The Mother-Woman in The Awakening Assignment, Essay Example

Before the modernistic era, a woman’s job criteria, might, would read – to uphold traditional values, take care of household duties and care for the children. A woman was supposed to be a docile and domestic creature whose main concerns in life were to take care of household duties, be submissive to her husband and take the role of motherhood seriously.

But women in the late Victorian era embodied a muddle of contradiction.  Victorian mores gave rise to the cult of True Womanhood, which assumed four fundamental virtues: piety, purity, submission and domesticity.  At the same time, many women were expanding traditional boundaries of dress, education and employment.  A Victorian woman from a wealthy background, Kate Chopin was able to transcend contemporary cultural limitations of womanhood and attain a degree of individuality rare for her time.

Victorian women were expected to exhibit the precepts of True Womanhood, but in Kate Chopin’s book, The Awakening, her character, Edna Pontellier depicted the Modern Woman of the nineteenth century, or  non-mother woman, while Madame Ratignolle was portrayed as a mother-woman and was “delicious in the role” (Chopin, 9).  According to Victorian traditions, Madame Ratignolle was the ideal mother and “true woman.”  Edna is the outsider, culturally and by inclination.  In a sense, Adele Ratignolle is the culture, sublimating herself to Victorian womanly duties.

Each has her own moral compass.  Adele’s points her in the direction of True Womanhood and all of its virtues.   Edna’s has no definite direction.  Utterly conflicted about her maternal duties, artistic inclinations and sexual desires, Edna chooses none.

But it is her inability to be the ideal mother-woman that defines and limits her in Creole and Victorian society.  She is unable to establish her own identity beyond this feminine ideal, cannot escape the massive shadow cast by the virtuous Victorian woman, as portrayed by Adele.

Given The Awakening’s radical portrayals and subject matter, it’s not surprising that Kate Chopin was ostracized from society when the book was first published.  Set in New Orleans, La., and centered on Edna, it was a drastic change from the traditional women of the earlier nineteenth-century.  The book shocked and appalled Victorian society. “While this plot is common by today’s standards, it caused a huge commotion when Herbert S. Stone and Company published The Awakening in 1899. The book was removed from library shelves in Kate Chopin’s hometown of St. Louis, and the St. Louis Fine Arts Club expelled Chopin from its membership” (enotes).

As Chopin did with the literary establishment, Edna bucked the system when it came to inhabiting the role of the conscientious mother.  She was not considered to be a good mother for, according to Mr. Pontellier, she had a “habitual neglect of the children…it was…a mother’s place to look after her children” (Chopin, 7).  Mr. Pontellier did not think of Edna as a good mother and motherhood was very important to him. But then again, he was not the best judge of character, because he had just come in from shooting pool with his buddies and he had been drinking.  In fact, Mr. Pontellier wished that Edna could be more like Madame Ratignolle and other mother-women.  After all, weren’t “women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals …” to be prized above all others?  (Chopin, 9).

Edna’s ambivalence toward motherhood elicited different (negative) reactions from the community.  She was capable of feeling tremendous love for her children but friends and acquaintances didn’t see it that way.  “Naturally her inability to be fulfilled by motherhood and wife-hood alone made her an object of criticism both inside the story and out; even her closest woman friend did not censure her, but rather pitied her – as one might pity a person born without eyesight or a limb” (Jenn, 1998).

Mrs. Pontellier did not wish to surrender to a socially constructed identity just to be all the things that society or her husband thought she should be. She wanted more than to be a mother and a wife. “Edna thinks about herself as separate from her family and society” (enotes). Edna wanted to be an individual so, “She challenges the role society has forced upon her and courageously turns her back on it,” by moving out of her husband’s house and into her own house (enotes).

Edna’s “challenge” is an attempt “to live outside of all social constructions, beyond any workable, practical fiction, entering what she imagines to be a space of unmediated reality beyond identity—a space that can neither be inhabited nor endured —as she comes to reject in succession the various social roles available to her: whether that of wife, mother, woman of society, artist and/or lover” (Ramos, 149).

