Don't Nap for Self-Care. Wake up! (The Awakening, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on The Awakening, we welcome editor Laura Fisher to discuss Kate Chopin's writing career, the novel's reception and themes, as well as some of its major characters.

Laura R. Fisher is an associate professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Awakening, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/TheAwakeningNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/theawakening/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to The Awakening, Kate Chopin's novel, originally published in 1899. To discuss this fascinating work, we welcome the volume’s editor, Laura R. Fisher. In our first episode we discuss Chopin’s background, her writing career, the themes she explores in The Awakening and what an awakening means in the context of this novel. Laura Fisher is Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her monograph, Reading for Reform: The Social Life of Literature in the Progressive Era, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2019. Her scholarly and cultural work has been published widely, and she is currently writing a book titled Girl on the Line, which tells the story of how one forgotten memoir from 1913 galvanized multiple social movements. We are delighted that she joins us today. Laura Fisher, welcome to the Norton Library podcast.

[Laura:] Thank you so much for having me; it's great to chat with you.

[Mark:] Looking forward to discussing your edition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and why don't we start by talking about Kate Chopin herself? Who was she, and what was her path that led to the writing of this novel?

[Laura:] Well, Kate Chopin did not begin her career as a writer until a little bit later in life. She was born in St. Louis, and she came from a fairly wealthy family, and she had a very good education for a young woman of her day. She married a man named Oscar Chopin when she was quite young, and she had six children in pretty fast succession. And she did not begin writing until after her husband's death. So, her husband died, I think it was 1882, leaving her with six children to care for, and he had been a fairly well-regarded businessman; he worked as a cotton factor. But after his death she needed some more money, and she started writing. And she self-published a novel called At Fault, and she then began publishing her short stories, or she began publishing short stories before that novel came out. And she wrote many short stories, and they were fairly well-liked, and she had two short story collections. And then The Awakening was published in 1899.

[Mark:] So, what is it about The Awakening that seems like it was the most enduring of all the works that Chopin ever wrote?

[Laura:] Well, during her lifetime, her short stories were the things that really brought her attention and some small measure of fame as an author, but it's The Awakening that I think is probably most taught today and definitely the title that is associated with her name most readily. And I think it's because the novel touches on themes that, however distant you might be from the situation of her characters and the place of Louisiana, however distant you might be historically or personally in terms of identity, there are usually some aspects of this protagonist's search and her experience that can be seen as universal or that you can find your way into. So, it's got these lasting interrogations of identity and meaning and family and, you know, a person's path and purpose that transcends time really.

[Mark:] And is this consistent with what Chopin herself was going through? How would you negotiate the difference or similarities between the protagonist of The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, and Kate Chopin herself?

[Laura:] Kate Chopin has a biographer Emily Toth who has written quite a bit about Chopin's own life and her marriage and compared it to the experience of the fictional Edna, and by all accounts Kate Chopin's marriage was a happy one. She, you know, there are no stories of marital strife between herself and her husband, Oscar. So, I think in terms of the relationship piece of The Awakening, that was one entirely, you know, imagined by Kate Chopin. And so, there's no real parallel there, although Toth does write about an affair that Kate Chopin apparently had after the death of her husband, and Chopin did draw quite extensively on the name and some of the characteristics of her lover after her husband's death in some of the men in her fiction. And so, she puts, apparently, pieces of this man into Alcée Arobin and also Robert Lebrun in The Awakening.

[Mark:] In your introduction to the Norton Library edition, you talk a lot about the reception of The Awakening in 1899. How was this book received both by popular readership and also critics?

[Laura:] Well, when The Awakening was first published in 1899, you could say it was pretty much a failure. It did not sell well. There were many reviews of the novel, and it would be an exaggeration to say they were uniformly negative because there were some that were written by women that had some positive things to say about the novel, but on the whole the reviews were very, very negative. People used words like unwholesome, and immoral, poison, unutterable crimes, moral failure, etc. So, you know, all of the bad things were said about The Awakening, and it did not stay in publication for long. 

[Mark:] So, what were the complaints?

