Lecture 90 THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin Remember this absolute CORNERSTONE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, bestselling author, and PhD
in comparative literature. Some of you who've been listening recently
know that I've been interested in sex writing and in

(00:27):
these age gap relationships. That is the reason that I
first went to Kate Chopin's The Awakening. It's also the
reason why I went to Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. And
in the case of both of these novels, in the
case of Anna Karenina and The Awakening, I realized that
they went way beyond my current interest in looking at desire.

(00:47):
The Awakening, I think most people have some inkling of it.
This is a novel that was totally revolutionary and really
became not until the nineteen seventies, but finally in the
nineteen seventies became part of the literary canon and really
a very important touchstone in terms of feminist literature. For
some reason, I always seem to confuse it with Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper, And actually I think

(01:10):
there's a very good reason for that. The Yellow Wallpaper
was published in eighteen ninety two and The Awakening was
published in eighteen ninety nine. Both of them have to
do with women who are pushing against this idea of
domesticity and of maternity and of the role of women,
and the ways that this patriarchal American society was really
putting constraints on women in ways that were really chafing.

(01:33):
This is a book that I have read before, but
as with every book that I reread, I had a
very different experience this time. And honestly, this time, I
was so struck by the groundbreaking nature of this book
because it was published so long ago. Eighteen ninety nine
is so so long ago. That predates Virginia Wolf, it
predates James Joyce, predates Faulkner, all of these people who

(01:55):
we actually think of as writing like a long time ago.
She is writing ahead of all of them, as is
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Actually, which I mean, maybe that is
a sign that I need to go and look at
the Yellow Wallpaper. But for today we're sticking with The Awakening.
For those of you who like an agenda, this is
what we are doing today. We're going to give a
very brief bio of Kate Chopin. Then we're going to
talk about where The Awakening fits in terms of literary movements.

(02:19):
As with Anna Karenaat which was my most recent lecture,
sometimes it seemed kind of important here just to situate
it because it is a book that seems like a
very good example of realist fiction, and I think it's
interesting to look at the historical era, the Victorian era,
and to sort of see why its position as a
realist novel is important. We're then going to dive into

(02:40):
the text. We'll talk about the title, We'll look at
the first paragraph. We'll look at the narrator, really nimble,
excellent third person narrator here. Then we're going to touch
briefly on a couple of elements of figurative language, symbolism, foils,
foreshadowing all of this kind of stuff that you learn
back in sophomore English. We're then going to talk about
maternity in the the depiction of maternity, then the depiction

(03:02):
of women's desire, and then we're going to look at
the close of the novel. I will say right now
that my experience of the end of the novel was
radically different this novel, and frankly, we are going to
have spoilers. It's impossible, I think, to talk about this
novel without looking at the end of it. And in
some ways, it's so cool that we're looking at it
right after Anna Karenina, because both of them come to

(03:23):
a similar end and have a lot of similarities in
terms of seeing themselves as mothers and seeing themselves as
wives and really being involved with very passionate love affairs.
And I was fascinated this time when I was reading
The Awakening, because in fact, she takes her life at
the end, but this time it seemed entirely different to me.
So I'm going to try to convince you that it

(03:44):
is not quite the tragic ending. It's not some sort
of moralizing thing about how you know, if you have
an affair you're going to get so upset about it
that you're going to kill yourself. I will argue that
it is something very different. Okay, we're going to dive
into a brief bio of Kate Chopin. I mean, honestly,
even her names kind of modern and cool. Her name,
in fact when she was born was Catherine O Flaherty.

(04:05):
Her mom was French Canadian, her dad was Irish. She
went by Kate. She was born in eighteen fifty in
Saint Louis, but was very much identified with the South,
with Louisiana. In fact, that is where The Awakening is situated.
A lot of her short fiction had to do with
that setting, but she did spend most of her life
in Saint Louis. She married Oscar Chopin in eighteen seventy,

(04:28):
so she was twenty years old. Then from eighteen seventy
one to eighteen seventy nine, in eight years, she had
six children, So I mean, allow me to repeat that,
six kids in like eight years. And very soon after that,
three years later her husband died, and not only did
he die and leave her with the six children, but
he died and left her with forty two thousand dollars

(04:49):
of debt. It is not surprising to me that maternity
is one of the big things that we see in
her writing, because she would have just been absolutely steeped
in the reality of being a mother to all of
these children and in fact being a single mother. A
lot of people have the impression that she was able
to live on her writing, and she was very successful.
She wrote a lot of short fiction. It was published
in a whole bunch of different magazines, one of them

(05:09):
being Vogue, which I like that just because I like
Vogue magazine and I like that it's still around. The
other ones were big magazines at the time but are
now defunct. But the fact is she was very successful
at writing and had a lot of critical acclaim during
her lifetime. But when she wrote The Awakening, which came
out in eighteen ninety nine, it was one of I
think maybe only two novels that she wrote, and it

(05:31):
did not do as well in terms of the critics,
largely because of the subject matter that she was tackling,
which it is not surprising to me at all that
in eighteen ninety nine this book was not received favorably.
But she was very discouraged by that, and frankly, she
was kind of surprised. There are a couple of quotations
where she's talking about how she did not anticipate missus Pontellier.

