PEARL K. BELL
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off her wedding ring and tries to crush it, and she devotes herself
with unaccustomed seriousness to her painting, which until now had
been a trifling way of passing the time . In delirious defiance of
everything her husband and his society hold sacred, she decides,
while the rest of the family is away, to move out of her oppressively
opulent house and live alone. In a tiny house of her own, no longer
just a decorative part of her husband's property:
... she had a feeling of having descended in the social scale ,
with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual.
Every step which she took toward relieving herself of obligations
added to her strength and expansion as an individual . She
began to look with her own eyes ; to see and to apprehend the
deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to 'feed
upon opinion' when her own soul had invited her.
And yet, when she drifts into an affair with the notorious roue
Alcee Arobin, she feels little joy in this act of her own free will. She
wants more than a philanderer can give her, and hopes to find gen–
uine fulfillment with Robert Lebrun . But he cannot bring himself to
transgress against the Creole code of chastity, and he runs away.
With this rejection, Edna's illusion of freedom collapses. She cannot
face the negligent life of meaningless affairs that will be her fate–
"Today it is Arobin; tomorrow it will be someone else" - and on a
cool spring day she sails over to Grand Isle and plunges naked into
the sea that closes over her.
Unlike the many novels about a woman's yearning for self–
fulflllment spawned by the feminist movement of our own time,
The
Awakening
is almost forbiddingly objective. The nature of Edna's
longing has been misunderstood by many of Mrs . Chopin's readers ,
for she never suggests that her heroine's marriage has been sexually
inadequate. Edna is awakened not by her need for "perfect" sex but
by her desire for independence, for a life free of the shackles of mar–
riage and children. And Kate Chopin shrewdly perceived the flaw in
Edna Pontillier's notion that she would give her life for her children,
but wouldn't give "herself." Her illusion that the two are separate is
part of the more sinister illusion that freedom can be attained
through the reckless abandonment of all duties and obligations,
especially those imposed by young children. Her unforgivable of–
fense is not adultery but a dream of freedom which threatens the
foundations of society not only by rejecting the role it assigns to
