A TRUE SOLITARY JOURNEY

‘THE AWAKENING’ BY KATE CHOPIN

I was ever of opinion that Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening: a solitary soul’ is about homosexual relationships and a woman exploring various kinds of desires and experiences in a patriarchal society. I was wrong.

From the start of the novel,

“A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!"

He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking- bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.”

we come across the characters (arguably universal, like the parrots and mockbirds of nature), in a way that is indirect.

The starting adopts a way that is so very reminiscent of Victorian writings, but still, in my opinion, transgresses its similarities and boundaries, being in the late Victorian era of 1899.

If you start talking about the symbols and imagery you might find in this text, you can write whole articles about it. But, maybe, that’s the point of a piece of writing- so good, that you keep going back in those words, and build around them a world of your own.

If one might try to summarise it in a few words,

Mrs. Edna Pontellier, asleep and ignorant about the suffocations and passivity of her life, starts to wake up, slowly and steadily, amid love. Love ignites and awakens Edna. Small incidents of a patriarchal world, finally make sense to her, and awaken her. She wakes up in a world outside the reach of obligations, norms, constraints, restrictions, judgements, bindings, and problems. The world where Edna finally awakens, is a world of freedom and self dependency, where there are no judgements, no transgressions, and just peace.

“Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.”

Edna befriends various ladies on her vacation to Grand Isle, who become the different kinds of personalities women wear, and such personalities are what Edna wants to shed off. She finds herself awakening amid the two extreme personalities of Adéle Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz.

She finds herself in Robert Lebrun, who becomes her lover. He awakens her spirits, which were thrown down in a dungeon and locked away, screaming to finally feel the embrace of water and wind and soil and fire, and finally live in the love of her own self, everlasting and eternal.

Scared of their relationship being unconventional and unacceptable, Robert runs away to Mexico and doesn’t even write directly to Edna, but talks about her in his letters to Reisz, which Edna finds herself reading and crying. Music becomes a constant in her journey and awakens within her the images of a solitary life, full of escapism.

After returning from her vacation, Edna Pontellier continues her journey and becomes just Edna. Literally left alone, she builds herself ‘a pigeon house’, where she finds solace.

Though Robert was not present with her, he remained with her constantly, occupying her thoughts and journey. Edna realises her true self, independent of her husband, Leónce Pontellier, and finds her sexual self awakening.

“…he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

She engages in an extramarital affair with Alceé Arobin, and feels guilty for cheating on Robert.

“There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert;”

Soon enough, Robert returns and although, he tries to avoid her, life pushes them together, and they end up confessing to each other. Edna tells him that she will give herself wherever she wants to, and that she infact, loves him dearly. Intoxicated in passion, Robert is ready to transgress the societal norms, but Edna had to leave to take care of Adéle, who was going through labour. This symbolically connects to the idea of Edna being snatched back to her children and her obligations, care, love for them. By the time she returns, Robert leaves, all that remained in her house was a note, reading,

“I love you. Good-by, because I love you.”

Edna awakens completely after this, on a more solitary level. After a few days, she transcends the boundaries of being Edna, and becomes, finally, one with nature.

Well, that was more than a few words. Still, this novel, according to me, is about the realisations, the awakening, the stirring, the movement, the voice that echoes inside one and begs them to wake up.

A feminist reading of this book is spectacular, and really needed. Edna says,

“I don’t mind walking. I always feel so sorry for women who don’t like to walk; they miss so much — so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.”

This novel is something that might awaken within you- something.