Charles University 2005

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

Self-knowledge, Self-deception and their Role in the Process of Edna Pontellier`s Awakening and Suicide.

Kate Chopin`s Edna Pontillier is one of the first articulate female voices in Southern American literature, as well as American literature in general. Her story is a story of waking to a female self-consciousness. What roles do self-deception and self-knowledge play in the awakening that Edna Pontellier experiences? How are they reflected in her relationships and decisions, including her final decision?

The novel deals with the main characters awakening on an emotional and spiritual level. These two levels cannot be examined separately, because they are closely related and they frequently overlap. The very word awakening implies a transition from one state of being to another. This is always accompanied by a replacement of one kind of knowledge by another, but we have to keep in mind that the acquisition of a new kind of knowledge does not necessarily mean that all the old illusions are unmasked, or that the new knowledge will not be deceptive in a way, too. Love is one of the central elements in this story of awakening. It

is one of the sources from which her new awakening self-consciousness springs, and it is also its result. It has crucial influence on Edna`s actions and moods, and it plays an important part in her self-knowledge and self-deception. To understand it appropriately, it must be traced back into the time only mentioned in the book, into her childhood and her adolescent years.

At a very early age she had been passionately enamored of a dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky. She could not leave his presence when he was there, nor remove her eyes from his face, But the cavalry officer melted imperceptibly out of her existence. At another time her affections were deeply engaged by a young gentleman who visited a lady on a neighboring plantation. [] The young gentleman was engaged to be married to the young lady, Edna was a little miss, just merging into her teens; and the realisation that she was nothing, nothing, nothing to the engaged young man was a bitter affliction to her. But he, too, went the way of dreams. She was a grown young woman when she was overtaken by what she supposed to be the climax of her fate. It was when the face and figure of a great tragedian began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses. The persistence of the infatuation lent it an aspect of genuineness. The hopelessness of it colored it with the lofty tones of a great passion. (30)

So, here we can see that Edna has had an idol since she could comprehend the possibility of having one. When she was small, it always was a particular person, some young men visiting their house. As she grew older her idols grew more abstract. She fell in love with a man in the picture to whom she probably attributed all the characteristics that such a dream-lover ought to have. However, what links them all is that Edna has always had the idol-lover category in her mind, which was the only permanent and unchanging thing in this whole matter. It is a variable for which there are different substitutes at different times. Edna has a need for romantic love. And for love to be truly romantic, there always must be some kind of obstacle, which gives love a shade, a tragic aspect, a foil - be it a husband or hopelessness so that the romance of it is made more visible, made ravishing, more torturing, simply more romantic.

The picture of the tragedian stood framed upon her desk. Anyone may posses the portrait of a tragedian without exciting suspicion or comment. (This was a sinister reflection she cherished.) In the presence of others she expressed admiration for his exalted gifts, as she handed the photograph around and dwelt upon the fidelity of the likeness. When alone she sometimes picked it up and kissed the cold glass passionately. (30)

Edna kept these infatuations to herself unlike the girls of her age, who are incapable to keep someone elses secret, not to speak of the secrets of their own. It is due rather to the environment she grew up in than her own disposition. That Creol society loosened her constraint, and made her a little more open, only confirms it. However, one of the reasons of her tragedy is her inability to communicate her inner thoughts and feelings. Why on earth has she married Mr. Pontellier with such notions of love and such idolizing of love objects?
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Her marriage to Lonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. It was in the midst of her secret great passion that she met him. [] He pleased her; his absolute devotion flattered her. She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which she was mistaken. Add to this the violent opposition of her father and her sister Margaret to her marriage with a Catholic, and we need seek no further for the motives which led her to accept Monsieur Pontellier for husband. (31)