(05:52):
I think that's how they would say it, that she
was not really expecting Edna to make such a stir,
and that maybe if she knew that this was going
to happen, she would not written the book. But in
terms of the writing, she was very successful in many ways,
but it didn't make her the kind of money that
she needed to live on. The way that she made
the money in order to support herself and her six
children was investments that came through her mother's estate. So

(06:14):
I like this because I like the idea of Kate
Chopin as being a very shrewd business person. I also
like the fact that it came through her mother's estate.
I mean, presumably that was managed by men on the
maternal side of her family, but somehow I like the
idea of it, sort of feeling matriarchal. She was not
related to Chopin. I mean, obviously she would have only

(06:34):
been related. I'm talking about the composer. She would have
only been related by marriage. But her husband was also
not related to Chopin, although they had a son named Frederick.
So I think they were big fans of Chopin. And
there is very important Chopin that is woven throughout the Awakening.
Although we do not have the scope today to talk
about music in the novel despite its importance. She died

(06:55):
in nineteen oh five, so she was only fifty five
years old, and her work sort of fell out of favor,
in part because this wasn't that long after The Awakening,
which had mixed critical appeal. But then in the nineteen
seventies her work was rediscovered with this kind of I
don't know if that's first wave or second wave feminism.
I get confused about the waves of feminism. But it

(07:16):
was acknowledged as being really important and being really formative
and foundational for the feminist movement, so it became part
of the canon. There was some excellent statistic that in
like nineteen ninety one, there were like eight different people
who wrote their doctoral dissertations on her. Importantly, she was
not only important for feminist literature, but also for Southern literature.
Looking at The Awakening did make me realize that we

(07:38):
need to look more at Southern writing in general, and
at Southern women writers. So we're talking about Youudra Welty,
Carson mccullors, Zora Neil Hurston, Flannery, O'Connor, Harper Lee. I
am so interested in regional literature, especially in this country,
where we really do have such large regional differences in
many ways. When I was in college and I was

(07:58):
getting my degree in Spanish literature, I took a class
in regionalist Argentine literature and we had this visiting professor
and it was incredible, but like trying for me to
try to parse the different regions of Argentina, it was
really taxing, and we are talking about like flora and
fauna and very specific things. Really kind of a big demand,

(08:19):
but certainly made me appreciate just even the concept of
regional literature. Now that we have a sense of Kate
chopin It's life, we are going to situate the novel
itself in the literary moment in which it was written,
and in fact the one that I think it is
a very good example of. So for me, this is
very solidly in the realistic tradition. One of the things
to think about in terms of realism is that it

(08:40):
coincides very neatly in many ways with the Victorian era.
Those of you on the YouTube will note that I'm
wearing something it's not quite you know, a Victorian moment.
If I still had my like Jessica mcclintok, Gunny sacks dress,
you know, from when I was I don't know, maybe
a freshman in high school, maybe eighth grade, something like that.
I could have put that on and been the picture
of the Victorian era. But I think this was as

(09:00):
close as I was going to get, with these puffy sleeves,
long sleeves and you know, a high neck, lot of coverage.
In general, lots of people see the beginning of the
realist novel as eighteen fifty one with the publication of
Madame Bovary. And of course all of these things are
slightly arbitrary, but for my purposes, it's very neat to
think that the realist novel was essentially eighteen fifty to

(09:21):
nineteen hundred. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, we
are having naturalism, which is kind of like a hyperrealism,
and it usually has a political slant. Think of Zola,
people who were trying to make kind of a big
statement with their hyperrealist novels. This also, as I mentioned,
coincides with the Victorian era, which is also roughly eighteen
fifty to nineteen hundred. One of the things that's most

(09:43):
interesting to me is how women were viewed at this time.
So all you have to do is think of these
Victorian dresses, you know, like with the very very high
necks and the very long sleeves and the artificial bustles,
and just like all kinds of coverage of women. This
was a time when women were viewed as ornamental. They
were viewed as weak, they were viewed as something that

(10:03):
needed to be protected. They certainly were not viewed as
someone who had any kind of sexual desire, and really
not very much agency at all. So it's important to
see Kate Chopin as writing within the realist tradition, which
also coincides again with the Victorian era, but really writing
against this idea of the woman that was kind of
characteristic of the Victorian era. It's also interesting for me

(10:26):
to think about how women were viewed in the American South.
I think in many ways, you know, if you're a
pioneer woman in Oregon or in California, you know in
the nineteenth century, you're not going to be viewed necessarily
as ornamental. And as we move through we're going to
see the radical nature of this work. But it's important
at the outset just to understand that talking about women,
focusing on the life of this woman, and there's several

(10:49):
different women who are important throughout the novel, but focusing
on the life of Edna Pontellier is kind of radical
in and of itself, and certainly the idea of focusing
on her sexual potency and her desire was pushing hard
against the Victorian era. Before we move away from this
idea of situating the novel in its literary moment, I
want to touch quickly on one of the main influences

(11:11):
on Kate Chopin, which is Yi de mobassm. You think
of the necklace, think of short stories, big writer short stories,
as was Chopin, and kind of predominantly of stories that
have kind of like a surprise ending. For a long
time that was kind of, you know, the formula of
the short story. There would be some sort of turn
at the end that would shift the whole thing. But
what I'm interested in here is a quotation where we

(11:33):
see Chopin talking about why mopasm was so important to her,
and this is such an interesting commentary on the idea
of realist fiction. So here's what she says. I read
his stories and marveled at them. Here was life not fiction?
For where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanisms in
stage trapping that in a vague, unthinkable way I had

(11:56):
fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here
was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority,
who had entered into himself and looked out upon life
through his own being and with his own eyes, and
who in a direct and simple way told us what
he saw. So this is very interesting. We talked about
the realist novel as having this omniscient narrator, this third

(12:19):
person narrator that was actually fairly removed and would occasionally
dip into the minds of characters. We looked at that
in Anna Karenina Kate Chopin is very deft there in
noting that someone like moutpassant and she herself is doing
more of getting into the brains the thoughts and worries
of the characters. So in some way, you know, this
is late realism. You can see it as moving toward

(12:42):
the modernist tradition, where you have much more emphasis put
upon people's thoughts, people's worries. The ultimate manifestation of that being,
you know, stream of consciousness, where you have you know,
not only the thoughts, but the thoughts sort of directly
verbatim in all of their incoherence. But it's very interesting
to note the way that Chopin is really picking out
and underscoring this idea of expressing the thoughts of the

(13:06):
different characters instead of just looking at them from the outside.
So this idea about interiority is actually a very good
segue into the title of the work. I love the title,
The Awakening, in many ways is so apt. I also
love the fact those of you who have been longtime
listeners know that whenever I see the title repeated in
a work, I get very excited about the whole thing.

