But I Wouldn't Give Myself (The Awakening, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on The Awakening, editor Laura Fisher tells us about her first encounter with the novel, discusses her approach to teaching it, explores her favorite line of the text, provides a killer Awakening playlist, and more!

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.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by The Awakening:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/15QEBtiocc5SyhwH4wIfGF?si=15da7e7e396d4e86.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/theawakening/part2/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. Today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening as we interview its editor, Laura R. Fisher. In part one, we discussed Chopin, her life and career, and where this novel fits into her bibliography. We talked about the notion of an awakening, the protagonist Edna Pontellier, and some of the characters she meets. In this second episode, we learn about Laura's favorite line in the novel, her Chopin playlist, and the idea of a room of one's own. 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. Laura Fisher, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Laura:] Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's great to talk to you again.

[Mark:] Good to see you again. I'm looking forward to learning more about your edition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and why don't we actually start with – I'm looking at the Norton Library paperback. Can you tell me a little bit about this front cover and the design of the book?

[Laura:] Sure, so my editor at the Norton Library sent me an image of a painting from 1840 by an Austrian artist, we don't know the artist's full name, we just know that the artist's initials were J. J. H., and it's a painting of a green and yellow parrot sitting amongst a bunch of beautiful fruits in a bowl, and the Norton Library geniuses picked up on some of the colors from that painting as their inspiration for this cover. So, we see this beautiful golden orange as the primary color, and then also this kind of dark and tropical green that I think really evokes the milieu in Louisiana, the golden sand, the tropical greens of the trees, and, as well, I think you get a sense of the heat of the air and the kind of sensuality and the kind of beautiful ocean.

[Mark:] It's a striking cover, and the Norton Library does such a wonderful job designing them, so it's always interesting to hear what the inspiration was for this combination. Laura, how did you first encounter Kate Chopin and this novel.

[Laura:] I first encountered the novel in a pretty typical way, in the same way that my own students encounter the novel, which is, I think I was in a third-year English class at my undergraduate institution, which was McGill University in Montreal, and I was taking a summer course on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, which ended up, you know, years later, becoming my own focus of research. And it was just one of the novels on the list to read that summer. We had to read all of the texts really quickly, because summer courses are very condensed, and so it was, you know, a three/four day immersion in the novel, and I hadn't read it before that, but I think I had heard of it, or at least I had heard references to it as this really important feminist classic, and so it was one I knew I needed to read, and I was really moved by it when I first encountered it.

[Mark:] So, you responded to it powerfully?

[Laura:] I did; I was in a phase of my life which had lasted since adolescence where I really loved to read novels where female characters were tortured. I don't know that now I would describe Edna as tortured, but that's how I saw her at the time. And I was really inspired by a novel written so long ago, or it felt so long ago to me at the time, but that depicted a character who was asking the kinds of questions, you know, I was asking, my friends were asking, the people around me were still wondering about, and it seemed to fit in my mind with the experience of self-realization that I was undergoing as a, I don't know, twenty-year-old at the time.

[Mark:] Maybe you can think about this question as when you were a student, or now that you're a professor teaching this text, but what challenges do you see first-time readers of The Awakening have with this novel.

[Laura:] There are some challenges as a first reader of this novel, and one of the main ones is the opacity of the text in terms of Edna's motivations. You know, it can be really hard to understand, reading the book, why the character of Edna would be driven to kill herself in the last couple of pages. What was it about her life, which was in many senses very luxurious, very comfortable, what was it that compelled her to make the decision that she made? Why would she be driven to suicide? It didn't really make sense to me when I first read it, and it doesn't make sense to a lot of my students when I teach it today. So, I think working through the opacity and ambiguity of that problem, the motivations of the character, and then connected with that is the challenge of reading a character like Edna who you might not really like. You know, a lot of people find her self-absorption to be a real turnoff, and more than this, her privilege can be a turnoff for readers, the fact that, you know, we really have to work through this problem when we read the novel of how is it that being a mother is such a problem for this character when in fact we see her doing almost no active mothering at all right. She's not like making breakfast, lunch, and dinner; she's not even necessarily putting her children to bed; she might show up as a kind of character in their bed-time routine, but a lot of the work of parenting is being done by other people. So what is it about Edna's life that is causing her so much turmoil that she would be driven to end her life at the end of the novel? And I remember when I first read it, and it was taught to me as an actually affirmative ending. Her decision at the end to walk into the sea was represented as, or was taught to me as, something powerful and something positive as a decision that she made for herself that we had to applaud. And that's not an approach I take when I teach the novel today, but it is a question that you need to give to your students if you're teaching the novel, or a question you have to ask yourself, which is what brought her here? Can we justify it? Can we explain it to ourselves? Does it make sense to us?

