The Awakening — themes & analysis

The sea is the novel's central image and Chopin returns to it deliberately. Edna spends her first summer at Grand Isle unable to swim — taught daily by Robert, by the women, by the children, "almost at the point of giving up" because of an "uncontrollable fear" that overtakes her in the water. Then one moonlit night in Chapter 10, after Mademoiselle Reisz has played Chopin and the whole company has walked to the beach, she finds she can. "She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water." She swims out alone toward "the open sea" and feels she is "reaching out for something unlimited in which to lose herself."

The mastery is the awakening. Chopin is unembarrassed about saying so directly: "Edna Pontellier was beginning to grasp her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relationship — as an individual — to the world within and around her." The sentence is at the start of Chapter 6, and the most-quoted passage in the novel — "The voice of the sea is seductive — never silent, whispering, insisting, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander awhile in abysses of solitude" — appears twice, almost word for word. Once in Chapter 6, before she can swim. Once in Chapter 39, when she walks into it for the last time.

The repetition is the structural argument. The same lines, framed twice, are not the same lines. The first time they describe an awakening; the second time they describe whatever the ending is. In between, the sea reappears at every turn — the moonlit swim, the boat to the Chêniere with Robert, the sleep at Madame Antoine's cottage, the references in Robert's letters from Mexico, the final morning. Chopin does not tell the reader what the sea means. She places it at every joint in the structure and lets it accumulate.

What the sea offers Edna is not freedom in the social sense. It offers a body in space — the experience of being a self, alone, weightless, capable. "The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace." It is the only thing in her life that does not belong to her husband. The novel is precise about this: when she comes out of the water that first night, she walks home alone, refuses to come inside when Léonce calls her, sits on the porch all night and "feels her will blaze up." The freedom of the body in the water becomes, immediately, the refusal of the body to come back inside on cue. The sea is what teaches her she has one.

Where to follow it: Chapter 6 (the voice of the sea), Chapter 10 (the swim), Chapter 39 (the ending).

Léonce Pontellier is the novel's quiet argument. He is forty, a prosperous New Orleans cotton broker, neat, bespectacled, well-regarded. He brings home bonbons. He sends boxes of friandises to Edna at Grand Isle that the other ladies declare prove him "the best husband in the world." He almost never raises his voice. The first description of him looking at Edna — when she comes back from the beach in Chapter 1, sunburned — is the line that defines him: he looks at her "as one looks at a piece of valuable personal property that has suffered some damage." He is not cruel. He is conventional, possessive, and honestly bewildered when his wife begins to refuse her duties.

Chopin makes him sympathetic in order to make her point. The constraints on Edna are not the fault of any individual man. They are the structure of the institution itself, which arranges his decency and her suffocation as parts of the same machinery. He consults Doctor Mandelet about her with concerned ownership. He writes her disapproving letters when she moves out. When the move threatens his social standing, he places a notice in the paper about renovations to save face — financial reputation, not emotional reality, is what marriage protects. None of this is malicious. It is simply how a 1899 New Orleans husband manages a wife who is misbehaving.

The novel was scandalous in 1899 partly because it refused to give readers a husband they could blame. The wife who runs from a cruel man is a Victorian convention; the wife who runs from a kind man — the convention does not handle. There is no clear villain. There is only a life that does not fit her, made up of small kindnesses she cannot accept and small cruelties no one in her circle notices because they are part of how things are arranged. The Tuesday afternoon receptions she stops giving; the rings he holds for her at the beach; the half-bills he hands her from his winnings at Klein's hotel; the cigar he smokes while she weeps on the porch in Chapter 3. He is not, at any point, doing anything wrong by his own standards.

What Edna refuses, by the end of the novel, is not Léonce. It is the category of being-someone's-wife. "I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both." The line is in Chapter 36, and it is the novel's deepest argument. Even Robert, who loves her, dreams of asking Léonce to set her free — and that fantasy, the conventional escape route, is exactly the thing she has stopped being able to accept. The cage is not the husband. It is the structure that arranges her as something to be given.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 ("a piece of personal property"), Chapter 11 (refusing to come inside), Chapter 36 (no longer a possession).

Edna is given two women on Grand Isle, and both are full versions of what a woman of her time could become. Adèle Ratignolle is the first. She is "the very embodiment of womanly grace and charm" — spun-gold hair, sapphire eyes, lips like crimson fruit, beautiful arms and exquisite hands always at some piece of needlework for her children. Married seven years, three children, a fourth on the way. Devoted to her husband, who adores her in return. Chopin gives her a name for the type: "mother-woman." "These were women who adored their children, worshipped their husbands, and considered it a sacred privilege to efface themselves as individuals and become ministering angels." It is the available life of Creole womanhood and Adèle inhabits it without strain.

Mademoiselle Reisz is the second. An eccentric, bony, disagreeable spinster — "small, wizened face and body and eyes that burned" — who lives alone in a top-floor apartment in New Orleans, plays Chopin and Wagner brilliantly on a piano almost no one wants to hear, and is disliked by almost everyone. Edna seeks her out in the city after Robert leaves for Mexico. Reisz keeps Robert's letters and reads them aloud while playing the piano. She presses her hand to Edna's shoulder blades to feel for wings. She tells her, in Chapter 27, what she thinks of the path Edna is on: "The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth." She does not pretend the price is small.

