Teaching Philosophy and Materials
Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Final third.
As we concluded The Awakening, we continued our discussions of Edna's "fate." We considered the tensions between women's social roles and female artistic ambition. What are the social options for a woman who pursues artistry to a degree beyond the simply "conventional" and entertainment/performative domain to which it is typically consigned within Edna's high-class New Orleans society? We saw Mademoiselle Reisz as exemplary of the possible destiny of a woman driven by the sublimity of her art above and beyond the demands of family or social mores.
Mademoiselle Reisz is characterized as somewhat reclusive, inattentive to demands of fashion, unpleasant, disliked by her neighbors, and physically withered. Concomitantly, her artistic output - her music - is of the highest, most sensitive caliber. She, in contrast to Edna, is "strong enough" to have committed herself to an autonomous, artistic life without the distraction of social pressure or romantic ambition. These forces, which Mademoiselle Reisz has eschewed, continue to strain Edna, prompting Mademoiselle Reisz's comment, as she feels Edna's shoulder blades, that an artist must be "strong" or else, because of weak wings, the artist (the metaphorical bird) will come crashing back down to earth, destroyed.
We wondered what it is that Edna wishes to receive through her relationship with Robert. We also wondered about what she seeks to gain from her relationship with Arobin. Similarly, what is it she is hoping to fulfill through pursuing her art? These seem to be attempts on her part to "fill something up," something that has been persistently vacant - whether she noticed it or not - for much of her life.
The final crisis in the novel is Edna's departure from Robert, passionately engaged with her at her "pigeon house" (notice this, yet another, bird reference), as she answers her "call to duty" to attend to Adele as she gives birth. This is a condition for which Edna does not feel, and may not have ever felt, any connection. For her, it appears that husband, children, social conformance were things that happened to her, not things that she created, as an artist creates an artifact (a vase, a picture, a tapestry . . .). Adele's delivery of a child, of a life, does not inspire in Edna a feeling of contact to the perpetuation of life in a beautiful way; it rather strikes her as something rather horrible, something distasteful to her, and she leaves. Upon returning to the pigeon house, Robert is gone, having left her because "he loves her."
Next, we witness Edna back on Grand Isle. Her final swim concludes the novel. Is Edna a "weak" woman (following Mademoiselle Reisz's thinking)? If she a selfish woman, given her rejection of her husband and her family? Are her responses the only possible ones for a "thinking" woman, one who wants certain liberties, space, intellectual freedoms? Why is she characterized as "other" (to pick up the thread that weaves throughout our course)? Are the two options for women - women of means who choose to live - to be "Adeles" or "Mademoiselle Reiszes"?
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