(13:29):
I'm reading No Country for Old Men right now by
Kormick McCarthy, and that country the word country comes up
again and again and again. That has been fascinating. But
back to the title. So the title here, in some
ways it's like kind of like two on the nose,
But in many ways I think it is really very
bold and a very good signaling of what she is
trying to do. It really does focus our attention on

(13:50):
this idea of transformation, on this idea of really recognizing,
you know, that women are sort of asleep, that women
are kind of in this position where we aren't really
cognizant of what's happening, and there is this awakening. There's also,
of course, the awakening of sexual desire, which we are
going to look at. I like the cover art on mine.
It's fine. It feels kind of modern those of you

(14:11):
on the podcast. It's just a plain red cover, and
it has the awakening in these kind of letters that
are that are sort of scattered and then two hands
kind of reaching upward. It also, though, looks perhaps like
we are getting a little sense of her drowning, which
is not so awesome. But in general I like the
modern feel of this because in fact, it is a
book that feels in some ways, I mean, it feels

(14:31):
kind of dated, as it should because it's, you know,
one hundred and twenty five years old, but in many
ways it also feels like it deserves a very modern
looking cover. So we're going to go ahead and look
at the few places when the word awakening or the
concept of awakening is really very clear in the novel,
and as you might hope and expect, these are excellent
ways to look at what it is the book is
actually doing in terms of the message it's trying to convey.

(14:55):
So One of the first examples is on pages fifty
eight and fifty nine. And this is such an interesting
description of marriage. And this is relatively early in the novel.
Let's see, the novel is two hundred and fifteen pages long,
so we're about an eighth in. Is that right? God, No,
we're quorder in and we're getting this idea of awakening.
So this is our Edna who is talking about her husband.

(15:19):
She heard him moving about the room, every sound indicating
impatience and irritation. Another time she would have gone in
at his request. She would, through habit, have yielded to
his desire, not with any sense of submission or obedience
to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly as we walk, move, sit, stand,

(15:41):
go through the daily treadmill of life which has been
portioned out to us. So this is also a very
good example of the narrative stance here. We're this isn't
Edna saying I did this, I did that. We're not
in the first person, but we do have this sense
of what is happening for her. We also do have
this sense of you know, in the past, she would
have done one thing, but there is a distinct awakening
that is happening, and we already know at this point

(16:03):
that the reason she is having this awakening is because
of her passionate love for young Robert. Just to touch
briefly on the age gap relationship thing, I think she's
like twenty seven and Robert's like twenty two or something,
which doesn't seem that significant but also is kind of significant.
So then a little further down we have this. This
is when she is out on on a hammock at
the place where they are summering. She says to her husband, Leance,

(16:25):
go to bed. She said, I mean to stay out here.
I don't wish to go in, and I don't intend to.
Don't speak to me like that again. I shall not
answer you. I mean, wow, bold like she is not
only awakening, but she is expressing this awakening very clearly
to her husband. Then right across the page, he has
a glass of wine that he offers to her. She

(16:45):
did not wish any He drew up the rocker, hoisted
his slippered feet on the rail, and proceeded to smoke
a cigar. He smoked two cigars. Then he went inside
and drank another glass of wine. Missus Pontellier again declined
to accept a glass when it was offered to her.
Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out
of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream to feel again,

(17:09):
the reality is pressing into her soul. So this is
so interesting. I mean, we have this very phallic thing
where he's smoking his cigars, cigars being a very well
trod phallic symbol, but we have this idea of him
very subtly trying to dominate her. And interestingly, when she
is awakening from the dream, she's awakening in this way

(17:29):
from her passionate love affair. The passionate love affair is
the dream, and she is awakening to her reality, which
is of course the whole point that she is wakening
to the fact that her daily life is pressing into
her soul. Okay, the next time we see this concept
of awakening is this very interesting passage that is, let's
see seventy pages ish into the novel. It's this very

(17:52):
strange and really beautiful and well done kind of amalgamation
of this kind of fairy tale and this kind of
really in some ways like leaning more towards modernist writing.
And it has everything to do with awakening. So what
we have here is Robert and Edna, very early in
their relationship. They've gone out to an island and there's
a woman named Madame Antoine who lives there, and we

(18:13):
actually have a situation where Edna takes this nice long nap.
That's the sort of fairy tale part of it. So
on page sixty nine we have this Madame Antoine had
laid some coarse, clean towels upon a chair and had
placed a box of pootre d'urs rice powder within easy reach.