[Laura:] The complaints were that the character of Edna was deeply immoral, that she was a bad mother, she was a negligent wife. But more than that, the problem was that Kate Chopin depicted a character like this making choices like the ones that she made, you know, to carry on an affair, to neglect her husband and children, to move out of her family home. She made these choices, and then she didn't apologize for them. And she made those choices, and there was no lesson attached to the novel. There was no moralizing. Because it's not impossible, in a nineteenth-century novel, to depict adultery, of course, or to depict an unhappy marriage or an unhappy mother, but to do so without apologizing for it and without their character eventually coming to see the error of her ways, through whatever means, this was really novel, and this was the grounds for a lot of the negative attention that that the novel received in its reviews.

[Mark:] How did Chopin respond to this kind of backlash that the novel received?

[Laura:] She was devastated. She was very, very upset, and she tried to combat it by writing a witty kind of sarcastic retort which was published a couple months after The Awakening came out in which she says basically, ‘oh, I didn't mean to make such a mess of this character. If I had known, I would have done things differently. She would have behaved differently.’ She tried to make light of the situation, but no she was very upset by it. This had been really her life's work. I think she recognized it as the best that she could accomplish, and it was upsetting to see it be reviewed so negatively. Although, I think she also received some positive affirmation for what she accomplished in the novel, and it was read and it was reviewed within the cities that she lived in or had lived in in the past, and she had friends and intellectual and artistic communities there that feted her, to some extent.

[Mark:] So, you were saying that this novel touches on universal themes. Would you say that the reception in the last one hundred twenty-five years of The Awakening has been consistent over the course of literary history, specifically twentieth-century and twenty-first-century literary history? Or has it been uneven? Is this a rediscovered novel? How would you place The Awakening?

[Laura:] After the novel was published it kind of dropped out of circulation. For a few decades it was not in circulation at all, until in the early 1930s there was a scholar – his name was Daniel Rankin – and he published a biography of Kate Chopin. He was a scholar of hers, and what he had was access to people who had known Kate Chopin. Because he was working early in the 1930s, those people were still living, some of them. So, he wrote this biography that brought her name back into circulation. He published a dissertation about her, and so his work, while it had some errors in it, it was very foundational for all of the later generations of scholars and readers. So, after this initial kind of small wave of interest in Kate Chopin, there was another small wave of interest in the 1950s, but it was really in the 1960s and ‘70s that the second wave feminist movement, in its coalescence with The Awakening, brought that book back into circulation. And so, it was not until the ‘60s and the ‘70s that the book reemerged as what we would now call a classic. And it was published and has been in circulation in many, many different editions ever since then. It's been taught very widely ever since then, and it's considered now, of course, a feminist classic. 

[Mark:] So Chopin would be shocked that you and I would be having this conversation and that it would be in the Norton Library as a canonical piece of American literature?

[Laura:] You know, it's hard to say if she would be shocked or not, because her short stories did lend her some degree of fame. She was primarily seen as a local color writer during her lifetime, and in fact she was a little bit frustrated by the way that people seem to like her picturesque and kind of comical depictions of Southern and Louisiana life in her short stories more than her more searching and kind of serious longer form fiction, like The Awakening. So, she would be utterly delighted, of course, but I don't know if she would in fact be shocked, because I think she had a sense of herself as creating, you know, long-lasting art that was going to be remembered.

[Mark:] If one of our listeners enjoys The Awakening, is there a short story or two that you would recommend if they want to continue their reading of Kate Chopin's work?

[Laura:] Chopin wrote dozens of short stories, so your hypothetical listener has a lot to choose from. My favorite is probably a short story called “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” which Chopin published in 1897, and it was originally published in Vogue magazine, which in fact a lot of Chopin’s short stories were published in Vogue. And you can see Chopin beginning to work out some of the themes that she develops in The Awakening in this short story. It features a woman, a married woman, with children who has just come into a very large sum of money, for her. She's come into fifteen dollars, and at first she thinks about how she might spend this money on things that her children need or on household economy, but then she makes her way to a department store, and she's surrounded by the finery, like beautifully tactile items that she loves to touch. And she's drawn to a pair of silk stockings, and she feels them run through her fingers and then suddenly all of this desire for objects, but more than that, for, kind of, sensual expression and pleasure is awakened in her and she runs rampage through this department store, buying beautiful luxury items, eating a really beautiful meal. Then she gets back on the cable car, and she's headed back home and, you know, back to reality. It has been this very short blip in this one character's lifetime, but it touches on these themes that Chopin's going to develop a couple years later in The Awakening, where a desire is awakened in the female character, and what it will lead to, you know, we see unfold throughout the course of that novel.

