Notes Toward a Fin-de-Siecle Reading of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
Dieter Schultz, American Literary Realism, 25.3, Spring 1993, p. 69-76
In the following essay, Schulz explores similarities between The Awakening and other works written at the end of the nineteenth century.
The ending of Chopin's The Awakening signals Edna Pontellier's failure to resolve the conflict between her urge toward self-realization and the constricting conventions of society. Most critics, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has remarked, treat the novel "as a problem novel that cries out for a 'solution.'"1 They see Edna's conflict in cultural terms--in the framework of late Victorianism and the post-bellum South--or as a version of the Romantic quest for transcendence. From these perspectives, Chopin's protagonist appears as either a failed New Woman or a failed Romantic, with the blame being variously placed on society or Edna or both.
Useful as these approaches are, they tend to obscure the literary dimension of Chopin's art. As we know from her biography, Chopin's taste was cosmopolitan. She was an avid reader of British, German, Italian, and, above all, French fiction, and she had a strong interest in music (notably Wagner) and the arts. According to Daniel Rankin, "[Chopin] absorbed the atmosphere and the mood of the ending of the century, as that ending is reflected in Continential European art and literature."2 Rankin's reservations about what he considered to be the morbid elements in Chopin's novel should not blind us to the relevance of his insight. Taking my cue from the title of a recent collection of Chopin criticism, I wish to encourage readers and critics to go not only "beyond the bayou" but also beyond the U.S. by drawing attention to some of the international trends that intersect in The Awakening.3 Published in 1899, the book is an important example of a fin-de-siècle sensibility. Chopin's original title was "A Solitary Soul." Edna's solitude bears strong resemblances to many other solitary figures in the literature and art produced around 1900. From a comparative perspective, The Awakening appears as a novel of moods rather than as a piece of social fiction; Edna's "problem" has the distinctive flavor of turn-of-the-century mood poetry and art nouveau.
A Mood Novel
In an important interpretation of Chopin's novel, George Arms underscores the vagueness of Edna's rebellion and her tendency to lapse into sleep: "On the whole, as she reveals herself, her aimlessness impresses us more than her sense of conflict. [...] Edna appears not so much as a woman who is aware of the opposition of two ideals but rather as one who drifts--who finally, even in death, is drifting when she again recalls having wandered on the blue-green meadow as a little girl." Arms goes on to comment on Edna's "sleepiness from reading Emerson" and her "inordinate amount of sleeping throughout the novel, in spite of her underlying vitality."4
Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream as well as Thoreau's Walden suggest that the fully realized self requires a double awakening: The first is a movement from everyday consciousness to a dream world; the second marks the completed initiation, the achievement of an authentic self.5 Edna never moves beyond the first stage; she remains in a state of half-slumber. As her senses are awakened, her soul, as it were, sinks into her body. The result is a frame of mind that is close to somnambulism. Even when she appears to take note of her surroundings, Edna's gaze is inward rather than outward: "Mrs. Pontellier's eyes were quick and bright; they were a yellowish brown, about the color of her hair. She had a way of turning them swiftly upon an object and holding them there as if lost in some inward maze of contemplation or thought."6 As her sensuality unfolds itself, she turns more and more inward: "Edna looked straight before her with a self-absorbed expression upon her face. She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic" (54).
Edna's gaze combines an intense inner life with drowsiness and ennui. One of the earliest and most striking versions of this combination of inwardness and alienation was offered by Balzac in his description of the Marquise d'Aiglemont in La Femme de trente ans (1834):
La marquise, alors âgée de trente ans, était belle quoique frêle de formes et d'une excessive délicatesse. Son plus grand charme venait d'une physionomie dont le calme trahissait une étonnante profondeur dans l'âme. Son oil plein d'éclat, mais qui semblait voilé par une pensée constante, accusait une vie fiévreuse et la résignation la plus étendue. Ses paupières, presque toujours chastement baissées vers la terre, se relevaient rarement. Si elle jetait des regards autour d'elle, c'était par un mouvement triste, et vous eussiez dit qu'elle réservait le feu de ses yeux pour d'occultes contemplations.7
Chopin was familiar with Balzac's writings, and the parallels are striking indeed, but an even more immediate model for Edna's pensive look may have been the Pre-Raphaelite portraits of women by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edvard Burne-Jones. Commenting on these portraits in 1900, Rudolf Kassner, one of the leading fin-de-siècle figures in Germany, was struck by the dreamy, melancholy expression and the peculiar sensuality of the women: Body and soul seem to have become one, or rather, the body has become a symbol of the soul; by the same token, these women exist in a sphere of their own, unrelated to society, and separated even from the male who may have aroused their sensuality.8 A key concept in Kassner's analysis is the notion of mood ("Stimmung"). The women depicted in Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry embody a mood--a mysterious, unfathomable disposition of the psyche. Hugo von Hofmannsthal had made much the same point when he reported on the 1894 Vienna Exhibition. He marveled at the "soulfulness" in the eyes of Rossetti's and Burne-Jones' women; there was a depth and a mystery in these eyes, combined with melancholy, that provided a fitting emblem of the modern artist's sensibility.9
Mood was a central category in fin-de-siècle literature and art. In the writings of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Arthur Symons, mood advanced to a privileged concept. Reality was considered as a product of moods; hence poetry inevitably focused on a mood or several moods. According to Yeats' essay "The Moods," "[l]iterature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul."10
Edna's awakening involves both the discovery of a new inner life and an escape from ordinary, conventional reality. This nexus of intensity and alienation is characteristic of mood poetry. In his book on William Blake, Symons relates the modern idea of moods to Blake's concept of states: "By states Blake means very much what we mean by moods, which in common with many mystics, he conceives as permanent spiritual forces, through which what is transitory in man passes, while man imagines that they, more transitory than himself, are passing through him."11 Mood thus provides the modern equivalent of transcendence. In German literature around 1900, mood became a privileged notion to suggest the blurring and expanding of perceptual boundaries. The early poetry of Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Stefan George focuses on transitory psychic states in an effort to shift or indeed suspend the limitations of ordinary experience. As Helmuth Koopmann has pointed out, these poems project neither utopias nor artificial paradises, but an intra-psychic world of dreams and vague, floating desires. The process of transcendence, in short, is neither upward nor outward but inward into the recesses of the soul.