But are these the only reasons? We read that she thought the acme of bliss, which would have been a marriage with the tragedian, was not for her in this world. 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.(31) (Whether she succeeded in abiding with her intention all those years of her marriage until the moment we meet her, we are not to find out, though I think it is very unlikely.) Was Edna really so practical that she was aware it was rather impossible to find a husband for life (to find such a lover is quite another thing, for he can be dropped when he starts to be too downto-earth) that would remind the person of her dreams? And is that why she had chosen, in consonance with her common sense, the Pontellier-type? I think not. It might seem so only at the first sight. It is possible that she invented this explanation for herself. But she deceived herself. I think the true reasons lie much deeper . We know that Edna has had a world of her own since her childhood. She had a psychic need to produce an identity which is predicated on the conscious process of concealment. the cool distancing tone of her visible character conceals an ardent yearning for intensity, for passion. So Edna provides the passion she needs in the only manner which seems safely available to her through daydreaming. 1 She lived on two levels; she lived in the real world with her father and her
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sisters, and then she lived in her imagination, known only to herself, with her idols. So when she marries Lonce she behaves completely according to her so-far nature. C. G. Wolff sugests that Edna would probably not be able to keep a high-quality love relationship, because to do so, she would have to reveal her secret inner self. She says that Edna actually fears genuine emotional involvement, and thus it is no accident 2 that Edna marries Pontellier, and that this marriage is a defence manoeuvre she takes refuge in, in order to maintain the integrity of the two selves that formed her character and to reinforce the distance between them3. Her outward self made the conventional marriage and so her inner self was not in danger of revealing itself, which might make her feel threatened, as it later does. For, as Wolff observes, an intuitive man, a sensitive husband, [] who evoked passion from her might lure the hidden self into the open, tempting Edna to attach her emotions to flesh and blood rather than phantoms4. So here we have an example of Ednas self-deception and its translation in her marrying Pontellier. What was Ednas relationship with her husband like? After marriage she grew fond of her husband, realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection, thereby threatening its dissolution(31). It really is rather unnatural for a woman to feel satisfaction at feeling no passion or at least warmth for her own husband, provided he was her own choice. He is very fond of her, but his affection does not transcend the limits of how a husband should feel about his wife, the paradigm of the time and the society they live in, and it is also affected by the the limits of his personal disposition. He is a practical, pragmatic businessman (careful to save appearances(130)) with no imagination whatsoever, incapable to know his wife or to understand her. He views her as a beautiful, representative object. He is presented as a man looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property(10). Even if he was a possessor, it must be admitted that as a possessor he is very attentive to his possession, being generous with money and always sending fruit, sweets, or jewelry to it. He really did not deserve what he
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got, poor thing. Actually, he does not strike me as a possessive type of a husband. He is not jealous at all, and he lets Edna do what she pleases. Many 21 st century husbands would not tolerate what Mr. Pontellier tolerated. He is greatly disturbed by his wifes suddenly so unaccountable behaviour. I dont know what ails her Her whole attitude toward me and everybody and everything has changed. [] Shes making it devilishly uncomfortable for me Shes got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women; and you understand we meet in the morning at the breakfast table.(93) No doubt their meeting only at the breakfast table was an important, but not the only motive for his decision to consult the Doctor. Although life with a man like Mr. Pontellier must have been boring and oppressive sometimes, to be just to him, I must agree with Wolff about the swimming party when Edna refuses to come to the house at her husbands request.

he utters but a few sharp words and then, surprising for a man so supposedly interested in the proprietary relationship, slips on a robe and comes out to keep her company during her fitful vigil. After their return to New Orleans, he reacts to Ednas disruption of her wifely functions with but momentary impatience; he does not attempt coercion, and he goes to the lengths of consulting a physician out of concern for her well-being. Even when Edna has taken up residence in her dimunitive pigeon house Lonce decides to leave her to her own ways.5

The thing that most troubles Pontellier about Edna is her attitude towards their children. He thinks she neglects them, and is not as caring as a really good mother should be. He reproaches her and she probably hates him for that, for sometimes she herself must feel remorse somewhere deep inside. As Edna is awakening, she refuses to be viewed as a possession (either of her husband, Robert, or even of her children) - as she thinks she is viewed. But it is quite clear that Lonce is a slender vehicle to carry the weight of societys
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repression of women and the children as they are portrayed in the novel seem to exercise even less continuous claim upon her. They are always accompanied by a nurse whose presence frees Edna to pursue whatever interest she can sustain6. Edna refuses to recognize the bonds of marriage, she does not feel any responsibility regarding her children. For to argue that she was thinking of them after Adeles childbirth, and before the suicide, is of no great importance, since the result is that although they perhaps have a right, as she tells the Doctor finally she decides to view them as her enslavers, and it is also them that she swims away from at the end. I think the truth is that she does not realise, or, perhaps, she is unconsciously not willing to admit to herself that she has a mortal dread to accept the responsibilities of adulthood - responsibility for her actions and for their consequences, and responsibility for other people - as well as she dreads the possibility of her failure in case she tries to come to terms with them. I dont want anything but my way, she says; but she does not realise that to be independent and emancipated is not to be egoistic and self-absorbed. That the only freedom is the freedom of choice. To have ones own way, as she understands it, is possible only on a deserted island, not in the inter-subjective world one has to live in. She rebels, but her rebellion is tragically unavailing, as it does not result in some kind of transcendence into a more mature and more fulfilling life but in her suicide - which may be considered to be another example of what her self-deception leads to.