(18:34):
Edna dabbed the powder upon her nose and cheeks as
she looked at herself closely in the little distorted mirror
which hung on the wall above the basin. Her eyes
were bright and wide awake, and her face glowed. When
she had completed her toilet, she walked into the adjoining room,
she was very hungry. So we have this idea here,
of mean, it's very important that she's looking in the mirror,

(18:55):
she's seeing herself. She's seeing this reality, but it's a
distorted reality. She's also in a liminal space. She's on
this island that is not her home, it's not her
permanent destination. Liminal space is simply being spaces that are
kind of in between, and there are places where a
lot of transformation can or can not happen. In this case,
there is So's her eyes are very wide awake. She

(19:16):
recognizes this idea of awakening. She's also very hungry, which
speaks to desire, and in fact she does have quite
a meal. So on the next page, on seventy, she
poured some of the wine into the glass and drank
it down. Then she went softly out of doors and,
plucking an orange from the low hanging bough of a tree,
threw it at Robert, who did not know she was

(19:38):
awake and up so very importantly, here we have this
orange tree. Anytime you have a fruit like this, you know,
usually it's an apple, you should think of the Garden
of Eden. You should think of the Tree of Knowledge.
You should think of Eve plucking the fruit. And I
think it is amazing here that here we have this
orange instead of an apple, which I like it speaks

(19:58):
to the place it's speaks to, like you know, Kate
Chopin putting her own stamp on this Edenic setting. But
I also love that she throws it at Robert. I mean,
this is a woman who is really you know, she
has awakened and now is after a nap and is
now like really feeling enough agency that she's literally throwing
things at the object of her desire. And then it
goes on. An illumination broke over his whole face when

(20:21):
he saw her and joined her under the orange tree.
How many years have I slept? She inquired. The whole
island seems changed. A new race of beings must have
sprung up, leaving only you and MIA's past relics. How
many years ago did Madame, Antoine and Tony die? And
when did our people from grand Isle disappear from the earth?

(20:43):
He familiarly, He familiarly adjusted a ruffle upon her shoulder.
Oh my gosh, you can hear how I stumbled over
familiar familiarly. I mean, that is a real indication, even
when you're reading it. Man, adverbs are just not great.
Moving along here, Robert speaks, You have slept precisely one
hundred years. I was left here to guard your slumbers,

(21:05):
And for one hundred years I have been out under
the shed reading a book. The only evil I couldn't
prevent was to keep a broiled fowl from drying up
if it is turned to stone, still, I will eat it,
said Edna. So this is so interesting. On the one hand,
you can see his role as being the guard as
kind of taking away from her power that he's essentially

(21:25):
the one who still has the power. But it's interesting
that he's doing something domestic. He's supposed to be cooking
a meal for her during this period of time, so
we really do have this interesting role reversal. We also have,
of course, this period of sleep. She's equating it to
an entire century, which is speaking to this transformation. And
then we have him talking about how she has changed.

(21:48):
While Edna slept, Robert had foraged the island. He was
childishly gratified to discover her appetite and to see the
relish with which she ate the food which he had
procured for her. So you have this idea here of
hunger and of him providing something in her really taking
advantage of it, which I think we can really read
as general desire and as somewhat a sort of sexual

(22:10):
desire also, So in essence, we have this passage that's
very fairy tale like where we have her actually sleeping
and actually awakening. But this passage is entirely involved with
this idea of her passion for Robert, which is the mechanism,
This is sort of the thing, her passion for him,
which is outside of marriage, outside of domesticity, certainly outside

(22:30):
of maternity. It is that which is awakening her to
the fact that her sort of normal life, her domestic
and maternal and marital life, is a sort of, you know,
a slumber. That is not a great thing. She's sort of,
you know, just going through the motions. And the last
example of this, this idea of where the where the
title comes up in the text, is on page two
oho two, So we're getting very close to the end

(22:51):
of the novel, and this is a direct reference back
to that she slept on grand Isle and then awoke,
So she's speaking to Robert. I love you, she whispered,
only you, no one but you. It was you who
awoke me last summer out of a lifelong stupid dream.
Oh you have made me so unhappy with your indifference.

(23:12):
Oh I have suffered, suffered. Now 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. I must go to my friend. But you
will wait for me, no matter how late you will
wait for me, Robert. So here we have this direct
idea of this awakening, and it's very I mean, she

(23:32):
puts a pretty clear stamp on it here, this idea
of it was you who awoke me last summer out
of a life long stupid dream. Stupid's actually kind of
funny there. I mean, it just seems like such a
like a kind of a light, kind of silly word
to talk about her entire existence. But this idea of
the lifelong dream and her passion for him as having
awoke in her is very clearly stated at a couple

(23:54):
of very key points all throughout the book. So I
think looking at these different instances when we see, you know,
the idea or even the word awakening throughout the novel
is a very good way to look at the prose.
But I want to kind of take one step back
and look at the very opening of the novel, in
part because the prose is so interesting and engaging, but
also to take a look at the way that all

(24:16):
of this idea of Edna awakening is really taking place
within this very kind of patriarchal situation. So on page
three we have this opening. A green and yellow parrot,
which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating
over and over, a le vous a, le vouson sapristie,
that's all right. He could speak a little Spanish, and

(24:38):
also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the
mockingbird that hung on the other side of the door,
whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.
Mister Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree
of comfort, arose with an expression and an exclamation of disgust.
He walked down the gallery and across the bridges which

(25:01):
connected the Lebrun cottages one with the other. He had
been seated before the door of the main house. The
parrot and the mocking bird were the property of Madame Lebrun,
and they had the right to make all the noise
they wished. Mister Pontellier had the privilege of quitting their
society when they ceased to be entertaining. This is so good,

(25:21):
It's always, I'll say it again, so interesting to go
back and look at the very beginning of a book
once you have finished it. So I love the idea
of beginning with this parrot. We're beginning with the idea
of nonsense. We're beginning with the idea of mocking We
have this mocking bird, we have just the idea of
parroting things. And I think in lots of ways we're
asked to look at mister Pontellier. He's very upset and

(25:42):
kind of like exasperated by these birds. But I think
they can be symbolic both of this kind of this
milieu in which they are operating, this idea of these
people of leisure, but also society in general, this idea
of all of these different languages. You have some French,
you have some Spanish, you have some other language. No
one understands. It's this broad look at society that even

