An X-rated Awakening

In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edna Pontellier kills herself in a bizarre sexual swim that culminates in her tiring and drowning in the embrace of the sea – her lover. Because of her childhood experiences, Edna is searching for a lover who will accept her for who and what she is.

The Awakening begins with Mrs. Pontellier as a child. She is physically a grown woman, but intellectually and emotionally she is a child. Mrs. Pontellier is a completely subordinate to her husband. He chastises her for disagreeing with him about their child's fever: "He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children, If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it?" (24). Mrs. Pontellier runs from the room crying in a child-like manner, "She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences ... seemed never before to have weighed much against the abundance of her husband's kindness and a uniform devotion which had come to be tacit and self-understood" (25). She feels foolish and guilty for being upset. It isn't until chapter 6 that Chopin gives Mrs. Ponteller her first name, Edna. Only in the context of she visit to the beach does she begin to take on an identity of her own. "A certain light was beginning to dawn within her" (31).

That night she grows up. She faces her fears and uncertainties and takes her first successful swim, "she was like a tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its power, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence" (46). She grows up and is informed of the significance of the swim by Robert, a future lover:

a spirit that has haunted these shored for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some mortal worthy to hold him company, ... His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But to-night he found Mrs. Pontellier. Perhaps he will never wholly release her form the spell. (48).

While Edna isn't possessed, as Robert suggests, she is, like a child, enlightened by the new-found freedom the swim provides.

Edna is abandoned by every lover she has. As a child, she became "enamored of a dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer melted imperceptibly out of her existence." (36). As a teen, she fell in love with a young man only to realize "that she herself was nothing, nothing, nothing to the engaged young man." (36). These lost, childhood lovers war echoed in her adult life. Her husband, Leone, leaves her on the pretense of business. Arobin befriends her at the racetrack, then one day "he leaned forward and kissed her, ... It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded, It was a flaming torch that kindled desire." Unfortunately, his torch is wet and sputters and fades into darkness. The darkness is replaced by Robert. When he returns from his business trip to Mexico, they consummate the agape relationship. This time it is Edna who takes control, "She reached over and kissed him – a soft, coo, delicate kiss, whose voluptuous sting penetrated his whole being" (128). But Robert cannot handle the twist in the relationship, and abandons Edna, writing, "I love you. Good-by – because I love you." (134).

The sea is the only faithful, accepting and enduring lover, it never leaves her. She first experiences it as a child in a Kentucky field:

a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water.... I don't remember whether I was frightened or pleased. I must have been entertained. (134-5).

As an adult, the two times she encounters the sea she makes love with it, it caresses her, "The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace." (32 and 136). The sea accepts her, loves her and, unlike her other lovers, cannot leave her.

Not only is Edna abandoned by the men in her life, but by her mother too, "their mother having died when they were quite young." (35). This lack of matronly care is reflected in her less-than-exemplary raising of her children:

She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.... Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional intense longing. Their absence was a sort of relief (37).

Chopin sums Edna's mothering beautifully when she tells us, "In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman.... They were women who idolized their children" (26).

Edna is a woman of the '90s - the 1990s. She is liberated woman trapped in a society that is unable and unwilling to accept her. Her swim frees her from the bonds of naiveté. Shortly after returning to New Orleans, she begins to reject the social convention, "She began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked. She completely abandoned her Tuesdays at home, and did not return the visits of those who had called upon her." (76). After her husband leaves her, she abandons the house for a small, dilapidated apartment of her choosing in the French Quarter. In order to save social appearances, Mr. Pontellier remodels the house, yet curiously doesn't bother to return home to check on his wife. Edna even gives up everything for her freedom, even her children, "There was with her a feeling of having descended the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward reliving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual." (115). Edna's transformation completes itself upon returning to the Grand Isle. There she realizes that she cannot be accommodated by society-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be some one else. It makes no difference to me" (136). Edna realizes that everyone is expendable in her quest to discover herself

Her father sees her change and rebukes Léonce for having allowed them, "'You are too lenient by far, Léonce,' asserted the Colonel. 'Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife.'" Chopin warns us that, "the Colonel had coerced his own wife into her grave." Edna allows no such manipulation.

Edna foreshadows her own demise with her story at the soirees musicales that she attends with her father. She has become so complete a person that she can fabricate a story about a pair of lovers who paddle off and become lost, "and no one ever heard of them or found trace of them from that day to this." (90).

Edna seeks freedom from the oppression of her childhood, society and the men who wish to control her. She finds it in her final lover – the sea. the only one who is willing to accept her for who she is and allow her the freedom she needs. She casts off last year's bathing suit, faded and dulled like the societal experience she was once so enamored of, and enters her last embrace with her lover nude, dressed only in the innocence and purity of her pale skin, "she cast the unpleasant pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of ... the waves that invited her in." (136).

-Feb 19, 1997.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. St. Martin's Press: New York. l 993.