While the poets, thanks to the subjective quality of their genre, express powerful visions of great intensity, the prose writers, in contrast, tend to develop the escapist and self-defeating components of inward transcendence. In the early fiction of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the clash of subjectivity with social norms leads to alienation and death. Withdrawal, defeat, and death are the inevitable consequences of the protagonists' adherence to their moods.12
From this perspective, The Awakening dramatizes less the failure of a would-be New Woman than the gradual, step-by-step deepening of a mood. If Chopin's protagonist challenges society in her final swim, she does so by remaining true to her dominant mood. Her psychic disposition involves an intense though vague fantasy life and, at the same time, a withdrawal from social obligations. If Edna's stance is affected by her being a woman and a wife, we should also recognize that her final gesture would have been understood by Thomas Mann's Aschenbach and many other solitary souls in turn-of-the-century literature.
Nature and Symbolism
Edna's withdrawal from society is completed by her immersion in the natural element of water. Critics usually point to the Romantics and Walt Whitman as the chief sources of inspiration for Chopin's use of nature images.13 The reference to the Romantic tradition is helpful but ultimately misleading. According to Benita von Heynitz, Chopin's treatment of nature and the relationship between the protagonist and nature has strong affinities with art nouveau or Jugendstil, a trend in turn-of-the-century art and literature that marks a departure from late Romanticism as well as décadence and anticipates elements of modernism and expressionism.14
The nature symbolism of art nouveau differs both from the romantic symbol with its ontological underpinning and from the objective correlative or modernism which cancels the expression of the subject. The fundamental assumption underlying Romantic nature imagery and symbolism is the ontological analogy between the human mind and nature. Due in part to the writings of Charles Darwin, this analogy collapsed in the second half of the nineteenth century. No longer in (even potential) harmony with nature, the self withdraws into an interior space. Nature continues to provide a wealth of imagery, but nature symbolism now serves as a chiffre--a kind of shorthand for subjective moods. No longer grounded in an ontology, the connection between mind and nature turns into a suggestive relationship anchored in the psychic state of the protagonist.15
Edna experiences the sea as alluring and threatening. Few readers will miss the crucial passage in Chapter 7, if only because it is repeated almost verbatim at the end of the novel:
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.(15)
Suicide by drowning was a popular motif in nineteenth-century fiction, particularly in novels dramatizing the plight of the "fallen woman." Another, and more pertinent, antecedent to Chopin's novel is Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852): Perhaps for the first time in American fiction, drowning is stylized into an aesthetic act (albeit an abortive one) on the part of the woman.16 The aesthetic potential of the motif was fully exploited in the second half of the century. John Everett Millais' famous Ophelia painting of 1852 inspired a host of literary responses, among them Rimbaud's equally famous "Ophélie" (1870).
While the many variations on the theme of the fallen woman explore the moral implications of the motif, artists and writers became more and more fascinated by what they perceived to be the aesthetic affinity between the female body and water. As the sinuous line replaced the techniques of impressionism as a structural device, painters developed the analogy between female and watery outlines to the point where body and element became fused into one. G. J. V. Clairin's Wave (1890) and Aristide Maillol's woodcut with the same title (1898) are only two of the most famous examples of what one could almost call an obsession in the artistic community. In 1889 Paul Gauguin painted Undine, the water spirit of German folklore who, after a temporary stay among ordinary mortals, returns to her watery realm. Undine became one of the most common motifs in 1890s painting and graphic art. The English translation of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine (1811) was enthusiastically reviewed by Poe in 1839. On one of his tours of Great Britain, Theodor Fontane noted the extraordinary popularity of the romance in England.17
Kate Chopin owned a copy of Undine.18 Like Undine, Edna retreats to the water after a disappointment in love. More importantly, The Awakening, much like the Undine versions in literature and the arts, suggests a natural affinity between woman and water--"natural" in aesthetic, indeed decorative, terms. As von Heynitz points out, the emphasis, in art nouveau, on naturalness marks an important departure from the Pre-Raphaelite and décadence renderings of the female body. The paintings of Rossetti, for instance, often seem to capture a moment of great expectancy; Kassner suggests that it is the moment before the woman is embraced by the male. Strongly tinged by the male gaze, some of Rossetti's women exude the allure and the threat of the femme fatale. One reviewer of The Awakening was obviously under the impression of this type of portrait when he felt reminded of "one of Aubrey Beardsley's hideous but haunting pictures with their disfiguring leer of sensuality [...]."19 It is precisely this "leer of sensuality" that is missing from Chopin's protagonist. Thus the reviewer's remark alerts us to the distinctiveness of Edna's awakening. Chopin's treatment of Edna's sensuality is as far removed from the moralizing tradition of the "fallen woman" literature as it is from the lasciviousness of décadence. The emphasis she places on the healthiness and naturalness of erotic impulses puts her protagonist into the company of Undine and the numerous other mermaids that populate art nouveau literature and art.