(26:03):
he is kind of pushing away from. We also have
this idea that, you know, the parrots are meant to
be entertaining. They're meant to be, you know, beautiful, they're
green and yellow, they're meant to be exotic, much the
way that a woman is meant to be kind of
ornamental and is meant to entertain men. And the way
that he's pushing away these birds, sort of walking away
from them, is in many ways reflective of the way

(26:24):
that Edna is going to the way that his marriage
is going to sort of break down. Of course, we
have the idea of birds. That's more in England, I think,
but you know, the idea of women as being birds.
So in some ways, focusing on mister Pontellier in the
beginning is kind of odd because it seems like the
story should be Edna's from the very beginning. But I
think it's really interesting to situate us in this environment

(26:47):
so that we can really see what it is that
Edna is awakening from. I want to take a minute
to talk about the names in the book. I was
so fascinated. I love it when names have a lot
of significance, and this is definitely the case in this book.
So Pontellier Pont in French would be like a bridge,
and right at the beginning, we have this idea of
the bridges between all of these cottages in this place

(27:08):
in Louisiana where they are on the coast. But what's interesting,
of course, is like a bridge, a Pontelliers would be
like a bridge, or like a like someone who is
creating bridges, and in this case, the bridges between mister
and missus Pontellier are like really not functioning well. We
then have Robert Lebron. So when you say Robert, there
is a sense of like robber, like he is robbing

(27:29):
Edna away from mister Pontellier, so you have this idea
of him as being a robber. Later, she is involved
with someone named, i'll say a Robin. So again we
have this idea of a Robin, like somebody is robbing things,
which it's funny, like on some level that should feel
heavy handed, and yet it really doesn't. We also then
later we have this Mademoiselle rise r ei Z. So

(27:50):
what's very important about her. She's a much older woman,
but because she is mademoiselle, we know that she has
never married, and she is someone who actually has a
lot of power in society. Well not a lot of power,
but she has like a like a pretty solid social standing.
But this idea of her as rising and the idea
of her as helping Edna to rise is very significant

(28:11):
because she is this independent woman who didn't have children
and who didn't have a husband and yet is rising.
We have Madame Ratignol, who is she's the archetypal mother here.
She has many children, she's always seen in this role
of mother, and you have this idea of ratinnuole, which
is kind of like rat in a hole. You might
argue that that's like too much and that I'm stretching here,

(28:33):
which is fine, but I really do think you can
argue that she is very much trapped. It's the name
that just like doesn't have great connotations in society, which
our Edna is often pushing very hard away from the society.
We have missus Merryman and missus high Camp, so Mary Man,
I mean it's, you know, someone who is very merry
high Camp. You know, you have this idea of society

(28:55):
as being high high society. So these are kind of
these arc types of the society people and the last
names are so indicative and maybe in some ways kind
of ironically so indicative of what they want to be,
which is Mary and and sort of high society. We
have Edna, who is obviously our main person, which means
delight or rejuvenation, which I love. I mean, in some ways,

(29:18):
what she is looking for is delight. She's looking for joy,
and she's looking for happiness when she is not finding
it in her maternal and domestic sphere. But also the
idea of rejuvenation or rebirth is so important because we
do in fact have her, you know, there is a
sort of rebirth that we see throughout. Her sons are
named Raoul and Etienne. They are four and five. We

(29:41):
see them not very often throughout the novel, which I
think is very appropriate, and interestingly we're going to talk
about this in a second. We see them a lot
of times in relationship to their father or in relationship
to Robert, their mother's you know, idealized lover figure. One
very important element that actually, you know, is indicated by

(30:03):
these names is that there is this kind of sentiment
that the reason why Kate Chopin got away with writing
about Edna Pontellier is that this was this kind of
this French creole population in Louisiana that were sort of
known as being kind of foreigners. I actually should have
looked up when Louisiana became a state. If you're on

(30:24):
the YouTube, I will flash the year in which Louisiana
became a state. But obviously for a long time it
was under French rule, it had been under Spanish rule.
So I think there is this sense of Americans as
these other kind of populations as existing alongside people who
were like truly American, which god knows what that meant
in the end of the nineteenth century. But there is

(30:44):
this idea that some of the sensuality and some of
this kind of rebellion on the part of Edna was
somewhat more acceptable because she is part of this kind
of international group which maybe had a little more leeway
when it came to desire. So we're going to move
on now and talk about figurative language. We're not going
to look at too many examples. I'm just going to
sort of tick off a list of all of the
different ways that I think Chopin is actually wielding figurative

(31:08):
language to very good effect. So we have a lot
of symbolism for many reasons. The ocean, the sea is
kind of associated with women, partially because of the ocean
and the moon and our lunar calendars and women's fertility. Interestingly,
in French, of course, you have la maier, which is
it means both the mother but also the ocean. So
this idea of her not being able to swim in

(31:29):
the beginning, and the idea of her learning to swim,
and the idea of kind of becoming one with the
ocean is It's an important way that this idea of
like coming into her own femininity might be viewed. Also,
the ocean functions here as a kind of foreshadowing. This
idea of her not being able to know how to
swim and the process of learning to swim speaks to
her vulnerability and also speaks to kind of the agency

(31:52):
at the end that she has when she decides to
take her own life by wading out into the ocean.
We also have a couple of different points where music
ends up feeling like a kind of a foreshadowing device.
I want to look at one example of metaphor. There
is quite a bit of figurative language throughout, and it's
pretty good. You guys know that I am very picky
when it comes to metaphor, and similarly, I'm like, we

(32:13):
don't need these elaborate comparisons if they are not good.
But in this case, I actually really liked it in
part because it does also involve the ocean. So on
page sixty three, we have this sailing across the bay
to the Chanier Kaminada. Edna felt as if she were
being borne away from some anchorage, which had held her fast,
whose chains had been loosening, had snapped the night before

(32:35):
when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to
drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails. So I mean,
it's a little bit of an elaborate metaphor, but I
actually really like it. Not only do we have the
idea of the chains that were holding her, but we
have the idea of her moving away on the sea,
which is this kind of feminine entity, but then also
this idea of her having control over where she is going.