Edna decides that since she can’t have it the way she wants it, she’ll have none of it.  She can’t resolve the contradictions between motherhood and the person she’d like to be, between New Orleans society wife and a woman with desires and aspirations.  Such contradiction placed her well outside the social norms of turn-of-the-century New Orleans and the Victorian South.

She marginalizes herself, limiting her possibilities at the same time she imagines there must be more for herself than just motherhood, or marriage, or society.  “Her desire to live outside of all socially constructed identities cannot be realized, precisely because such an existence, even if achievable, cannot be sustained” (Ramos, 149).

Because of the portrayal of Edna as a non-mother-woman, readers and critics assumed that Chopin was attacking the foundation of motherhood, but in reality, Chopin was a mother-woman. With research from the autobiography, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography written by Per Seyersted, assistant professor of American literature at the University of Oslo, Dr. Linda Byrd’s article on maternal influence, begins with, “Kate Chopin’s genuine feelings about motherhood and children are best illuminated in her comments about her own six children. Loving her children immensely, she never wanted to shun them or turn them away even when was very busy” (Byrd). Byrd goes on to say that children can “restrict and impose,” though she resolves this assertion by stating that “Motherhood and children often serve to emphasize a woman’s self-deprivation, but there are also cases where a woman can achieve self-actualization realization through motherhood and caring for children” (Byrd, 2008).   This passage accords with a recurring theme in Chopin’s work, that of “self-realization versus socially sanctioned self-sacrifice.”

Chopin had great respect for the mother-woman and gave her the praise she deserved when she said Madame Ratignolle was “the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm” (Chopin 9).  For some women, being the center of the household, by nurturing children and taking care of her husband, is her individuality and she enjoys it. Although Chopin lived a wealthy life in the comfort of her mother’s home, she proved, by her lifestyle, that a woman can be an individual and have a life outside motherly duties and still be a good mother.

Chopin used a bit of light sarcasm, in The Awakening, as she addressed the issue of women that had the idea that there was nothing else to do all day but run after their children.  “It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protective wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood” (Chopin, 9).  By using the word imaginary, Chopin was making fun of these women who thought that running after children was the way to prove their womanhood or their motherly nature. To them, the idea of a woman doing anything other than seeing after the house and children would not be the ideal mother-woman.

Chopin goes even further when she uses sarcasm again to speak of Madame Ratignolle’s “condition” and states that, “Madame Ratignolle had been married seven years. About every two years she had a baby” (Chopin, 10). Even though Chopin had six children, she also had a “life” other than husband, house, and children. Despite the conventions of her time, she took time for herself , as a writer, which greatly influenced her role as mother and wife. Because Chopin was a writer and a mother it helped her to understand that some women need more out of life than to reproduce and be a wife, thus her character Edna.

Even though Edna was not the portrait of the ideal mother-woman, Edna loved her children. But she felt as if there had to be more to life than just motherhood and marriage. She felt constrained by the duties required of her by her family. “In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman” (Chopin, 9).  Maybe Edna felt so constrained by her duties that she was forced to feel a shirking of her responsibilities. After all, marriage and motherhood is not for every woman and Edna feels as if she should not have to give her complete “self” for the sake of her family. “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” (Chopin, 46). Edna never once doubted the love she had for her children.

Even though, Mrs. Pontellier is quite distant from the two little boys she gave birth to, she really does love and see that her children have everything they need. When Madame Ratignolle comes over to visit and sew, “Mrs. Pontellier’s mind was quite at rest concerning the present material needs of her children…” (Chopin, 10).  Mrs. Pontellier had already seen to it that her children’s winter clothes were taken care of because she did not want to make “making winter night garments the subject of her summer meditations” (Chopin, 10).  In the prior sentence, Chopin makes it a point to state, “material needs.” In other words, Mrs. Pontellier never found it a problem to provide materially for her children.  After all, her husband was a very good provider, but she found it hard to provide nourishment of the soul for her children.  Edna’s children were lacking for heartfelt love from their mother, but Mrs. Pontellier “was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way…she would sometimes forget them.” In other words, Mrs. Pontellier would show her children affection when it was “convenient.”

