"Abysses of solitude": Acting naturally in Vogue and The Awakening

In the second illustration above, for instance, taken from the cover of another number in 1895, a woman named Florence stares schemingly into space. Unlike the previous examples, the female figure here is neither gazing abstractedly toward nature nor collusively toward the viewer. Instead, she appears to be well within herself, actively plotting revenge. "I should like to do something that would make him miserable for life," she says. Her male interlocutor replies: "Then why don't you marry him?" As in "He Almost Thinks He Will-Ask Her to Dance," this illustration invites the viewer to share the sometimes bitter humor inherent in social forms that encourage women to pretend that most of their motivations and emotions derive from occulted, extra-cultural sources. Here, Florence entertains the possibility that the best way for her to express her hatred for a particular man would be to manipulate him into believing that some unseen force meant them to be together until death-which she can then hasten or at least supervise. The dry humor of illustrations such as this one shows that Chopin's intermittently cool perspective toward traditional gender relations was often shared by cultural organs that, for the most part, energetically supported the role of woman as capitalism's naturalizing influence.

Yet the ironies implicit in both these illustrations from Vogue and in Chopin's bifurcated narrative voice do not adequately predict the end of The Awakening. For the self-contempt implicit in the act of suicide has to be seen as qualitatively different from the fashionable weltschmerz displayed by both Chopin's prose style and most of the pictures in Vogue. Elsewhere in Vogue, however, illustrations routinely appeared that encouraged the viewers of the magazine to go beyond self-irony and to regard the naturalizing role of women, and themselves, with considerable contempt. The woman reader who glanced at "Fillies on View" and "Her First Love" (See Figures 5 and 6) might have been led to a very disturbing insight: namely, that however much power women received by being identified with nature, such an identification also implicitly insulted women by intermittently placing them in the same semantic region as animals. The visual pun of "Fillies on View" (Figure 5) is obvious: insofar as both are unpredictable, beautiful, and very expensive to maintain, a well-bred woman is a lot like a well-bred horse. Yet although these women are being compared to animals, the emphasis here is upon the contrivance involved in the women's pose of naturalness. The implication is that in the same way a champion race horse is the result of generations of deliberate cross-breeding, so must women be painstakingly trained, generation after generation, to flutter under the male gaze until such fashionably hystericized behavior seems to come naturally to them. A result of such an implicit identification of women with animals (which may well have caught Chopin's fancy) is represented in "Her First Love" (figure 6). Having been isolated by the system of naturalization that gives women prestige, the model in this picture is represented as more likely to relate to animals than to other human beings. Like Edna Pontellier after Leonce and her children leave her alone in New Orleans, the woman in the picture finds that her lap dog is her closest friend.