The Awakening

Set in New Orleans and the resort community of Grand Isle some hundred miles south, the novel is rooted in the social mores and traditions of the "Crescent City."  New Orleans, one of the oldest cities in America, still operated (and operates) on a class system.  The wealth landowners and "old money" inhabitants made up the ruling aristocratic class and worked assiduously to preserve their power with an elaborate hierarchy of family alliances and connections, reinforced by marriages, parties, summer homes.  This power base even had a gendered quality: for women it entailed "receiving calls" from other women, and for men, it entailed membership in the proper "club."

Laid over the existing class system was a pecularilarly Southern concern about race, and in particular, blood lines.  Though the Civil War ended about forty years before the events that take place in the novel, the class system that the antebellum planter system supported was still, for the most part, in place.  As the descendents of Thomas Jefferson can tell you, slavery made for, if you'll pardon the pun, strange bedfellows.  The power relationship between master and slave meant that slaves had little or no defense when it came to warding off the sexual predations of their owners.  The result, a mixture of skin tones ranging from olive to a rich, dark, blue-black, sent the white supremacists of the day into conniption fits.  Their worries about miscegenation lead to birth certificates attesting to percentages of Negro blood resulting in a discourse of race -- including terms like octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto -- which was used as a linguistic barrier to prevent class and blood lines from being mixed.

Of course a Freudian critic would point to these anxieties as a kind of repression of the fear that everyone's blood was tainted: i.e., an unconscious fear that if you looked deeply enough into any of the upper-classes bloodlines, you would find a drop or two of Negro blood. 

This fear and anxiety about place and social status, though more directly addressed by Chopin in her short story "Desiree's Baby," manifests itself in the novel by the attention the characters pay to the subtleties of class distinctions, the gradations in the social pecking order between Anglo-Americans, Europeans, Creoles, Cajuns, and Colored people.  For members of the upper-class, a fall from one economic class meant a corresponding fall from a social class -- and the uncomfortable prospect of being on a social par with the Other -- the group you previously kept at arm's length.

Being a predominately patriarchal culture, women could be considered another kind of Other -- particularly those women who tried to assert their rights."The Woman Question," as it was labeled in nineteenth-century America, entailed everything from women's suffrage to the cultural prohibition against women smoking in public.  Louisiana, with its Napoleonic Code of law, made it especially difficult for women to assume an identity independent from their husbands.  Though originally designed to protect women, it meant that they were not allowed to hold separate property after marriage and transferred all rights to the male.  Essentially, it relegated women to a chattel slave status, as the property of their husbands.  The legal status of women in Louisiana is telling illustrated by Article 1591 of its State Code:

The following persons are absolutely incapable of bearing witness to testaments: 1. Women of any age whatsoever. 2. Male children who have not attained the age of sixteen years complete. 3. Persons who are insane, deaf, dumb or blind. 4. Persons whom the criminal laws declare incapable of exercising civil functions. (qtd. in Culley 120)

Notice, of course, the company women are placed in.

The lives of women -- especially of the middle and upper-class -- were circumscribed by an elaborate system of manners and customs designed to shield them from the world outside the home.  These customs were promulgated by a variety of "conduct books" which offered guidelines to ensure "proper" behavior.  The samples below can give you an idea of the role of women in the society.

What the child needs pre-eminently above playthings, books, clothes, and every other earthly thing, is the presence and influence of mother. . . .Many otherwise excellent women find the nursery a prison, and the care of their own children irksome, simply because they have a perverted mother-sense.  The mother should have proper relief from the care of her children, but if she has the true mother-heart the companionship of her children will be the society which she will prefer above that of all others. (circa 1897; qtd. in Culley 123)

Let nothing, but he the most imperative duty, call you out upon your reception day.   Your callers are, in a measure, invited guests, and it will be an insulting mark of rudeness to be out when they call.  neither can you be excused, except in case of sickness. (1860; qtd. 123)

The true lady walks the street, wrapped in a mantle of proper reserve, so impenetrable that insult and coarse familiarity shrink from her, while she, at the same time, carries with her a congenial atmosphere which attracts all, and puts all at their ease. (circa 1882; qtd. in Culley 125)

Do not accept an invitation to visit any place of public amusement, with a gentleman with whom you are but slightly acquainted, unless there is another lady also invited. (circa 1860; qtd. Culley 125)

These prohibitions are all designed to reinforce the prevailing cultural ethos of woman as mother, woman as ornament, and woman as angel, an arrangement which effectively limited woman's role to a caretaker status and helpmeet to man.  Above all, as the last two excerpts show, women's sexuality was denied.

Yet though all the culture pressures were bent on shaping women into desexed and dependent beings, some women sought to throw off the yoke of social conformity.  From around 1848 (Seneca Falls Convention) on through today, women have agitated for change.   By the end of the nineteenth-century, when the story takes place, women were agitating for "self-ownership" -- the right of control over reproduction.   The argument went that since women bore the burden childbirth and its attendant care of children, they should decide when and if they wanted to become pregnant.   Since birth control was deemed unacceptable by most women, the decision to control reproduction usually meant abstinence.  It also meant the women could derive a measure of independence by exerting control over their bodies and thus, control over their destinies.