[Mark:] When your students do question Edna's motivation or they find it difficult to interpret, do you find yourself defending Edna? Is there an explanation that you give about why she does the things she does?

[Laura:] Well, I think in order to understand the decisions Edna makes, I think it can be helpful to do some radical historicizing. And that is to say, try to help your students understand what the cult of true womanhood looked like in the 1800s, what the notion of the angel in the house meant, so that you can get a sense of the category of the mother as precisely that – a category, an identity category that had very, very hard strictures and boundaries put around it for white upper-class women like Edna and for Chopin herself to some extent. And so, if you can understand mothering as not necessarily a behavior or a set of actions that you undertake but as like a way that you see yourself and a category constraint, I think that can really open up the novel for readers today because the concept of being constrained or hemmed in by a social category is one that pretty much everybody can find their way into and understand, even if her mode of being a mother or a woman is not one that we can relate to.

[Mark:] Laura, do you have a favorite line in The Awakening?

[Laura:] I'll admit, I'm very partial to those declarations of autonomous selfhood, you know, those moments where Edna issues her manifestos of being. I really like all of those moments. The one I think I like the best is in chapter sixteen. If you have this edition, the Norton Library edition, it's on page seventy-nine, and it's a conversation between Edna and Adèle, Madame Ratignolle in which Edna says to her friend, of course, the mother-woman, who would do anything for her family. Edna says “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.” And then she has to work through what she means by this with her friend, who utterly cannot comprehend what it might mean to give your life but not give yourself. What is the distinction between these two things and how could you make the choice to give up one but not the other. So, I think in a sense this line gets at the heart of what this novel is about: that there exists a kind of autonomous selfhood within us that is separate from our relationships and our obligations, and it needs to be preserved at all costs. So, I think this is a really powerful line, and I think it is one that generations of readers can find their way into from their different perspectives.

[Mark:] That's such a wonderful line. Madame Ratignolle doesn't appreciate the difference in this exchange that you're addressing between life and self. So, it seems like Edna is drawing a distinction between those two things. How is she defining the word self or her concept of selfhood. 

[Laura:] I think Edna sees self as the privacy of the soul that has no strings attached whatsoever. It's the core of the self that is not thinking about where you come from, who you're connected to, who needs you, how society might define any of those aspects of your person. It's the self that is pure and unadulterated and unconstrained and entirely controlled by yourself and not by others. So, it's the autonomous, individual self. And this is something that Edna wants to pursue and says that she is coming into, but of course we see that she's utterly dependent on lots of people, so this is one of the ironies of the novel, but also one of the aspects of the text that gives it a kind of friction.

[Mark:] Thinking back, Laura, to our first episode, it's curious that Edna is trying to explain this concept to Mademoiselle Ratignolle and not Mademoiselle Reisz, who might be more sympathetic to this particular definition of selfhood.

[Laura:] That's right, I think it's because Edna's actually closer with Adele than she is with Mademoiselle Reisz. In a way, she kind of uses Mademoiselle Reisz. She goes to her house and she listens to her play piano, but she also goes to her house because Robert, who she's in love with, is not sending her letters from Mexico, he's sending Mademoiselle Reisz letters. So, she goes to her house, she listens to music, she reads the letters, and she kind of communes with, you know, the person that she loves who's far away from her. But with Adele, she can actually have a little bit of closeness, and she's less critical, Edna is, of her friend Adele, though not entirely uncritical.