The two women are not types in any reductive sense. Chopin is unflinching about both. Adèle's warmth toward Edna is genuine. Her worldview is a cage, but she is happy inside it; she is not stupid; she is not unfree in any way she would recognize. Reisz's freedom is real, but it is paid for in disliked, tolerated, friendless. Her apartment is small and smoky. She lives alone. She plays for almost no audience. She does not pretend either of these is romantic. The two together form the novel's structural alternative: Edna is being asked, implicitly, to choose between them. She refuses to choose.

What she discovers, by the end of the novel, is that neither model fits. She is not built for self-effacement; the mother-woman path repels her. But she is also not built for ascetic isolation; she is sensuous, attached, a woman who responds to bodies and bodies of water. The novel tracks her testing each in turn — Adèle's path through the early chapters, Reisz's through the middle — and finding both impossible. The childbirth scene in Chapter 37 is the moment Adèle's path closes definitively. The Chapter 39 walk into the Gulf is the moment Reisz's path closes too. There is no third available life. Chopin does not invent one. The refusal to invent one is the novel's most painful honesty.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (the mother-women), Chapter 9 (Reisz at the piano), Chapter 37 (Adèle's childbirth).

Edna's relationship to her two small boys, Raoul and Etienne, is the novel's most carefully drawn refusal. She is not a bad mother in any conventional sense. She holds them when they cry. She visits them in Iberville for a delicious week and weeps to leave them. She thinks of them in the final chapter as she walks down to the beach. But she will not be defined by them. "She loved her children in an uneven, impulsive way. Sometimes she would gather them to her heart with passionate tenderness; sometimes she would forget them." Chopin renders the unevenness without judgment.

The category Edna refuses is not motherhood as labor — she does some of that, when called on. It is motherhood as identity. The mother-women of Grand Isle "considered it a sacred privilege to efface themselves as individuals and become ministering angels"; this is the structure Edna refuses. The famous formulation, given to Adèle in an early conversation Chopin keeps coming back to, is: "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." The distinction between giving and giving up is the novel.

The childbirth scene in Chapter 37 is the moment the refusal hardens. Edna sits with Adèle through a long, agonizing labor — chloroform, sweat, "an ecstasy of pain," her friend's beautiful face drawn and pinched. She watches with "a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature." Adèle, exhausted, presses her cheek and whispers the most-quoted line in the novel: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!" It is meant as moral argument. It lands as moral wound. Walking home with Doctor Mandelet, Edna says: "One has to think of the children some time or other; the sooner the better." The doctor, intuitive, replies: "Youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race."

In Chapter 39, walking down to the beach, Edna says it most clearly: "The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them." Whatever the ending is, this is what it is in part — a refusal of motherhood as a totalizing claim. The boys themselves are not the antagonists. The institution that makes them a claim on her selfhood is. The novel does not condemn her for the refusal and does not absolve her either. It records it, exactly, and walks her into the water.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (not a mother-woman), Chapter 37 ("think of the children"), Chapter 39 (the antagonists).

The novel ends with Edna walking out into the Gulf of Mexico, on the beach where she first learned to swim a year earlier. Chopin gives her an interior monologue as she undresses, wades in, and swims. She thinks of Léonce and the children. She thinks of Mademoiselle Reisz: "And you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies." She thinks of Robert: "Good-by — because I love you." Her arms grow tired. The old terror flames up for an instant, and sinks. And then the prose pulls back to her father's voice, her sister Margaret's, the barking of an old dog, the cavalry officer's spurs across the porch, and the last sentence: "There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air."

She does not explicitly drown. The text does not say she drowns. The last paragraph is a sequence of childhood images and one present-tense sensory image — a hum and a smell. Chopin refuses to say whether her body sinks. Generations of readers have read the ending as suicide, as defiance, as ecstatic dissolution, as defeat, as transcendence, as the only freedom 1899 New Orleans permits a woman who has discovered she is a person. The novel does not arbitrate. The refusal of clarity is built in at the level of syntax.

What the ending refuses is not simply a fact (does she die) but a frame. If she drowns and Chopin says so, the novel is a tragedy. If she swims back and Chopin says so, the novel is a parable of survival. Either resolution would let the reader file the book under a known type. Chopin will not allow this. The hum and the smell are images of a self in a sensory present, neither dead nor returned. The ending is the novel's deepest argument that the choice it has been describing — to be a person inside an institution that has no place for one — has, in 1899, no available outside.

It is also why the novel was unpublishable in its own time and unforgettable in ours. Reviewers in 1899 wanted the moral arithmetic: the wife who strays must be punished; the wife who finds herself must be redeemed. Chopin gives them neither. Edna is not punished by Chopin (only, perhaps, by the Gulf, and even that the prose will not confirm). She is not redeemed. She is, at the last sentence, a body in water with a memory of a meadow and a sound of bees. The novel was forgotten for sixty years and rediscovered in the 1960s precisely because the ending is the kind a culture only learns to read after a long change in what it can bear to look at.

Where to follow it: Chapter 16 ("I would give up the unessential"), Chapter 38 ("Good-by — because I love you"), Chapter 39 (the walk into the Gulf).