1895 Map of Louisiana

Detail of Map showing New Orleans and -- circled in green -- Grand Isle (the background to this page)

1895 Panoramic view of New Orleans

1906 New Orleans street map. NOTE: this is a large file and will take a while to load.

The maps above are there for a purpose: this novel is rooted firmly in its place: Louisiana.  Before The Awakening was published, Chopin was known primarily as a regional writer of the "Local Color" school.  This school amounted to a kind of anthropological travelogue, a narrative which includes detailed description of the setting, people, and customs of a particular region.  The South, in general, and New Orleans in particular, was associated with a more relaxed way of life, an area more given to enjoyment of life than the Puritan North.  It was also a place of artistic refinement: New Orleans could boast that it had America's first opera house, and its architecture was noted the world over.   More generally, New Orleans connotes the exotic, a steamy region of languid heat and a heterogeneous population which led to a rather tolerant view of vices such as prostitution, gambling, and drinking.

The other locale in the novel is the resort area of Grand Isle.  Pay attention to the distinctions between the wide-open spaces (and especially water) of this Gulf of Mexico hideaway, and the city.

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialization as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, service, ornaments, apparel, weapons, and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities [today, of course, you'd have to add SUV's to the list]. . . . Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it become honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit. (190)

This connected to women of the time because it often fell upon them to "feather the nest" of the household.  And as a conduct book of the period noted, when referring to the importance of dinner parties as a way up the social ladder,

It is needless to say to aspirants for social honors, who really wish to "entertain," that dinner-giving is a serious expense, and entails all sorts of obligations upon the embarkers in such an enterprise. (circa 1898; qtd. Culley 125)

Thorstein felt that for women (usually white, middle/upper-class), this "conspicuous consumption" (187) resulted in a kind of slavery, because they are often "the ceremonial consumer of goods" produced by husbands (195).  The "vicarious leisure" of these women "almost invariably occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end beyond showing that she does not and need not occupy herself with anything that is gainful or that is of substantial use" (194).  Watch, in the novel, for evidence of this kind of busy-work mentality.

By the way, isn't it amusing (and sad) that we're now reliving the Gilded Age?

The Life
Born in 1850 into an Irish/French family in St. Louis, Chopin's life was dominated by strong women who often had to assume a dominant role in family affairs.  Chopin herself, after her husband's death, had to assume a similar role in her own life.  Her upbringing, due to the wealth of her parents, assumed the usual (for a white, upper-class woman) progression from child to debutante to wife.  By all accounts, her marriage was a happy one, and she bore six children.  While she spent many years in Louisiana, and her fiction is set there, she moved back to St. Louis in 1884, two years after the her husband's death and it was while living there that she began her literary career.

This is one of the houses the Chopin's rented during the nine years they lived in New Orleans.  Located at 1413 Louisiana Ave., its style and shape is similar to the house on Esplanade Ave. described in the novel.

As noted above, Chopin was known primarily as a write of Local-Color short fiction, collected in Bayou Folk (1894), and A Night In Acadie (1897), and an earlier novel, At Fault (1890).  While critics praised her earlier work for its "charm," most found the subject matter of The Awakening distasteful and immoral.  Representative of the criticism is found in the following excerpt from the magazine The Outlook:

The Awakening is a decidedly unpleasant study of a temperament. The author, Kate Chopin, is known as the writer of several faithful stories of Louisiana life.   This, too, is faithful enough in its presentation of certain phases of human passion and downward drift of character, but the story was not really worth telling, and its disagreeable glimpses of sensuality are repellent. (qtd. in Culley 166)

Chopin responded to these reviews in an 1899 note published in Book News:

Having a group of people at my disposal, I thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen.  I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did.  If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company.   But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was too late. (qtd. in Walker 14).

Note that she doesn't apologize or accept the view that the novel is immoral; instead, like any true artist, she treats Edna as a "real" person, alluding to the creative powers of fiction and the muse-like quality a powerful character exerts on a writer.  It's as if Edna somehow had a life of her own and Chopin was merely recording her actions.

An interesting sidelight to the criticism of the novel is Chopin's love of Walt Whitman's poetry -- he of Song of Myself with its "banned in Boston notoriety." This, along which her interest in contemporary French fiction (considered the "steamy romance" novels of the period) may explain why she didn't shy away from depictions of, as the reviewer above notes, "sensuality."  For Chopin, sexuality was not something to be repressed, but something that should be expressed, at least in fiction.

Shortly after the novel was published, Chopin health declined, which contributed to her withdrawal from the publishing scene.  She died in 1904.

Works Cited

Culley, Margo. Editor. The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1976.

Veblen, Thorstein. "Conspicuous Consumption." The Consumer Society Reader. Ed. by Juliet B.

Schor and Douglas B. Holt. New York: The New Press, 2000. 187-204.

Walker, Nancy. Introduction to The Awakening. New York: St. Martin, 1993. 3-18.

Questions to Mull Over As You Read

© 2001David Bordelon