(32:58):
She is with Robert Ada this point, but he's like
chattering away, and she's really kind of coming into her
own in a way that has to do with him
and her passion for him, but also has everything to
do with her own agency. The last kind of figurative
language we're going to talk about is the one that
I was most impressed by, and it was the one
that was most obvious to me, which is the idea
of foils. So if you recall your sophomore English, a

(33:21):
foil is like someone who is in relative opposition to
someone else. There's someone who have, you know, a bunch
of things in common, but then they have some striking
differences that underscore the qualities in the two different people.
So towards the beginning of the novel, while they're all
at the resort, at the Lebron resort, you know, all
summering together, there is a pair of young lovers. They

(33:42):
are just called the young lovers, but they are these
they keep kind of popping up again and again, and
they're known by this generic kind of term, but they
are people who obviously are much happier in their love.
There are people who are together. They are people who
are kind of meant to be together. It's appropriate that
they are together, and they stand and in pretty stark
contrast to the way that missus Pontellier. Edna is wanting

(34:05):
to be with Robert, who is a younger man who
is single, and she in fact is married to someone else.
So you have this idea of the young lovers as
standing in stark contrast to Robert and Edna. We also
have Mademoiselle rise as this other kind of areas as,
this other kind of foil. So we have this independent
woman who never married, never had children, and who has

(34:26):
a pretty you know, serious and pretty solid social standing
in comparison with Edna who is literally sort of drowning
in domestic and societal expectations, which is a great segue
into the other one of the major foils in this novel,
which is Madame Ratignol, who is like this kind of
uber mom and Edna is always like in actually very

(34:49):
kind of obvious contrast. It should have felt kind of
more like on the nose and sort of like overdone,
But it didn't feel like that to me, which is
actually a real testament to the prose and to the
way that Kate Chopin is being very upfront with these things,
but in a way that is very palatable. So we
have a good example of that on page sixteen. In short,

(35:10):
Missus Pontellier was not a mother woman. Mother woman is
like a hyphenated, you know, sort of concept. There, the
mother women seemed to prevail that summer at grand Isle.
It was easy to know them fluttering about with extended
protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary threatened their
precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped

(35:32):
their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface
themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. Here
we also not only not only do we have the
foil of these other mother women, but we also have
this kind of mixed and extended metaphor here with this
idea of the women fluttering with these wings kind of
in a birdlike thing, and then also like angels. Many

(35:55):
of them were delicious in the role. One of them
was the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm. If
her husband did not adore her, he was a brute
deserving of death by slow torture. Her name was adel Ratignole.
So here we have this very pointed and I think
very very kind of complex and interesting way to introduce

(36:17):
this person who is a direct foil for the ways
that Edna is resisting her role as a mother. We
also see Missus Ratugnle and her husband and children as
kind of providing this notion of like perfect domestic harmony.
In fact, that phrase is used by Chopin in this
excellent description on page one oh four and one oh five.

(36:37):
So Missus Ratugnoll, Madame Ratignole, is not only a foil
in terms of her motherly role, but also just in
terms of the domestic So on one o four we
have this Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them.
The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered
her gave her no regret, no longing. It was not
a condition of life which fitted her, and she could

(37:00):
see in it, but an appalling and hopeless onoui. She
was moved by a kind of commiseration from Madame Ratignol,
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 life's delirium. Edna vaguely

(37:22):
wondered what she meant by life's delirium. It had crossed
her thought like some unsought extraneous impression. So what's important
here is we have this foil, this kind of perfect
domestic bliss, but Edna does not want it so importantly.
One of the ways that an author will use a
foil is either to show you know that someone has

(37:42):
regret and they want to be more like their foil.
But in this case, we have this kind of archetypally
kind of perfect, objectively perfect mother and wife, and yet
Edna is not interested in being any of those things.
So it's a little unusual to have a foil like
this and to have the you know, the protagonist really
against the foil and really stating very clearly that she

(38:03):
does not want the life of her foil. I want
to look a bit more deeply at this idea of maternity.
This is another one of those times when Kate Chopin
is very outspoken in a way that I really appreciate.
It's interesting to kind of like try to cast yourself
back to the end of the nineteenth century, when women
in that Victorian era, both in the United States and
in England, and I imagine in other places across the world,

(38:25):
were really looked upon just as a vehicle for procreation.
And I mentioned before that we often see the young
boys to the foreign five year olds in relation to
either Robert or mister Pontellier. And at the very beginning
of the book, on page six, we have this both
children wanted to follow their father when they saw him
starting out, he kissed them and promised to bring them

(38:46):
back bonbonds and peanuts. So this is the end of
the very first chapter. And it's very interesting that the
first time we see these young boys, it is the
two of them interacting with their father. He's kissing them,
he's promising them things, he's doing things that are actually
very sort of matern Then on page nine we have
one of the first introductions of Robert and this interaction
between Edna and Robert. So right from the beginning we

(39:08):
see them together, we see them being like fairly bold
about their desire for one another. We find out, in fact,
in this interaction very early in the book that her
mother is dead. It's a very important part of the
kind of quick biography that she is giving to Robert.
And then at the end of the second chapter, the
end of the first one, we see the children with
their father. At the end of the second chapter, only