[Mark:] So, I'm interested in Chopin's title of the novel, The Awakening. So, to me that suggests that the character is awakening to something or from something. What is the theme that's being explored with that title?

[Laura:] One of the really beautiful things about this novel is that there are a lot of possible answers to this question, and a lot of possible very good answers to the question, because there's no one single awakening. It's a repeated process, or it's something that is enduring throughout the text, but really what we see is this character of Edna awakening to her own desire. Early on in the life of this novel, out in the world, people typically read that desire as erotic, primarily or even singly, erotic. But it's more than that. She has an awakening of desire to be an autonomous and free person. She suddenly realizes that there's more to life than following the scripted kind of, you know, courtship, marriage, children, socializing within your milieu, following the rules of your social scene. She has an awakening, Edna does, on vacation in the Gulf of Mexico, through this experience swimming in the ocean, and she realizes that there is so much inside of herself that she has not touched on and she has not explored. So, it isn't like the silk stocking short story, where a character goes into a department store and sees all the different things she wants to own. We see Edna awakening to an entire world inside of herself that she hasn't really explored yet, and she has this unchecked desire now in the novel to see where that can take her, to see what more of life there is if she, instead of shutting that out and following the rules and tending to her duties, instead if she actually pursues those interests and where they lead her.

[Mark:] So, is she unable to pursue that because of society or because of marriage? Why was she asleep to those potentialities previous to the action of the novel?

[Laura:] Previous to the action of the novel Edna was following all of the, you know, the script for a woman in Creole society in New Orleans in the 1890s. She has a husband who's a very successful businessman, and she, in some ways, seems to see her position as a wife and mother as a kind of job, you know. It has certain job duties, and she's fulfilling them adequately. So, there was no necessary hard check on her behavior before, except her own internal checks upon herself, telling herself – perhaps she in fact didn't even realize that there were interests that she had in the world. They're not even awakened or not even really appearing before her until the summer that she spends on Grand Isle with her family. And she has these beautiful experiences within nature, swimming, feeling the warm air, hearing the sounds of the birds and the trees, feeling the sand beneath her feet. She has a tactile and really felt experience that is a huge part of her awakening in the novel. So, it's really her immersion in nature that opens up her pursuit of something more for herself, the awakening.

[Mark:] Do her relationships with all the people that she's surrounded with in Louisiana, do they help with The Awakening at all? And maybe we can talk about that a little bit. 

[Laura:] Yes so, the first half of the novel takes place at a resort in Grand Isle, a fair ways from New Orleans, in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. And actually, one of the things I really love about this novel is being thrown into the experience of a very long summer vacation, which I don't think I've ever had in my life, but the way that Chopin depicts this world is one of utter immersion. So, people are living together in a kind of colony, they're sleeping in these small cottages, but they're eating all of their meals together, they're socializing together, they're around one another all of the time. And so, I do think that this experience of being thrown together with people she did not know well before, but who she now becomes very intimate with, I think this plays some part in activating Edna's experience of a new potential for herself. There are a few characters who play bigger roles than others. There's a pianist who's staying at the resort with her, Mademoiselle Reisz, who Chopin shows to be a beautiful artist with incredible talent and penetrating insight into the music of especially Chopin, no relation to Kate Chopin. And it's through listening to Mademoiselle Reisz play the piano that Edna comes into contact with some of her deeper emotions that she has been pushing down or ignoring for years, perhaps since her adolescence. So we see her crying, listening to music and having these really deep experiences of art through her friendship with this character. And then there's also Adèle Ratignolle, who becomes a close friend of hers over the course of the summer.

[Mark:] Your introduction mentions transcendentalism, which really is a fascinating connection to me. I'm wondering if we can talk about Edna's awakening as part of a transcendental experience. 

[Laura:] I think we can. Transcendentalism as a movement emphasizes individualism and solitude and transcendence through encounters with nature, and nature as a kind of portal to the divine. So, there are a couple of different, I would say explicit, references to transcendentalism in the novel. The most explicit is the one where we see Edna falling asleep reading Emerson's essays. Now, the funny thing about that, of course, is that she's not reading Emerson and taking notes in her notebook. She's reading Emerson and getting tired, maybe bored. So, I think that's a kind of funny tongue in cheek reference to transcendentalism.