[Mark:] So, we've touched on this a little bit, Laura, but when you do teach The Awakening in your classes, what types of techniques do you use? Can you let us into your classroom just for a minute or two?

[Laura:] I think that you can teach The Awakening as a standalone text with very, very little outside context. It's possible to teach this as an incredible formal achievement, but I prefer to really introduce concepts from the 1890s, from the turn-of-the-century period that can help students understand what makes this a revolutionary novel, because that would be my goal in teaching – it understand why this is a novel that blew people's minds and that horrified them and offended them so much that it went out of print for decades. Because it doesn't necessarily present itself that way to us today when we read it, so they need to understand what motherhood looked like; they need to understand race relations in turn-of-the-century New Orleans and in the United States more generally. I think it can be really helpful to think about Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption. I like to introduce that as a way of understanding Edna's relationship to her husband and as a way of understanding all of those class markers within the novel. So, I guess I like to get a few of these critical definitions on the page, as it were, so that we can work from there to understanding why Edna's choices were so radical and why the decisions that she faced were so torturous for her and ended in the way that they did, with her death.

[Mark:] Laura, we also ask our guests on the Norton Library Podcast to offer a hot take about their text, something controversial that will attract cheap attention to this podcast. Do you have such a hot take?

[Laura:] If we're looking for cheap attention, then my hot take to a first-time reader is open up the novel and see if you can, on your first read, find all of the different places where Edna has sex with her boyfriend or her, you know, paramour, I'll say. See if you can identify, this is my homework, identify three moments in the novel, see if you can do that. That's my, but that's not exactly a hot take. My real hot take about the novel is probably that I actually think it's very funny. I've been using words like torturous and, you know, her longing and her path to self-discovery, etc. That's all true, but Chopin's also a very comic writer, and I really love the scenes in this novel where Edna’s sitting back in a social scenario and just kind of laughing and judging all of the boring conversations around her, the kind of bad, amateur performances of music. And I think she has a very acerbic, Chopin does, a very acerbic and sometimes very funny way of writing that I appreciate and that really helpfully adds some levity to a novel that is very serious.

[Mark:] Well, that's interesting. So, we also talked, especially in the first episode, about the evolution of the reception of The Awakening over the past 125 years. Has this book been adapted or otherwise repurposed in other forms that our listeners might be able to explore?

[Laura:] Well, this might actually be my real hot take which is that, yes, it has been adapted, twice in major forms. The Awakening has been adapted into a 1982 movie called The End of August, and then it was adapted in 1991 into a movie called Grand Isle. But I guess my real hot take is that it has not been adapted very well, and it's been a very long time since it has been adapted, and I think it's very ripe for a reinterpretation. I think it would make an incredible miniseries or feature film, and I'm very available to help with that.

[Mark:] So, those movies don't do it justice, Laura?

[Laura:] They're not my favorite. I don't wish to insult them. They have some beautiful elements to them, but I think enough time has passed between the most recent of these Awakening adaptations, which was ’91, I think, enough time has passed that there has been so much really rich and interesting conversation about The Awakening, especially its racial politics that a new version of this is very much called for.

[Mark:] Laura, what songs would you put on an Awakening playlist? You mentioned that there's a lot of music in this novel, so, what other types of music does it inspire?

