"Oh, I see the connection now!" - how Kate Chopin uses Flaubert

The first time I read The Awakening, I saw the story I described yesterday.  The second time, a couple of years later, I had read a lot more (and a lot more Flaubert), and I saw the other story, about a woman who regresses to her childhood, and whose “awakening” is that of a child.  All of this is tied to her father somehow.  This story contrasts with the surface story, and in some ways contradicts it.  Complicates it, at least.

The reason I keep mentioning Flaubert is because this under-story is told mostly in a combination of memories, images, and metaphors, not at all through ordinary plotting.  It is a startling and artful method.  It is basically invisible to all but the keenest first-time readers.

The sea was quiet now, and swelled lazily in broad billows that melted into one another and did not break except upon the beach in little foamy crests that coiled back like slow, white serpents.  (Ch. 10)

Edna has been trying to learn to swim, and suddenly she can.  She is “like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence.”  Once I am on the alert for metaphorical references to children, this seems almost like giving the game away.  Edna’s “awakening” is repeatedly described as if the heroine has just reached the age of reason, as if she is not twenty-eight but eight.

Edna’s awakening and childhood are linked to the sea, which is odd, since she grew up in Kentucky, but here’s how:

“’The hot wind beating in my face made me think – without any connection that I can trace – of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than the waist.  She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water.  Oh, I see the connection now!’”  (Ch. 7)

She wonders if she was “’running away from prayers… read in a spirit of gloom by my father that chills me yet to think of it’” – the father always appears somewhere.  Edna does not see all of the connections.  Note that we are a few chapters back, before Edna learns to swim in a sea that smells like “new-plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfume of a field of white blossoms somewhere near” (back in Ch. 10).  All of this is tied to Edna’s love life, too, her childhood crushes through her loveless marriage.  Again, I have to follow the imagery, not what Edna is doing.

Those serpents, for example.  “The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents around her ankles.”  Now I am in the last chapter, a few lines from the end of the book.  Chopin has paraphrased her earlier line, bringing the serpents back, moving the color to Edna, who has regressed even more – “She felt like some new-born creature.”  The meadow is mentioned; her father is mentioned; some other thematic elements are mentioned.  A new theme appears in the last sentence – “There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air” – which must mean something new, since there were no bees or pinks until now.

Reading The Awakening for the third time now, after a gap of twenty-five years, the under-story still seems full of fresh ambiguities.

who did not know she was awake - Kate Chopin's The Awakening

I was assigned Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) twice in college, once in American Literature II out of a big Norton anthology, and later in a class on Southern fiction writers.  This was, I now know, the period just after the novel’s “rediscovery,” its reclamation by feminist critics from the dismissive label of “local color,” so lots of teachers were assigning it and discovering how it worked in class.

Why Kate Chopin, with her fiction about New Orleans, was a regionalist, a “local color” writer, while Gustave Flaubert, with his fiction about rural Normandy, was not, is a mystery to me.

I poke at Flaubert because The Awakening is a first-rate example of an American trying to “do” Flaubert, in fact the purest example I know.  Long-time, and I hope medium-time, and surely even a few short-time readers of Wuthering Expectations know that I am not referring to the adultery plots of these novels but to questions of style.  Kate Chopin understood the style of Flaubert, and most importantly understood it the way I understand it.

Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a Kentucky girl who has married into New Orleans society.  Now she is 28 and something is off.  She has never thought of herself as an especially good wife or mother, not compared to some of the women in her circle.  But as the novel begins, something else happens.  The wives are at the beach, on a Gulf Coast island, accompanied by idle young men from respectable families, which is not a violation of New Orleans mores, but is trouble for Pontellier, who is an outsider.

Out on these islands, away from her husband, at the side of a young rake, something happens to Pontellier, the awakening of the title.  In Chapter 13, it is literal, the aftermath of a long nap.

She was very hungry.  No one was there.  But there was a cloth spread upon the table that stood against the wall, and a cover was laid for one, with a crusty brown loaf and a bottle of wine beside the plate.  Edna bit a piece from the brown loaf, tearing it with her strong, white teeth.  She poured some of the wine into the glass and drank it down.  Then she went softly out of doors, and plucking an orange from the low-hanging bough of a tree, threw it at Robert, who did not know she was awake and up.

An illumination broke over his whole face when he saw her and joined her under the orange tree.

“How many years have I slept?” she inquired.

It is as if Pontellier is passing through a religious initiation, in which she is, symbolically, Eve – that orange, or perhaps she is joining the Freemasons.  All of this looks more symbolically blatant on re-reading.  Edna makes a series of decisions that declare her independence from her conventional role; the later adulterous affair is merely a symptom, as is drinking a beer by herself.

She rummaged in the larder and brought forth a slice of “Gruyère” and some crackers.  She opened a bottle of beer which she found in the icebox.  (Ch. 24)

For some reason that bit has stuck with me for twenty-five years, perhaps because it involves cheese.

No one understands what has happened to Pontellier.

“Has she,” asked the Doctor, with a smile, “has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women – super-spiritual superior being?  My wife has been telling me about them.”  (Ch. 22)

No, not that.  Still, this cannot end well.  What room does Edna have to move, to do anything on her own?

That is more or less the novel I saw the first time I read it.  The first layer.