(39:30):
pages later, we see them in relationship to their mother,
and kind of shockingly, we don't, in fact have Edna
interacting with her children. We have her young lover interacting
with them. So at the end of the second chapter
you have Robert interacting with these young boys, and not
only do we have him interacting, but we have missus
Pontellier Edna really not interacting with them. So at the

(39:51):
end of page nine we have this when Missus Pontellier
left him to enter her room. The young man descended
the steps and strolled over toward the crow k players,
where during the half hour before dinner, he amused himself
with the little Pontellier children, who were very fond of him.
So we have these two men in the first two
chapters who are really standing in and in the second

(40:12):
one in particular, we have Missus Pontellier off in her
room while other people are doing these sort of maternal things.
Just a couple of pages later, on pages ten and eleven,
I mean, this is all being piled up really pretty heavily.
At the very beginning of the book, we have mister
Pontellier thinking this about Edna. He thought it very discouraging
that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence,

(40:35):
evinced so little interest in things which concerned him and
valued so little his conversation. Mister Pontellier had forgotten the bond,
bonds and peanuts for the boys, notwithstanding he loved them
very much. I mean, honestly, nobody's doing great parenting here.
Right across the way he reproached his wife with her
inattention her habitual neglect of the children. If it was

(40:59):
not a mother's place to look after children, whose on
earth was it? And of course you know they have
a lot of babysitters and nannies and stuff happening here.
But he's getting to this much more important truth here,
you know, at the very beginning of the book, on
page eleven, about the fact that she is not maternal.
I'm just glancing at the page here and at the
bottom it's the beginning of an X paragraph, But it

(41:19):
says this missus Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake,
so that was just her waking up. But this idea
of waking does come right after this idea that she
was not a great mother, which just speaks to the
way that all of this is so well woven together.
Then on page eighty eight we have an even more
striking and even more kind of bald statement about how

(41:40):
Edna feels about her children. So I'm kind of in
the middle of eighty eight. Edna had once told Madame
Ratignol that she would never sacrifice herself for her children
or for anyone. Then had followed a rather heated argument.
The two women did not appear to understand each other
or to be talking the same language. Edna tried to
appease her friend to explain, I would give up the unessential.

(42:04):
I would give up my money. I would give my
life for my children, but I wouldn't give myself. I
can't make it more clear. It's only something which I
am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me,
and it is there is like an interesting kind of
conundrum there. She's saying she would give her life for
her children, like if it came down to it, she
would sacrifice herself, meaning you know, she would stand in

(42:26):
for them and die. But if she is going to live,
she is not in fact going to live a life
where they are her sole occupation. It's also very important here,
of course, that she is talking to Madame Ratignol, who
is the archetypal mother figure in the novel. It's really
interesting to take a step back and think about Anna Karenna.
You do not have to have read it for me
to tell you. It was published about twenty years before

(42:49):
the Awakening, but in it, Anna is very hostage to
this idea that she doesn't want to leave her son.
She understands that if she goes off with Vronsky. She
will in fact be abandoning her child, and it is
one of the driving forces. She herself is very ambivalent
about leaving him behind. It's interesting to me that twenty
years later we don't have a lot of that. Of course,

(43:10):
the reason I'm saying that is because at the end
of the novel we do have a little bit of ambivalence.
So on page two thirteen, this is right before she
is going to take her life by wading into the ocean,
And we have this, and we're going to get to this.
But the very important thing about the end, she is
walking into the ocean. She's taking her own life because
her love for Robert is unrequited. In the meantime, she

(43:32):
has had this experience with a robin, I'll say a robin,
but that has only served to prove that she is
just hopelessly in love with Robert, who is not returning
her devotion. So we have this. She had said over
and over to herself. Today it is a robin. Tomorrow
it will be someone else. It makes no difference to me.
It doesn't matter about Leonce Pontellier, but Raoul and Etienne.

(43:56):
She understood now clearly what she had meant Lana when
she said to Adele Ratignol that she would give up
the unessential, but she would never sacrifice herself for her children.
Despondency had come upon her in the wakeful night and
had never lifted. There was no one thing in the
world that she desired. There was no human being whom
she wanted near her except Robert, and she even realized

(44:19):
that the day would come when he too, and the
thought of him, would melt out of her existence, leaving
her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who
had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag
her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days,
but she knew a way to elude them. She was
not thinking of these things when she walked down to

(44:40):
the beach. I mean, soul's slavery, Like this is a
pretty serious condemnation of what it is to be a mother.
It's also so interesting that we have this relatively long
passage and then this idea of she was not thinking
about these things as she was walking down to the beach.
I mean, in some ways that seems like kind of illogical,
but what we are meant to do take away, I

(45:01):
strongly believe is that these are thoughts that she has
had for some period of time. These are thoughts that
are very habitual, These are thoughts that are very deep.
We know, in fact that she had them in the
middle of the night, and she is already resolute. She
already knows what she is going to do, and she's
kind of worked through this idea of abandoning her children,
and very clearly she feels justified in this idea of

(45:21):
not wanting to live a life unless she has this
kind of passion. So we were going to take a
close look here at the idea of desire and sex writing,
and we're not going to actually do that because I
don't think we really need to. There was one short
passage where essentially she was talking early in the book,
on page one point fifty six about the idea of
not having shame and remorse. I mean, even at that

(45:41):
early point in the book, she was already sort of
working out the importance of passion and the importance of
this relationship with Robert, even if it is unrequited. And honestly,
we don't need to talk about the sex writing because
there really isn't any At one point we realize that
she and Robert have had this kind of very ardent kiss.
And there are two different times where I believe that
we are meant to see that she and i'll say

