Learning to Swim: The Awakening by Kate Chopin

On a south American beach lined with water oaks and oceanfront cottages, a demure woman with yellow hair, yellow eyes, is in the sea. She is learning to swim. She struggles, initially. Unless there is a hand near by that might reach out to reassure her, she lacks confidence to swim out on her own, but eventually, something clicks — like a correct piece in a jigsaw puzzle, the woman’s mind experiences a sort of epiphany.

 

Suddenly Edna Pontellier, the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), is swimming with absolute ease — and intoxicated with her own “conquered power, she [swims] out alone” (p. 53). Completely solitary in a vast, expansive ocean, in an unbidden state of free will, Edna comes to realise the strength of her own body. The narrative tells us that, in short, “Mrs Pontellier [begins] to realise her position in the universe as a human being” (p. 25). Back in the ocean, the further Edna swims, the greater she feels her arms “reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (p. 53). This cosmological talk sets in motion The Awakening’s spiritual task: to see Edna become her full self, that is, to awaken from a life of passivity.

 

This is a novel with a philosophical core. However, a hollow, often predictable love story serves as a backdrop to Edna’s journey of personal self-realisation. Edna’s married life is falling to pieces, but the company of a young man seems to reinvigorate her belief in living. As such, the really racy parts — the meat of this literary dish — come when Edna is in her most inward-looking moods, when she is “palpitant with the forces of life” (p. 132). The inner struggle is therefore what makes this novel readable today — making it interesting in fiery flashes rather than an ongoing flame.

 

These ‘fiery flashes’, The Awakening’s sparks of glory, are incredibly sophisticated in terms of argument. Kate Chopin, a huge admirer of French literature writing at the turn of the nineteenth-century, manages to prefigure the main currents of French existentialist thought that came half a century later. Both estrangement and the idea of self-fashioning your own existence feature heavily in this book. Although these ideas weren’t entirely new (e.g. the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard had already formulated a form of Christian Existentialism in the mid-1840s), Chopin seems to be one of the first writers to investigate explicitly existentialist themes in fiction — long before Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Simone de Beauvoir’s novels, or Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

 

Straight off, Chopin adopts an existentialist discourse to signify the changes in her main character’s worldview. Her style is a ragbag mix of words, terms, and sentences laden with metaphysical thought. “The taste of life’s delirium.” “That inner life which so seldom unfolds itself to unanointed eyes.” “The music penetrated [Edna’s] being like an effulgence.” (p. 107; p. 134; p. 154.) All bespeak a philosophical frame of mind, tracking the changes in Edna’s worldview.

 

Edna’s radical visions determine her actions, her toils and torments against the strictures of her world — chiefly, a fallout with her husband, the decision to abandon her household, and then move into an apartment to pursue painting. Most contemporary critics pilloried The Awakening’s cosmological ideas, labelling it an ‘immoral’ novel, almost atheistic in feeling. But it’s quite clear that this novel was ahead of the age. Take a remarkable passage mid-way through the book that seems to predict continental philosophy in the immediate post-war era.

 

There were days when [Edna] was unhappy, she did not know why — when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead, when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation (p. 110). 

 

It reads exactly like Albert Camus’s famous refrain: with “weariness tinged with amazement” we ask the most basic question, Why do we go on living? In 1899, Chopin was already miles ahead on the existentialist racetrack.  

 

Then there is the sea, “the everlasting voice of the sea” (p. 11). During her holiday in south America, the water channels a new energy into Edna’s life. Its vastness tempts her to a world of freedom. Long before she even thinks of learning to swim, the sea “breaks like a mournful lullaby” making her fall under a “vague anguish”, a knowledge of “indescribable oppression”. Unsurprisingly the novel ends with Edna’s final swim — “inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” (p. 220). The sea seduces her, never ceasing, whispering, clamouring, murmuring. Its depths are a literal deconstruction of herself, freedom in her own unique choice to perish. Hers is an aesthetic suicide, built on the principle that means a lot to her: to always make her own independent choices, thereby giving her life essence.

 

The novel’s titular awakening is a prototypical form of Sartre’s pattern of existential progress — that we are all born into a void, a mud, that we choose to either live in acquiescent passiveness, in a semi-conscious ignorance hardly aware of ourselves, or we decide to squeeze and squirm out of the mud, become increasingly aware of ourselves, and predictably undergo a condition of total moral anguish, a self-questioning existence. When we begin to exist actively, we remove ourselves from the mud — or in Chopin’s terms, we awaken. Making this choice allows us to make meaning of our own universes, and this is precisely what happens to Edna in The Awakening. Thus, sensitive to the touch of the sea — its soft, close embrace — Edna is Chopin’s proto-existentialist, the autonomous woman who makes choices for herself and no other.

 

SOURCE

The Awakening. By Kate Chopin. (London: Vintage Books, 2011). Pp 221. 978-0-099-54077-9.

 

Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a heady exploration of existential thought