She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. (76)

This is the most violent demonstration of Ednas rebellion. But I do not think that it is a symbol of rebellion against the position of a female in society, and against the traditions as some critics propose. It may seem so only from todays point of view. I think that by stamping upon the ring Edna is releasing her desperate, hopeless and angry mood caused by Robertsickness, her spiritual and physical turmoil, and the nuisance of a husband with whom she just had a disagreement. Nobody knows about the confused feelings and thoughts of her awakening. Her friends and her husband can only see the outer demonstrations, the results they do not know what of. She never tells anyone. The only person who vaguely suspects what might be going on within Edna is the Doctor. Madame Ratignolle might sense something (she tells Edna: 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.(133) Adele is not conscious how true it is, though.), and Mademoiselle Reisz knows about Ednas love for Robert, because for Edna she is the only link with Robert when he is away. However, she does not seem to have a need to confide in anyone, which might eventually contribute to her suicide.

Ednas concept of love is not connected with marriage. When she visits the Ratignolles, and sees the harmony of their union, she feels depressed.

The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered to her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle, - a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of lifes delirium. (81)

Edna has a different idea of love. Edna does not easily relinquish her fantasy of rhapsodic oneness with perfect lover. She imagines that such a union will bring permanent ecstasy; it will lead not simply to domestic harmony like that of the Ratignolles, but to lifes delirium.7 A wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth (94), as she tells her husband. When Robert tells her he was dreaming the wild dream of her becoming his wife, her answer to that is a surprise and her saying it was very foolish of him. She has no intention to become his wife, that would rather spoil the picture. In a sense, Ednas awakening may be reasonably viewed as a late adolescence. All her moods, the periods of infatuation and happiness suddenly changing into feelings of deep despondency and depression, her need of anguish and delirium, her understanding of love, her unreadiness for motherhood, her search for independence, her inability to deal with all this in a reasonable way all of these may bespeak it. Now let me focus my attention on her relationship with Robert. Robert is a man who is always courting some interesting, preferably married woman. It usually is on the verge of play and real affection. He is taken seriously neither by the objects of his attentions nor by their husbands. They consider him safe. He does not expect to be taken seriously while Edna is deceived and takes this game seriously. However, he does fall in love with Edna. Perhaps because she is different. But when he finds out he is in love with her, he leaves, and thus confirms his image of a trustworthy fellow. By his second flight from Edna he re-confirms his being a responsible man. Ednas relation to him is connected with her awakening very tightly, although the process did not start by his impulse, as Edna tells him later in the novel. I think the reasons for her falling in love with him are quite obvious. He was about her age; she felt attracted to him; his attentions flattered her; she had more in common with him than with any other man (both of them liked music and reading, for example), not to speak of her husband; and because he resembled her dream-lover the most among the real men. She
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spent much of her time in his society, and, naturally, they became more intimate and got used to each other. And so it came about that she missed him when he was not with her.

The story did not seem especially to impress Edna. She had one of her own to tell, of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back. They were lost amid the Baratarian Islands, and no one ever heard of them or found trace of them from that day to this. [] Perhaps it was a dream she had had. But every glowing word seemed real to those who listened. They could feel the hot breath of the Southern night; they could hear the long sweep of the pirogue through the glistening moonlit water, the beating of birds wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown. (100)

This is exactly Ednas idea of love. Although Ednas affection is focused on a real man, its essence has not changed. The awakening has somehow failed here. There are parallels between this story and the real situation between Edna and Robert in the novel.

She gazed away toward Grande Terre and thought she would like to be alone there with Robert, in the sun, listening to the oceans roar and watching the slimy lizards writhe in and out among the ruins of the old fort. (52)

Another parallel is at Madame Antoines. Edna is tired, and she sleeps there. When she wakes up, she finds herself in her dream. She is alone with Robert on an island. Their conversation there is the coversation between the Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty. The only difference is that he did not wake her up with a kiss, and another novelty to the tale is that the Beauty is hungry and the Prince prepares some food for her.
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When Edna learns that Robert is leaving for Mexico, she is pained and bewildered.

For the first time she recognizes anew the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipient as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman. [] The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held.(66-67)

Did the painful pang make her see that Robert will no longer be with her and realize that she loves him? Or was it the prospect of noble suffering from love that brought her infatuation about? It might seem a mixture of both supposing one has not read the ending of the novel.

Only after he has left can she feel the intensity of passion that later comes to be associated with him; and she can do so because once physically absent, he can be made magically present as a phantom, an object in her own imagination, a figure which is now truly a part of herself. 8

She thinks about Robert all the time, she looks for his resemblance in the crowds, she visits his mother hoping to learn some news about him, she talks about him with everyone, even with her husband. Later she looks up Mademoiselle Reisz, their mutual friend, the only person to whom Edna tells about her love for him. She also learns that Robert loves her. She reads his letters. She dreams about him. Despite all this, there is Alce Arobin. Desire and love may be two different things. But it strikes me as rather unnatural that a woman who suffers from being so deeply in love, and who is so romantic about it, can have a lover that is absolutely nothing to her (109) at the same time.