[Mark:] That's the opposite of awakening; it’s falling asleep to Emerson.

[Laura:] Yeah, although falling asleep in this novel holds a really special role. There's something good about falling asleep as well. But I think we can also see the novel as a whole as being kind of Whitmanian. There's a lot of emphasis on sexuality and on self. I think that this book probably says the word self more than most published in that decade. But then more broadly I would say this language of sudden illumination – Chopin writes about a light turning on inside of Edna and once it's been sparked it's not going out. Something is lit within her and she needs to see where it will take her. So, I think this is certainly activating transcendentalist imagery within the text.

[Mark:] Laura, just one more question about this notion of awakening. A point that you made in your introduction which I thought was really interesting is you mention some of the domestic help that the Pontelliers have, and you suggest that that woman or those characters don't really have the privilege to have an awakening of their own, and we have this rather wealthy, white protagonist who is afforded an awakening. Do you see racial politics at play in The Awakening in ways that perhaps Chopin didn't even intend?

[Laura:] That's a great question, because when I returned to reading this novel as, you know, a few years after first reading it as an undergraduate, all I could see were the women in this novel who did not have names who were typically referred to by their racial categorization in, you know, turn of the century American terms, right, by the relative amount of black versus white heritage they have. And they're everywhere in the text: they're raising Edna's children; they're changing her sheets when she goes off to have affairs; they're cooking her food; they're cleaning up; and in fact they're so omnipresent in the novel that they become another encumbrance that Edna needs to get rid of, right; they're there affording her independence; they're making it possible for her to have the freedom and the movement that she desires. But Edna finds that actually having to deal with them, tell them what to do and manage them becomes another kind of form of pain or like too much for her to handle, and so she moves into the pigeon house where she will be entirely independent and free of her obligations to be tending to her servants, but of course she will have one woman living in the back room and dealing with all of her needs. So, they're everywhere in the book and I have long really questioned Chopin's intention in this kind of portrayal of domestic help.

[Mark:] Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the characters that we meet. And all of the remarks that you've made about Edna lead me to the question about: are we supposed to sympathize with her in every aspect? Your introduction mentions that there were readers initially, and perhaps even still, they don't care for Edna. They blame her for her own plight. So is Edna a flawed character in that respect? How do you read that?

[Laura:] I think she's a character who is given certain kind of exploitative tendencies, or tendencies to take people for granted, and of course the women who work in her home and care for her children are the best example of this. She pays them really no mind, and she's not concerned with their own pursuits or their own cares, and you get the feeling that she thinks of them like, you know, lamps or tablecloths or just items in the room, you know, that have a certain purpose but nothing within them to be encountered. So, I do think that Chopin intended to make Edna a self-absorbed character, and though this is not intended to or this should not mitigate the very real human struggles that she experiences and the longing that she has for something more than what her life entails, I don't think these two things are in conflict with one another. But it is something that a lot of readers have to work through and kind of struggle against when they read the novel, which is, a character who is not necessarily appealing to everybody, and in fact one that you might not really like at all. 

[Mark:] Yeah, and you say “self-absorbed,” and that's probably the whole point of Edna's trajectory, which is like the song of myself, right. She's focused on herself for the probably the first time in her life, so she's kind of unapologetic about that.

[Laura:] She is unapologetic, and she only sees herself as pursuing something which the white men in her milieu are already doing. So yes, her female friends are not pursuing songs of themselves; they're taking care of their children, for the most part, except for her pianist friend Mademoiselle Reisz. But her husband, for example, when he feels like, you know, playing cards, he goes to the club. He doesn't ask if somebody needs his help at home. He just does it. If he needs to travel for business, that's something that he does without asking or apologizing. So, she's pursuing a path that is self-absorbed, but particularly from the perspective of white femininity and motherhood in her era. So, it looks especially bad from a gendered perspective. But it's – she sees herself trying to tap into something that the men around her already have, and that's what she wants.

[Mark:] You’re mentioning Edna's husband, Léonce, and talking about some of his foibles and his habits, but Edna also points out and freely confesses that Léonce is about as good a husband as she knows of. So, how would the novel be different if Léonce was villainous or adulterous, brutal, abusive? He's not, right? He's a good guy, and Edna is still miserable. So how are we supposed to read Léonce as a character?

