As a member of the post-war generation, I arrived belatedly to both The Feminine Mystique and The Awakening. I read them in the same year, 1973, and the two books are intrinsically linked in my mind, because in tandem they made me want to weep and rend my clothing. They gave words to the increasingly suffocating atmosphere of a life I had entered, following close upon menses, wherein it came to pass that boys would be boys and girls were charged with keeping them under control. By that time, women could certainly look forward to careers, but we would make our way in a world that remained chary of women in leadership roles, presumably because hormones made us capricious and morally unstable. (This struck me as a maddening contradiction to the “boys will be boys, and girls must make them behave” dictum, but raising that point got me nowhere.) In my first job as a copywriter for my small town newspaper, at sixteen, I was actually taught to strike out the given name of any newsworthy female, carefully replacing every Jane Doe with “Mrs. John Doe,” or else “Jane, daughter of Mr. John Doe.” I furtively broke this rule, but it did not change my sense that female accomplishment was somehow being erased, everywhere, by forces beyond my grasp. The mists that crossed my soul’s summer days took the alternate forms of a desolate, depressive fog and thunderstorms of outrage.
I was rescued, my first year of college, by a choir of renegade women writers whose voices reached me like a rope thrown through my ire and confusion: Doris Lessing, Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Drabble, Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Susan Brownmiller, Germaine Greer, and others whose contributions were timely but now have faded. In retrospect, I would name Betty Friedan and Kate Chopin as particular champions. I have moved my home across continents and oceans since my college dormitory days, and shed hundreds, maybe thousands, of books, but their two volumes are still on my shelves in the cheap paperback editions I was able to afford as a student. They make an intriguing pair: The Awakening was published just as the National American Woman Suffrage Association was establishing its national headquarters, and The Feminine Mystique is credited with galvanizing the American feminist Second Wave. Friedan’s work is nonfiction, a forcefully argued clarion call from a well-educated journalist. The Awakening is a novel, and a short one, produced by a middle-aged widow from St. Louis who was known for her short stories for children and adults, mostly local colour and character pieces that appeared in magazines. These two authors could hardly have seemed more different, but their books stand as fascinating bookends on a century and a half in which women’s lives and labour were commodified, manipulated and repossessed in what Friedan called “progressive dehumanization in the comfortable concentration camp.” Friedan laid out the sociology of this great hoodwink in convincing terms, but Chopin’s contribution occupied a different dimension. Using the nuanced and poetic language available to her, she framed a part of female experience that had never before been acknowledged. The effect was explosive.
The relief in recognizing that others have felt what we feel – however we arrive at that revelation – is surely the great unifying experience of humanity. I can appreciate the full measure of frustration in Edna Pontellier’s life, even if I have managed to avoid the worst of her fate. And by reaching across centuries to touch me with its warning, The Awakening reminds me that my daughters are navigating a world that is unfortunately – in the “boys will be boys” department – not very different from the one in which I grew up. When I look around at government and the captains of industry, I can’t declare this world very much more welcoming to powerful and passionate women than it ever was. I am also reminded that fiction by and about men is called “literature,” but this novel and others by women are regularly sent to a shelf called “women’s lit,” and more than a few male readers remain as uninterested in that shelf as Mr. Pontellier was in his wife’s conversation. It is their loss. I wish I could declare The Awakening a period piece, but Chopin’s social analysis still hits its mark.
Even so, what has kept it in my bookcase through all these years is its strength as a work of literature. With astonishing efficiency the author centres the reader squarely inside a young woman’s yearning brain. Sitting with her friend Madame Ratignolle, gazing out at the blue bay, Edna thinks aloud about her summer childhood 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 her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water.”
Madame Ratignolle asks, obtusely, “Where were you going that day in Kentucky, walking through the grass?”
Edna confesses she doesn’t remember. Probably she was running away from the gloomy Presbyterian church service. Her friend murmurs, “Pauvre chérie.”
It troubles Edna that she has never learned to swim. Among the happily amphibious vacationers taking their daily swims, she paddles around near the shore, hiding her deficiency, mildly ashamed of her adult fear of the water. And then one night, still early in the novel, when the sea is perfect and the stars pull on her with a strange gravity, she forgets her fear. 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 . . . A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul.” Intoxicated with her new-found skill, Edna grows reckless, overestimating her strength, swimming much farther than any of the other women ever go. “She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.”
In a few delicate paragraphs describing a woman learning to swim, all that will happen is crystallized and foreshadowed: Edna’s discovery of her body, her power, her bliss as a complete and solitary human being beneath moon and stars, her embrace of an impossible horizon. She will aspire to a room of her own. She will smash a vase, just because she feels like breaking something. (And who hasn’t?) She will tell her husband not to wait up. Possibly, she will earn money! What we have here is very much more than a sexual awakening.
If Kate Chopin seems an unlikely candidate to have written the “Feminine Mystique” of her day, a closer look at her life reveals her substantial credentials. Married at twenty, she moved with her husband Oscar to his home state of Louisiana and proceeded to have six children in the next nine years. Meanwhile, Oscar’s bad business decisions bankrupted the family cotton brokerage and brought his family down in the world, to a small parish where they managed a general store. Living among Cajun and Creole communities exposed Kate to fascinating new worlds, but her husband’s sudden death from swamp fever must have quashed any great sense of romance about the place. Widowed at thirty-one, with a lot of mouths to feed, she struggled to support herself and, by some accounts, engaged in a scandalous relationship with a local man. Ultimately she moved back to St. Louis to accept help from her mother, and after her mother’s death the following year, she began to write. Her short stories found a wide readership and substantial critical success during her short career, until The Awakening put her in the limelight for the wrong reasons. If she had soldiered through that first round of censure and survived into her fifties, or longer, her work might have gained traction among the forward-thinkers of a new century. With a larger and more mature body of work, it seems likely Kate Chopin would have earned a more prominent place in the modern canon. But luck was never on her side; she died of a brain haemorrhage in 1904.
When The Feminine Mystique appeared in the 1960s, the world was primed and ready. Not quite so for The Awakening in 1899. Chopin had always taken women seriously in her fiction, often featuring female characters of unconventional character and surprising points of view, but the restless journey of Edna Pontellier knocked her author into an orbit of ugly controversy. It was one thing to undermine patriarchy in subtle terms, by portraying women as real people rather than foils for a masculine disposition. But the subject of The Awakening, quite explicitly, is female passion. The potential fire of a woman’s inner life was not considered a suitable subject for readers who carried parasols. Chopin was shockingly condemned by a bevy of critics, including Willa Cather. The Awakening raised