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“A Creole Bovary,” is how Willa Cather described Edna Pontellier, the restless female protagonist in Awakening, a book that shocked and scandalized genteel folk when it appeared in 1899. No one has adequately explained then, why Madame Bovary’s name (which appeared in 1856) rolls off tongues easily today. Not so that of Mrs P, whose disdain for marriage and explicit reluctance to give herself to her children were too close to reality. Some things had best remain in the shadows even in fiction.
Flaubert’s Mme Bovary has adulterous affairs at a level that makes Edna’s discreet dalliance seem negligible (by today’s standards). Although, played out with different details, both adulteresses, ultimately overwhelmed by despair, submit to forms of self destruction.
In Flaubert’s time, critics acclaimed him and his masterpiece. Kate Chopin, dutiful mother of six children and widowed young, never knew that her novel would survive to this day. Kate died depressed of a brain hemorrhage five years after the Awakening drew such ostracism. She never wrote again. Why, in the hands of a man (a Frenchman) did this nearly identical archetype of a character draw acclaim? In the hands of a woman, it was labeled “moral poison.”
I find it hard to believe that the criticism was due to Chopin’s too explicit depiction of adultery. I think what disgusted the genteel reader was the even more explicit denial of marital bliss. And that having children does not a fulfilled woman make. Edna Pontellier, in her late twenties, is married to a Creole stockbroker and mother of two young children. Early on in the novel, we witness her awaken sensually. She loves her in-the-body experience of learning to overcome her fear of open water, thanks to the would-be lover who awakens her to the freedom that lurks beneath the surface of fear and other constraints. Unlike Emma Bovary, Edna is driven as much by libido as by a clear and demonstrated artistic impulse. She draws—people and scenes. The more her body awakens, the more her muse awakens, and the more she yearns for time alone to create. She craves the company of the man who awakened her sexually. The plot is simple. The crux of the matter is explained when Edna tells her friend and alter ego, Mrs. Ratignolle, the devoted wife, that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for any one. “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.” Mrs. R lives in a “padded cell” (my words) of her lush body and has no idea what Edna is talking about.
Like Mme Bovary, Edna must get her comeuppance. You would think that a punitive ending would satisfy the polite society. But it doesn’t because Edna never repents of abandoning her children and boorish husband. Some of her last words are, “ . . . perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.”
Notwithstanding that passage, the language and syntax of Chopin’s novel are somewhat dated and quaint. But her theme and message are as relevant as ever.