Reading The Awakening Wrong**

I've always hated Kate Chopin's The Awakening, ever since it was forced upon us in high school.  When, as a 19-year-old college senior, 8 months pregnant, I was designated in my Literary Criticism  class to read aloud the Marxist feminist essay on The Awakening that argued that motherhood rendered a woman's life meaningless, I was amused, but not more inclined to like the tale.  I have not quite decided to reread it, as I am still inclined to think that trotting out The Awakening as a long-lost, long-forgotten classic that was suppressed because of the patriarchal slant of the canon was bona fide First- or Second Wave feminist nonsense, but as I was turning it over in my mind today, I decided to jot down a few thoughts.

While it may seem like a drastic departure from the Outlander series, I'm not sure that it wasn't, in fact, Outlander that brought it to mind.  Or at least, it was Outlander with its discourses on gender, sexuality, and motherhood, combined with my own thoughts on those very same subjects--which happen, actually, to be some of my very favorite subjects, just not as they are usually treated by literary critics and gender theorists.  My own model of literary criticism would take as a starting point the reader's reactions and the connections that proceed from those reactions, rather than taking as a starting point some external point of reference, like Marx (for an easy example).  It is entirely possible that Marx might become relevant (though usually not here), and certainly external theorists, philosophers, and critics--many more (and many more classical and Enlightenment philosophers) than exist in the current canon in the humanities--should be available as a point of reference.  But in order for the writer to be truly invested in the analysis, in order to be writing something that is, for her, meaningful, and in order for the result to have originality and resonance, the initial spark should be at least somewhat personal.  This is why student papers on "Good and Evil in XY Literary Work" will always be doomed to failure (well, one reason)--lack of personal investment.  (The same can be said about hot topics in composition courses.  Because really?  They don't have much invested in a paper about lowering the drinking age, even if they think they do.)  It is the original combination of influences, experiences, and knowledge that shape an original critic.

So I found myself thinking about motherhood.  And thinking about my recent posts, here and here, about women in some stage of becoming mothers claiming the child as their own, I realized--this is a necessary step in becoming a mother.  It is, in some ways, a sign of the maturity and capacity to mother a child.  It is--at least in Dragonfly in Amber and Voyager--an Awakening.  But it is clearly a step that is missing from Chopin's Awakening.

So I thought to myself, perhaps that's the point.  Perhaps the feminist icon Edna Pontellier was not a model of subversion and rebellion.  Certainly, she achieves self-negation rather than succumbing to the role of mother.  But is this the result of a deep character flaw, or a nobility of cause and purpose?  She is petulant.  She is childish.  She is weak.  She is hardly an admirable character.  And yet I remember having the distinct impression that her act of self-negation, because it was rebellion against the only possible role available to her as a woman, was a noble act.  Is it any wonder I regarded the work with disgust?  I do remember asking how her original audience received the story.  I'm not sure my teacher in high school new the answer--and when I was in college, my questions about reception were automatically dismissed as irrelevant.  I believe that Chopin was popular--it's one of the arguments for retaining her in the revised canon (If she was relevant in her own time, why have we dismissed her? Because she's a woman?  And yet, Tolkien is often considered unworthy of graduate study because he is popular, as when a course on his novels was proposed in my degree-granting department.)

Thinking further about Pontellier, though, I remember how she was set up against Adèle Ratignolle, the epitome of perfect, devoted motherhood.  While I find Edna repugnant, Adèle is not a suitable alternative, because to be held up to such a model of perfection could make any woman feel that self-annihilation is preferable to 1) that model of motherhood, or 2) trying to live up to that model while knowing the impossibility of achieving it.

I couldn't help visualizing this New Yorker cover, with its take on women and identity.

It seems that every model of womanhood in The Awakening is impossible, or imperfect, or undesirable, and perhaps that is more to the point than the claim that motherhood negates one's identity.  Edna Pontellier did not have an identity.  She looked for one in the women she knew, and she looked for one as a lover of the men she knew, and she was unable to find anything to fill her own void.  Rather, she becomes aware of herself as the Self that cannot be signified (a reference to Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy).  She cannot identify herself except with reference to others, and finds, finally, that her self does not exist, and yields to non-existence.  I find this slightly more interesting, but I still find Edna Pontellier to be a waste of a significant chunk of novella.

As it reflects on motherhood, though--it is her failure as a mother to claim her children that seems significant.  I have written papers (in grad school) about the need for the postfeminist woman to come to terms with fertility, and the choice to--or not to--mother.  But women constantly have choices put before them regarding their fertility, though they are not discussed as such. The "choice" that is commonly evoked with reference to women's fertility is, in fact, and act of violence that negates that fertility.  The choice that Edna never makes is the choice to claim her children as her own.  And it is only when she makes that choice that she can construct an identity that includes the act of mothering, even if her identity is not limited to Mother.

**I leave it open whether I am reading it wrong--intentionally against the grain--or whether I think that the feminist readings I was taught were wrong.  At the end of the day, I am not, in fact, committed to the text, though I am invested in the ideas of motherhood, choice (no, not that kind of choice!), and identity.