Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 245others and from different social classes, enjoy an encounter described in unabashedly
erotic terms. “When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering
ecstasy, inviting his lips,” the narrator reveals. “Her mouth was a fountainhead of
delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very
borderland of life’s mystery.” The lyric intensity, the use of wild scenery to depict and
celebrate sensuality, these are hallmarks of Chopin’s later writing. So is the defiance
of the conventional moralism of the day. The lovers remain resolutely unpunished,
with each of them returning to “their intimate conjugal life.” “So the storm passed,”
the tale ends, “and every one was happy.”
Not surprisingly, stories like “The Storm” were not published during Chopin’s
lifetime. The Awakening (1899) was, but it provoked enormous criticism. It was
banned from the library shelves in St. Louis and, following a reprint in 1906, went
out of print for over fifty years. It is not difficult to see why. Edna Pontellier, the
central character, a wife and a mother of two small boys, awakens to passion and
herself. What that awakening involves, eventually, is a suicide that is a triumph of the
will and an assertion of her own needs and strength. “I would give up the unessen-
tial; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children,” she tells her
friend, Adèle Ratignolle; “but I wouldn’t give myself.” So, in order not to surrender
herself, not to lose herself in a conventional marriage or a string of more or less
meaningless affairs, she swims out into the sea with no intention of returning. Edna
is awoken out of what she later calls the “life-long, stupid dream” of her life during
one summer at Grand Isle. Her husband, Léonce, to whom she has been married for
six years, is neither a villain nor a brute, but merely an ordinary husband, a little
selfish and insensitive and very conventional. Toward the beginning of the story,
Chopin entertains the reader with some sly social comedy, as she reveals just how
wedded to respectability Léonce is, to his own comforts and to his notion that Edna
is effectively an extension of him. “ ‘You are burnt beyond recognition,’ ” he observes
to Edna, after she has been swimming in the sea; and then, to underline his point,
looks at her “as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some
damage.” There is affection between them, certainly, and the kind of reciprocity of
understanding that often exists between married couples. But the understanding
hinges on an acceptance of Edna’s dependent, subsidiary status – easy enough for
Léonce, of course, but something that Edna herself begins quietly to question, as she
awakens to the “voice of the sea” she so loves to bathe in and, consequently, to her
own spiritual and sensual impulses. Edna loves the sea. For her, it is associated with
other instruments of abandon, such as art and nature. For the novel, it is the vital,
untamed element, the medium of liberation, the wilderness where one can be one-
self. It is everything that is the opposite of social and familial obligation. Marriage,
in a sense, and dependence on men, is the equivalent of the structural image of the
clearing that underpins so many American texts: it is the cultural space where Edna
is required to obey rules that oppress her as a woman and play a role that denies her
as an independent human being. Swimming in the sea, “a feeling of exultation over-
took her,” the reader is told, “as if some power of significant import had been given
her to control the working of her body and her soul.” And this feeling of power, ofGGray_c03.indd 245ray_c 03 .indd 245 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM