Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's the Awakening

Abstract

undeserved state of neglect; now, partly as a result of new feminist criticism, pendulum has swung in quite other direction, and Chopin has been hailed as an early advocate of women's rights. Edmund Wilson sees Awakening as an anticipation of D. H. Lawrence in its treatment of infidelity.' Kenneth Eble maintains that the novel is an American Madame Bovary, though such a designation is not precisely accurate. Its central character is similar: married woman who seeks love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage,2 Jules Chametzky is even more explicit: does surprise one is modernity . .. of Mrs. Chopin's insights into 'the woman question.' It is not so much that she advocates woman's libidinal freedom or celebrates force of body's prerogatives.. . . What Kate Chopin shows so beautifully are pressures working against woman's true awakening to her condition, and what that condition iS.3 There are differences, of course, among these evaluations, but underlying similarity is unmistakable: all see power of novel as growing out of an existential confrontation between heroine and some external, repressive force. Thus, one might say that it is woman against stifling sexual standards or that it is woman against tedium of a provincial marriage. Chametzky offers, perhaps, most detailed explanation: The struggle is for woman to free herself from being an object or possession defined in her functions, or owned, by others.4 Certainly elements of