. Yet when The Awakening is placed in its historical and cultural context, something occurs which makes me question the common classification of Chopin's text as a distinctively proto-feminist text. For one finds that The Awakening's representation of Edna's yearning for something like Showalter's wild zone is difficult to distinguish from representations of similar yearnings in such places as Vogue magazine. Indeed, although The Awakening may be the one truly canonical American feminist text and that such cultural organs as Vogue have usually been characterized as politically problematic at best, when the two are juxtaposed one finds that the proto-feminist liminality of the one seems uncannily similar to the proto-feminist liminality of the other. It is not so much that The Awakening and Vogue are equivalent or interchangeable; it is more that The Awakening's representation of women-particularly its representation of a beautiful woman in a state of overt discontent-can be regarded with the current style of guarded optimism only if it is severed from other, less critically sanctioned areas in American culture. Returning The Awakening to its historical context at the crossroads of high and popular culture forces us to realize that if gender norms in Chopin's lifetime were in transition, it was a transition that has proven to be curiously static.