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If she really cared what Robert would think, she would never do that. Of course, she thought she was nobodys possession but her own, and she might dispose of herself as she pleased. But being faithful has nothing to do with being someones possession. Wolff understands this problem to be Ednas stratagem [] to fuse the outer and the inner selves that comprise her identity 9. She says that Edna has the affair with Arobin precisely because she has no feeling for him. Her feelings are fixed safely on the image of Robert.10 Edna meets Robert by chance when he is back from Mexico. Their meeting is far from what she imagined. He does not come to see her, although it was his love for her that drew him back from Mexico. Then they meet accidentally again, and Robert goes with Edna to her little house. Here the Sleeping Beauty kisses the Prince and breaks the spell. But this is not a fairy-tale. There is a message from Adele asking Edna to come to be with her at her childbirth, as Edna had promised. And Edna goes, despite Roberts entreaties. On the one hand she says: Now [that] you are here we shall love each other, my Robert. We shall be everything to each other. Nothing else in the world is of any consequence. (150). On the other hand, she leaves him at the so often anticipated and so crucial moment.

To have stayed with Robert would have meant consumnation, finally, the joining of her dreamlike passion to a flesh-and- blood lover; to leave was to risk that opportunity. Edna must realize the terms of this dilemma, and still she chooses to leave. We can only conclude that she is unconsciously ambivalent about achieving the goal which has sustained her fantasies for so long. The flesh-and-blood Robert may prove an imperfect, unsatisfactory substitute for the beloved of her dreams; what is more, a relationship with the real Robert would disenfranchise the more desirable phantom lover, whose presence is linked with her more general yearnings for suffusion and indefinable ecstacy.11

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After this Edna recognizes that the day may come when Robert, even the thought of him, will go the way of her dreams, melting out of her existence. Edna could not bear this knowledge. I think this was the last, though not the least, straw regarding her decision to swim far out. Her awakening took place on a wider scope. It concerned many more things than just love. Her sensuous awakening translated itself, in social terms, into Ednas procuring a lover (Alcee) for herself, and in her turning away from her husband. Her spiritual (or intellectual) awakening, which was partly discussed in relation to her emotional development as these two never exist separately, leads her to realise that there is more to life than she thought, that there are things that have nothing to do with the dreariness of everyday life, things which fulfill, elevate, and ennoble people who are able to perceive them. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to feed upon opinion when her soul had invited her.(131) She lets her individuality go forward and express itself. She is starting to apprehend the limits of a female life in society. She becomes a different woman in a way. She changes from a listless woman into a woman full of life and energy if she is in the right mood. This newly acquired self-knowledge causes some radical changes, such as her neglect of the household and her family, an abandonment of her Tuesdays, her lonely wonderings, the dropping of her acquaintances, later her moving out and taking her residence elsewhere, and her affair with Arobin All of this causing her descent in the social scale, but, in her own opinion, also her rise in the spiritual scale. She also wants to become an artist. Another example of naive self-deception. However, she eventually comes to understand what Mademoiselle Reiszs statement And you call yourself an artis! What pretensions, Madame! (her insistence on the need of absolute gifts and a brave soul as necessary for art) meant. This is one of the things on her mind when she is swimming towards her death, and most probably the recognition of truth in this point also had its share in her suicide.
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Edna is a complex, interesting woman. To see the truth about her concept of love, her way of perceiving other people in relation to her self, her self-knowledge and self-deception and their influence on her actions, is also to understand her failure. Her self- knowledge is very often self-deceptive. She is not able to translate it into something positive and meaningful yet. She is trying to emancipate but is unable to accomplish it. Her life is just a beginning of the long journey to self-knowledge that generations of women (and actually men, too) in the future will have to undertake in order to transform it into something positive, liberating and enriching. I do not view Edna as a fighter for female rights. I rather view her as a little unbalanced young woman searching for her identity, and not quite knowing what to do with what she found out. Her type is yet to mature.

Works Cited Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The American Woman Writers. New York: Reed International Books Limited, 1991. Wolff,Cynthia Griffin. Thantos and Eros: Kate Chopins The Awakening. From Kate Chopin: The Awakening: Complete Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. by Nancy A. Walker. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, 1993. Showalter, Elaine. Tradition in Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book. From Kate chopin: The Awakening. Ed. by Nancy A. Walker. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, 1993.

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Index.

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Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Kate Chopin`s The Awakening. Ed. by Nancy A. Walker, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin`s Press, 1993, p. 235 2 Wolff 236. 3 Wolff 237 4 Wolff 237. 5 Wolff 238. 6 Wolff 238-239. 7 Showalter, Eleine. Tradition in Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary book, Ed. by Nancy A. Walker, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin`s Press, 1993 8 Wolff 240. 9 Wolff 240. 10 Wolff 240. 11 Wolff 254-255.