[Laura:] That's such a good question. I think an Awakening playlist would need to begin with some Chopin, because The Awakening references Frédéric Chopin several times. It seems to be Edna's favorite composer, so a playlist might open with Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C Minor, which when Mademoiselle Reisz plays piano for Edna in her apartment in New Orleans, this is the piece that she's playing. Kate Chopin doesn't reference the precise title, but through the process of elimination, this would be the one that she's playing. And there was a real cult of Frédéric Chopin in the late 1800s, and it's one that Edna fully falls into, so a playlist would need to open with him. But I think if I were making an Awakening playlist I would do a kind of jarring segue, and I would put on some more contemporary music that I think touches on the themes or the spirit of the novel. So, I would put in a New Orleans band that I really like called Special Interest. They have a song called “Street Pulse Beat” that I think would be great on an Awakening playlist. It's kind of new wave punk, electronic music, but it sets a very good pace for walking through the city, listening on your headphones the way Edna likes to take her long walks. Then I might transition to, I don't know, maybe Jeff Buckley, the song “Last Goodbye,” very romantic, beautiful breakup song. And this is, of course, a book filled with goodbyes and heartbreak; I think that song would work well. And there's also a very tragic and kind of morbid tie-in, which is the way in which the musician Jeff Buckley died, which was by drowning. And then I think a playlist oriented around The Awakening would need to have some feminist classics, so maybe you put on “You Don't Own Me” by Leslie Gore. I think that would work. And then maybe “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. Maybe we'll put on “I Walk Alone” by Mecca Normal. There's a lot of really good kind of anthemic, female-fronted bands’ songs that I would put on a playlist like that. 

[Mark:] Those are great. I am wondering – it's kind of suggested by the author herself – is she referencing the composer Frédéric Chopin as a kind of a self-referential move, tongue in cheek, or is there something about Chopin’s music that lends itself to what was going on at the time?

[Laura:] I don't know if it is tongue in cheek and self-referential. I think, probably, Kate Chopin was drawing on the association of Frédéric Chopin with romance and, you know, the figure of that composer as a kind of hero, and, you know, we see whenever Edna listens to Mademoiselle Reisz playing his music, we see kind of like sexual and erotic titillation happening for Edna that has something to do with the tragedy and the beauty of his piano playing, or his piano compositions.

[Mark:] In your end notes to The Awakening, I'd like to ask you about one of them, and it's to chapter nine, and it's along the lines of the discussion we've just been having about music. You mention that Edna calls this untitled piano piece “Solitude.” So, could you tell us a little bit about this end note and about what that theme means to the novel.

[Laura:] Well, I think that “Solitude” would have made a really great title for this novel, because that's exactly what Edna is looking for. She's never happier than when she is in her own company; she's walking by herself; she's resting by herself; she's painting. And in fact, the original title of the novel was A Solitary Soul, and then her editors decided to change it to The Awakening. But really, Edna just wants to be left alone. She wants to be with her own thoughts; she wants to be making her own decisions. And it makes sense that listening to music brings solitude to her mind, because the experience of being a listener is one where she is most in touch with all of her feelings, all of her thoughts, all of her desires, and in this case the reference in chapter nine, listening to music instantly brings an image into her mind, but it's a fairly kind of negative image, you know. “When she heard it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked.” And, of course, we know at the end of the novel she is the one who is feeling desolate standing at the banks of the ocean, and she's naked, and so this moment of nature, art, longing, all of it propelling you towards utter solitude, I think it's at the heart of the novel.

[Mark:] Does this have anything to do with what Virginia Wolff would call “a room of one's own”? Because you were saying in our first episode that Edna literally moves out of her house and gets a little place of her own, which she is privileged to do. Is there kind of a feminist connection to the notion of solitude?

[Laura:] Absolutely, yeah. Edna does manage to find a room of her own in the course of the book, but it isn't enough, because it comes at a cost, right. It comes at the cost of letting down her sons. The solitude that she finds is really provisional, you know, but I think for a woman of this generation, for a woman of Chopin's generation, the idea of having nobody dependent upon you, having only your whims and your intellectual interests to drive you, is utterly radical and very much a feminist pursuit, and today as well.

[Mark:] So, let's talk about today for just a second, about the contemporary relevance of The Awakening. How do people respond in the twenty-first century, reading this novel about the late nineteenth century? How does it speak to our own times?