So that she could be with Robert all day, Mrs. Pontellier left both of her children with the pregnant Madame Ratignolle.  On her arrival home, she found that Etienne, the youngest boy,

had not been on his best behavior.  He had missed his mother. Mrs. Pontellier “took him in her arms…began to coddle and caress him…soothing him to sleep” (Chopin, 38). Again, Edna has decided to give her son attention at a time that is convenient for her and maybe even out of guilt.  She knows that she has done her boys wrong by leaving them with Madame Ratignolle all day and she has done Madame wrong by pushing her boys off on her, while she is in her “condition.”

Edna would also send her boys off to stay for extended periods of time with their grandmother for “every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual” (Chopin, 89). Edna needed time away from family responsibilities in order to try to realize her own place in life. Her maternal obligations were weighing her down and, “Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did not admit this…It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her” (Chopin, 19). Even though life had thrown Edna into a role that she did not want at the time she eventually becomes the motherly figure for her two children.

Even though Edna was not a woman with deep maternal feelings, she did have a love for her children.  While visiting with the children at Madame Pontellier’s, “She wept for very pleasure when she felt their little arms clasping her. She looked into their faces with hungry eyes that could not be satisfied with looking” (Chopin, 89). This passage proves that Edna did love her children, in spite of her reluctance to sublimate her identity within the Victorian maternal construct.

The idea of “self of identity” is a social construct one creates in an act of free will; free will implying that one has the option to adapt and modify one’s identity, as Adele and Madame Reisz have done in their different ways.  Having freed themselves from the burdens and constraints of society (Madame Reisz), and taken on the mantle of Victorian motherhood (Adele), they created space in which their identities could flourish.

Not so Edna.  Unable to achieve for herself the “active creative transformation” that Carminero-Santangelo (1998, 181) speaks of, she is lost.  She is conflicted as to the relative value of the roles that appear to be open to her.  She loves her children but can’t express her sense of self, independence and potential to motherhood.  An artist, she lacks Madame Reisz’s “courageous soul” (Chopin, 61).  As a sexual being, her passions awaken to Robert but the exalted near-sanctity in which southern women exist ensure that any such relationship will at best be awkward, at worst impossible and unrequited.

Robert represents the promise of a new identity for Edna, a relationship that has awakened her sexuality.  But, even if Robert had not turned away from her, it would likely have proved unsustainable.  Passion awakened a part of Edna but wouldn’t have given her the freedom she needed to develop the identity she sought.  Social norms held her back.  Such a relationship addressed an emotional need but couldn’t have provided the freedom she sought.  Edna would have found it confining.

Edna’s intense but awkward infatuation for Robert –  for that is what it was, an awakening of desire and infatuation – is fraught with danger, the danger that attended a late-19th-century southern woman abandoning husband and family for a lover, and the risk that’s always present when one walks away from an established relationship to begin a new affair.  Despite her desire for Robert, Edna finds herself burdened by the impermanence and transitory nature of relationships, “There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him, would melt out of her existence” (Chopin, 81).   Having turned toward Robert, Edna at the same time realizes that a relationship in which passion and joy can take control and guide the course and direction of her life is unrealistic.  In the end, she seeks an identity that transcends the limitations placed on Victorian women but a relationship with Robert cannot give her the freedom to be herself.

A strong sense of identity carries with it a strong sense of direction.  Feeling unmoored to a sense of identity deprives one of a moral foundation that determines how one responds to the challenges and demands of society.  Edna is a woman without a sense of self, unable to fulfill herself.  She sought an identity that wasn’t possible in that place and time.  She lived in an age that clothed women with a ready-made cultural identity, one that Adele, for instance, wore effortlessly.  Society expected that there be no conflict over who she is and what she expects to become, that there be no “identity crisis.”