(46:03):
a Robin have actually had sex. But there's that kind
of thing where it's not described, it's totally elighted I
can just read this very brief part to you. Edna speaks. First,
I thought you were going away, she said, in an
uneven voice. I am after I have said goodnight. Good night,
she murmured. He did not answer, except to continue to
caress her. He did not say good night until she

(46:25):
had become supple in his gentle seductive entreaties, which I
think is kind of funny. I mean, if I'm going
to find fault with some part of the book, I
think this kind of idea of that she had become
supple to his gentle seductive entreaties, that to me is
not like a super strong description or even kind of
an allusion of what is happening there in terms of sex. So,
even though we don't have a lot of comment about

(46:46):
sexual desire, and we certainly don't have passages where we're
describing any kind of physical interaction between Edna and either
I'll say a Robin or Robert, who is her idealized
unrequited love. The idea of desire and passion is really
strong all throughout and really does culminate in the end.
So we're going to close by looking at the end

(47:07):
of the novel, and I want to look at this
in kind of a different way. I think lots of
times people think of Anna Karenna, and you know, the
way that she takes her life at the end of
the novel is the fact that you know, she's being
sort of punished for having this passionate love for Vronsky.
And I think that many people think of the Awakening
in the same sort of way that if she has
to take her life, if she has to end her life,

(47:28):
what that means is that her passion and her devotion,
even though it is an unrequited love, all of that
passion and devotion is like somehow a bad thing, and
she's kind of punished for it because she has to die.
So I would argue something else, which is that what
she has at the end, what she is showing by
deciding to take her life, is agency. So she is

(47:48):
someone who has power, and she is someone who has
said again and again I don't want to live within
these strictures of domesticity and marriage and maternity. Importantly, at
one point she moves out of her I mean, all
of these bold things that she is doing. She has
this smaller house that she sets up and has sort
of these encounters with society on her own terms. That

(48:10):
is not code for like having sex or orgies or something,
obviously given what I just said, but she's recreating this
kind of society where there is kind of passion. I mean,
sometimes it doesn't work out that well for her, but
still she is doing things on her own terms. So
my sense of what is happening at the end here
is that all the way until the end, and in
this very you know, bold way, she is rejecting this

(48:33):
life that is offered to her. She can't have her
affair with her young passionate lover because he in fact
doesn't want to have an affair with her. And from
the passages I read, we know that she also recognizes
that that kind of love would be fleeting, but she
still is like, I'm not going to sign up for
marriage and domesticity and Tuesday visits from all of the
ladies in society and maternity. She doesn't want any of that.

(48:56):
Her sons importantly have been sent away to their grandparents,
so they are not even part of the picture. But
I think a lot of people read this suicide as
some sort of like, you know, she's giving in and
she is like despairing and she's understanding that this kind
of passion is impossible. But I will say it again,
I think what she is doing here is actually having
a lot of conviction in her sense of what she

(49:17):
wants for herself. Also, the ending of this book is
so gorgeous. I really love the prose and we're going
to take a look at it here. We're not going to,
you know, purse it, but I'm just going to treat
you to it. So this is the very end of
the novel. This is two fourteen and two fifteen. Edna
had found her old bathing suit still hanging faded upon

(49:37):
its accustomed peg. She put it on, leaving her clothing
in the bathhouse. But when she was there beside the sea,
absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant pricking garments from her
and for the first time in her life, stood naked
in the open air at the mercy of the sun.
The breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that

(49:58):
invited her. Obviously I this. I'm a fan of nudity,
and certainly the idea of being naked in public in
eighteen ninety nine, even if you are on the way
to take your own life. How strange and awful it
seemed to stand naked under the sky. How delicious she felt,
like some newborn creature opening its eyes in a familiar

(50:18):
world that it had never known. The foamy wavelets curled
up to her white feet and coiled like serpents about
her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but
she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted
her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke.
The touch of the sea is sensuous, in folding the

(50:39):
body in its soft, close embrace. She went on and on.
She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled
the terror that had seized her at the fear of
being unable to regain the shore. She did not look
back now, but went on and on, thinking of the
blue grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child,

(51:00):
leaving that it had no beginning and no end. Her
arms and legs were growing tired. She thought of Leonce
and the children. They were a part of her life,
but they need not have thought that they could possess
her body and soul. How Mademoiselle Rise would have laughed,
perhaps sneered, if she knew. And you call yourself an artist,
what pretensions, madam? The artist must possess the courageous soul

(51:24):
that dares and defies exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her. Goodbye,
because I love you. He did not know, He did
not understand, He would never understand. Perhaps doctor Mandalaier would
have understood if she had seen him, But it was
too late. The shore was far behind her, and her
strength was gone. She looked into the distance, and the

(51:46):
old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.
Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She
heard the barking of an old dog that was chained
to the sycamore tree, the spurs of the cavalry officer
as he walked across the porch. There was the hum
of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.

(52:07):
So gorgeous, so gorgeous. I'm going to let that stand.
I'm just going to leave you with these Sorry, my
books all just fail down. I'm going to leave you
with these gorgeous words of Kate Chopin, not only the
gorgeous prose, but also this idea of a really, really
bold way to face the strictures of this kind of
Victorian era and this American society where what our protagonist

(52:30):
wanted was not at all in line with what society
wanted for her. I hope that you have found this
deep dive into Kate Chopin's The Awakening, you know, I
hope you find it a little inspirational. In some ways,
I feel like we've come a really really far distance.
In some ways, I feel like we have not. But
I do think we have to look at the writing
and at the content of a book like this and

(52:50):
just marvel that someone one hundred and twenty five years
ago had the intelligence and the boldness to create a
text that is so incredible. Thank you so much for
tuning in. Happy reading,