[Laura:] As I mentioned last time, I think that there are certain themes here which are very timeless, but you can't read The Awakening today and, for me at least, not think about some of the limitations of an individualistic paradigm of living, right. Edna wants to be alone; she wants to have an entirely individually driven life, but when I read the novel today, and when my students read it as well, we often talk about some of the structural barriers that exist for most people trying to access that radical mode of independence and individuality. And in fact, what might have been better for Edna would be to figure out a way to live in relation to the people around her, which everybody must do, you know, there's no way of living and having your ties entirely severed. So, I think that we have a vocabulary for thinking about the limitations of Edna's thinking and her desires, but that's not what Chopin wanted to pursue in writing this novel, right. That was not her interest. She didn't want to show the structural barriers to independence for women; she wanted to show one woman's experience and one woman's journey.

[Mark:] With that point in mind, there's one scene, Laura, that I was hoping you could comment on. It's a scene where Léonce, Edna's husband, is observing Edna's change in behavior. She's refusing to do certain things that are expected of her, and she's wishing to do other things. And so, Léonce visits a doctor, a family friend, and asks basically, what is going on with my wife, and so, what does the doctor say and what does that tell us about, let's say, the way women would have been considered in the late nineteenth century? And how we might read that today.

[Laura:] I love that scene where Edna's husband goes to see the doctor because what a total betrayal of privacy between a doctor and patient to have your husband go and try to figure out what's wrong with you and ask your doctor to kind of go spy on you, get in on the scene to see what's wrong with you. The doctor is depicted as being a well-intentioned guy. He asks Léonce, has she been hanging out with intellectually minded women? I can't remember his exact words, but it's like, has she been hanging out with feminists, and Léonce is like ‘No, in fact I wish she wanted to hang out with people, but she just wants to be by herself.’ And then, after their conversation wraps up, he doesn't say this to Léonce, but the doctor says to himself ‘oh man, there's got to be another man on the scene, you know, this is probably a textbook case of having an affair, no longer in love with your husband.” 

[Mark:] So, that seems to be such a weird conclusion for the doctor to draw, but he's kind of right, isn't he?

[Laura:] Yeah, he's a very wise doctor. He knows his business; he seems to know Edna pretty well. And what he's diagnosing is something that Léonce seems unwilling to see for himself, which is that his wife no longer has any interest in him whatsoever. She's not sexually interested in him; she's not interested in his company. She is interested in his money, but by moving into the pigeon house, into the pigeon home, she is separating herself from that as well right because she's paying for this rental with the small amount of money that she herself owns, and she's dispensing with her husband's income to some extent. 

[Mark:] There's also another scene that fascinates me and that is when, you mentioned this also in the first interview that we had, when Edna witnesses the childbirth of Madame Ratignolle. How is childbirth described in the novel? Why is it described this way, and how do you teach it? How do your students read that depiction of childbirth?

[Laura:] Ooh, childbirth is depicted as being painful, horrible work. It's depicted as having a certain set of smells and sensations, you know. She can smell the chloroform, and at the time, at the turn of the century, many times women gave birth basically out of consciousness, you know. They were not, you know, mentally present for the delivery of their children. So, it's depicted as being very painful, and this is not something that my students enjoy reading or talking about or thinking about. It makes people very uncomfortable, and it makes Edna very uncomfortable as well, you know. She has herself given birth to two children, but being present for her friend's fourth childbirth, brings it all back to her and brings her children back into her mind as well, which is something that she's been working pretty hard to push as far away from her as possible. So, seeing this cycle of life, seeing her friend in pain, but her friend also really in tune with what her life's purpose is, which is to be a mother, to give life, and to nurture that life. It brings up a lot of pain for Edna, memory of physical pain in the past, and then emotional pain in the present, and what she sees as her future. 

[Mark:] And you said Chopin herself had six?

[Laura:] She had six, so she knew what she was talking about.

[Mark:] Laura Fisher, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. This has been a pleasure.

[Laura:] Thank you so much; it's been so much fun talking to you.

[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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