Edna is unable to actively cope with her reality, to adapt as Adele and Madame Reisz have adapted.  Indecisiveness, insecurity, guilt, uncertainty…these ultimately render her incapable of the conviction she must wield if she is to find herself, to inhabit a strong moral ground on which she must depend for survival.  Adele and Madame Reisz exhibit solid personalities built on a solid foundation, they know who they are.  Edna has a sense of who she’d like to become, but personal conflict and insecurity undermine her.  “Edna finally comes to believe that she cannot achieve individuality or personhood.  Her least realistic or achievable fantasies of identity also involve the abandonment of particular roles she cannot bring herself to relinquish, motherhood being the most obvious” (Ramos, 149).

It would be so easy, as a reader, to think of Edna as weak, resigned and fickle. One of her great flaws is that she “lacks the will to maintain and inhabit…” (Ramos, 151). This inability to resolve herself leads her to surrender to the realities of her life as a mother, wife, and artist with which she cannot reconcile.  She lacks the will power to create her own reality within the framework of her personality and potential.  This doesn’t prevent her from loving her children, but makes it impossible for her to come to terms with herself.

Edna’s inner conflict gradually reaches a point of crisis, leading her to seek some form of release.  Her evident decision to embrace suicide doesn’t stem from failed relationships with Robert, for instance, but from a decision to take matters into her own hands once and for all.  She has suffered from the circumstances that determined the course of her life, circumstances over which she had no control.  Convention controlled her.

Cowardice is one possible explanation for her suicide, however, Edna’s actions seem to come from a poignant determination to remove herself from a situation that had imprisoned her soul.  Having failed to find a way out, and realizing that there could be no resolution of her personal conflict, no way in which she could be free and live her life on her terms, she chose to bring it to an end.

It’s possible to see Edna’s suicide as defiance, as a final gesture of thumbing her nose at the oppressiveness of her life, but this is a simplistic view.  For Edna, the gesture implicit in taking her own life has more to do with maintaining her personal integrity.  At odds over a life course that constrained Edna from expressing herself, suicide was the most profound expression left to her.  Unable to achieve resolution in her battle over identity, stymied by a repressive Victorian/Southern environment, she finally comes to understand that hers has not been a battle as much as it’s been an evolution leading her to this final act.  It’s as though she’s writing the last chapter in a story that’s reached its conclusion.

“For Chopin, liberation was not the antithesis of capitulation, and Edna Pontellier’s suicide is neither triumphant liberation nor cowardly capitulation; rather, it is capitulation for liberation, an acquiescence attained after true intellectual growth” (Bunch 2001).

Even though, Edna does not have true maternal feelings, it does not make her a bad person. Not every woman has a deep maternal instinct. Not every woman wants to give up her individuality to become a wife and mother. Being a good mother requires sacrifice, not just of time and of material things, but of self. The self is not something that Edna is ever willing to forfeit.

Works Cited

Bunch, Dianne.  “Dangerous spending habits: the epistemology of Edna Pontellier’s extravagant expenditures in The Awakening.”  Mississippi Quarterly.  Winter 2001.

Byrd, Linda. “Maternal Influence and Children in Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction,” 1999. Women  Writers. <http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/Byrd.htm>  23 April 2008

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. 1998. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 2^nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Ellis, Angela R. “Manners, Motherhood, and the Role of Women in The Awakening and The Good Mother.” Thesis: Ball State University, Muncie. Ind. (1990).

Jenn. “The Awakening by Kate Chopin.” Review.  http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/books/awaken.htm

Sprinkle, Russ. “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: A Critical Reception,” Women  Writers. http://www.enotes.com/awakening/copyright.  Research and Education Association.