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Introduction

by Barbara Kingsolver

The Awakening was published in 1899, on the cusp of a century that has already come and gone. I sometimes appraise the relevance of a classic, and amuse myself in the process, by imagining the updates that would be required in order to adapt this book to film for a modern audience. In the case of The Awakening, our screenwriter’s first task would be to rename the pretty young heroine: maybe she’ll be called Eden, or Eddye. Her name in the book, Edna, was common in its time but fell precipitously out of favour after 1941. Who knows why? The author couldn’t have predicted that trend, but because it happened, it’s hard for us now to picture an “Edna” as anything but a silver-haired matron, eighty if she’s a day, stalwart bosom like a ship’s prow . . . uh oh. Let’s erase that mental picture quickly, before it sinks in.

Eddye, then, is an energetic twenty-something, blonde, brown-eyed, with two little boys, a husband and a captivating restlessness under her skin. In the story’s opening scene, her husband Mr. Pontellier sits on the porch in a wicker rocker perusing the stock market reports. He looks up from his newspaper barely long enough to chide his wife for going swimming in the ridiculous heat and getting sunburned. The setting of Grand Isle, a summer resort on the steamy coast of Louisiana, stands up across the decades as a perfect backdrop to a story of personal discovery and sexual intrigue. The guests relax in the deep shade of graceful old water-oaks and stroll through their long, lazy days carrying parasols, which we’ll have to replace with sunscreen. Their skirts will need to be shortened, and their bathing costumes radically abbreviated. We will obviously have to do something about the “quadroon nurse” who is looking after the children. But beyond that, the Pontelliers’ family arrangement is not unlike that of a certain class of modern city-dwellers: while the wife and boys take a summer sojourn away from the city, the husband spends his week working in the office, comes out to Grand Isle on the weekends to be with the family, and gets bored with them all so quickly he tends to duck out at dinnertime for cigars and poker with other men. Meanwhile, the Mrs. has settled into a languid routine among the dozen or so well-heeled resort guests. She gets along well enough with most of the other women, though some get on her nerves, and one in particular is an irritatingly perfect mother and wife.

In the midst of all this, our heroine has accidentally attracted an admirer of the opposite sex. Robert Lebrun, the resort-owner’s son, a few years her junior, has attached himself to her like a barnacle. In the opening scene they’ve just come back together from the beach, and sit on the porch steps laughing at their private jokes. Mr. Pontellier watches his wife and Robert with benign disinterest. Utterly confident of his wife’s loyalty and his own place as master of his ménage, he can’t remotely conceive of Robert as a potential rival. Rather, he holds him in about the same regard one would have for a friendly stray dog that can be tolerated as long as it remains amusing.

Already, in just a few pages, any superficial distractions of period detail or class privilege have begun to evaporate, because the heart of this tale is as timeless as marriage itself. The husband and wife who share a bed but inhabit different lives: these couples are still keeping marriage counsellors in business. And half the romantic comedies of any year seem to involve the man and woman who are constant companions and best friends, technically platonic, leaning against one another’s shoulder as they laugh, skating on a thin ice of innocence that seals underneath it an ocean of desire. From the first pages of The Awakening we are pulled into territory that feels utterly current and familiar, with an undercurrent more dangerous than romantic comedy. Mr. Pontellier scrutinizes his sunburned wife “as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.” This causes Edna to remember the rings she gave him for safekeeping before she went to the beach. “She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers.” In a simple, wordless exchange, the parameters of a marriage reveal themselves, along with glints of the insurgencies soon to come.

Before we meet her in the summer of her awakening, Edna Pontellier has resigned herself, like every woman she knows, to a certain kind of life, without knowledge that alternatives might exist: the pleasure of a companion, for example, with whom she could talk for hours without running out of things to say. The novelty of a man who actually listened to her opinions. She has a husband who smiles and ignores her, or else abruptly scolds her for imaginary infractions, sometimes ferociously. He seems to believe this is what wives require. In their social circles, that is the standard stuff of marital discourse. (With her trademark succinctness, the author lays out the circumstances that led to this marriage: “He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and an ardor which left nothing to be desired . . . She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken.”) In the years since then, Mr. Pontellier has come to disregard his wife but has not really abused her, he’s kind enough, he provides for her and the children. She knows she ought to be satisfied, and has no reasonable explanation for the tears that overtake her sometimes, violently and suddenly, “like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day.”

Rare is the woman, even now, who would claim to be a total stranger to that brand of unnamed sadness. Though our expectations have shape-shifted drastically through the decades, certain constants connect every age. The keen disappointment Edna hides within her domestic tranquility is a touchstone. Sixty years after The Awakening, Betty Friedan famously called it “The Problem that Has No Name.” In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Friedan articulated the frustration of women whose lives gave them virtually no independence, creativity, or opportunity, and who were expected to feel grateful about it. Edna Pontellier’s affliction was still epidemic in the 1960s, when marriage had become, if anything, even more idealized than it had been in Edna’s time. Magazines and the advertising industry heralded dependency as a woman’s consummate state; having no trade or profession was presumed to be enviable. For the adult female intellect, the best-suited conversational colleagues were thought to be preschoolers, and as for her athletic potential – if such a thing could even be considered – it surely topped out at mopping floors to a high shine. Pot roast was a sacrament. A generation of housewives, thus steeped in putative bliss, had learned to dull their misery with alcohol and tranquilizers. When Friedan broke open their secret, The Feminine Mystique sent them in droves to discussion groups, coffee klatches and consciousness-raising meetings. Women talked as they had never talked before, daring to name their frustrations and thwarted dreams. Birth control and a fair number of divorces ensued; education and employment eventually followed.

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 its small ruckus and then fell out of print for decades. It did not resurface in any significant way until the 1960s, when all those women in the aforementioned consciousness-raising groups were reading books and talking about them. No coincidence there. According to history, what you hold in your hand is a dangerous document.

Introducing this release of The Awakening has given me an opportunity to re-experience one of my life’s important books, forty years after my first communion with it. The remarkable magic of literary fiction is that every reading of a particular novel creates a unique event. For each reader who brings to the reading chair his or her own luggage of lived days and unlived desires, this will be something of a different story. And I am not the same reader who sat down with my paperback Awakening in 1973. But I still read it in one sitting. I still marvel at Chopin’s realism, her impatience with conventional trappings, her arresting honesty. Since I’m now a writer myself, I probably have a more developed admiration for her skill. Comparing this edition with my old one, I see that I have underlined many of the same passages. I may take issue now with some of the choices Chopin gave her heroine, but that’s surely because I now have more choices myself than I did back then.

Edna is dated in name only; everything else about her is alive and breathing. As I turn the first page, there she is, still vibrating with frustration and a yen to smash something, keen to break the rule that needs to be broken. Waiting to walk out into the water and awaken.