[Laura:] One of Kate Chopin's greatest strokes of genius in this novel is to make Léonce a character who is a good father. He's a caring father; he is a decently loving husband to her, although they have no real passion, and not necessarily any real connection, but he's good to his wife, he doesn't hurt her; and most importantly, he's a very good provider. He makes a lot of money. They have a very beautiful home in the most fashionable area of New Orleans, in the French Quarter. He sends her, when she's at the resort with her children and he's back in the city working, he sends them presents and gifts. So, Edna is surrounded by a community of women who are saying, ‘you have such a wonderful husband. I wish my husband was as attentive. I wish my husband made as much money. I wish my home was as nice as yours.’ So, she sees nothing but positive attention paid towards him, and that makes her feel good, but he does nothing for her intellectually. They don't have interest in conversations. He doesn't really care what she wants or what she might need. He doesn't even care if she eats when she's hungry or sleeps when she's tired. He would prefer her to just kind of go about her business the way that every other wife and mother in the community does. So, he sees her as an advertisement for his own success. The better she looks, the better their home looks, the better he looks as a businessman in New Orleans. And so, he treats her like a piece of property, and this is a repugnant experience for Edna. And it isn’t one she realized was so horrible until that summer and her awakening to the desire for something different from that.

[Mark:] What role does Robert play in the novel and in Edna's awakening?

[Laura:] Robert is a little bit younger than Edna, and he's significantly younger than Léonce. So, he's supposed to be twenty-six, where I think Léonce is forty years old. And Robert is the son of the woman who runs the resort on Grand Isle, and he is depicted as a little bit different than the other men in the community in the sense that he prefers the company of women. He prefers chatting with the women and spending time with them. He's not socializing in the male sphere. He's not playing cards with the men, but he's sitting with the wives. And Edna flirts with him, and he's known to be a flirt. Every summer he has a different woman that he takes to and spends his time with. And because Edna herself does not come from a Creole family, she married into one at the beginning of the text, we get the sense that perhaps she's misinterpreting his attention, but then it appears that they do have a really strong romantic connection to one another, and Robert understands her in a way that Léonce does not. But ultimately, he is not interested in offering her a life that's particularly different from the one she already lives. So, the two of them fall in love and it's mutual, but he is only interested in potentially being her second husband, if that's even possible, which it would pretty much not be at the time. But if it were possible, that's still something that Edna does not want. So Robert doesn't really offer her a particularly different avenue. 

[Mark:] You mentioned Mademoiselle Reisz earlier as this solitary, inspirational piano player. The other friend that Edna has is Madame Ratignolle, and how can we sort of triangulate that relationship between Mademoiselle Reisz, Mademoiselle Ratignolle, and Edna herself?

[Laura:] Madame Ratignolle is what Chopin calls a mother woman. She's a woman who absolutely dedicates herself to her husband and to her children. And more than this, she feels perfectly at home and incredibly happy in that role, and when Chopin writes about her, it's interesting, she uses more flowery language, and she speaks about her like she's a romantic character from a fairy tale or something like that, in contrast to the way that she writes about Edna. So, Adèle Ratignolle, when we meet her has just become pregnant with her fourth child. She already has three children, but she's beginning, she's just become aware of her pregnancy, and so she has a kind of structural and symbolic importance in the novel that might even outweigh her contributions as a character and friend to Edna, which is that the novel has thirty-nine chapters – it's roughly the same shape and duration as a pregnancy – and at the end of the novel, Adèle does give birth to her fourth child, and Edna is present for that. So, it's really the triangulation between the three women is the spinster, the woman who decides to dedicate herself to art, and what she gets for that is a great degree of satisfaction, and personal satisfaction, but a home that’s depicted as kind of dirty and small, not the kind of home that Edna would like to live in. And then on the other side of that is Adèle with her beautiful home, her perfect harmony with her husband, her absolute peace and splendor within the role of mother. And Edna sees herself as having these two poles to choose from, and neither of them appeal to her and neither of them really suit who she is as a person. 

[Mark:] Laura Fisher, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast.

[Laura:] It's been a pleasure; thank you for having me.

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Awakening by Kate Chopin, edited by Laura R. Fisher is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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