246 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900her senses and spirit coming alive and her assuming control over her material and
moral being, comes to her again when she flirts with Robert Lebrun, the son of the
owner of the resort where she and her family are staying.
There is no doubt that Edna falls in love with Robert. There is equally no doubt
that, later, she has sexual relations, not with Robert, but with another man, Alcée
Arobin, to whom she is attracted but does not love. This, however, is a story, not
about illicit passion, secret affairs, and adultery, but about how all these become a
means by which Edna begins, as the narrator puts it, “to realise her potential as
a human being.” “At a very early period,” we are told, Edna, “had apprehended
instinctively the dual life – that outward existence which conforms, the inward life
which questions.” The romantic involvement with Lebrun, and then the sexual liai-
son with Arobin, awaken that deeper, inner, questioning part of herself. She realizes
for certain now that she could never be one of those “mother-women” like Adèle
Ratignolle, who “idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed
it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering
angels.” On the contrary, she recognizes, “it was not a condition of life which fitted
her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui.” More to the point,
she now sees that she is not a woman who can worship or lose herself in any man, or
any other human being; she is too much herself to ever dream of doing that. So
when Lebrun finally admits to having had wild hopes that Léonce Pontellier might
free her, Edna tells him, “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose
of or not. I give myself where I choose.” “If he were to say, ‘Here Robert, take her and
be happy; she is yours,’ ” she adds, “I should laugh at you both.” Swimming, romance,
erotic experience have awoken her, alerted her to her freedom. So has the simple expe-
rience of walking, ambling at will in the city, and the more complex, subtler experience
of painting – a vocation for which, she is told, she “must possess the courageous soul.”
Awoken, she cannot return to the old life, the days of quiet desperation she
remembers and that now, once more, loom before her. And she gives back her life
and her self to the sea that had aroused them in the first place, walking back out into
the “soft, close embrace” of the waves, naked “like some new-born creature, opening
its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.”
Throughout The Awakening, Chopin negotiates her way between social comedy
and sensuous abandon, an attention to the pressure of reality that is commonly
associated with the realists and naturalists and a sense of the miraculous potential of
things that invites comparison with other great narratives of romance in poetry as
well as prose. The subtle maneuvers of marriage, domestic and sexual politics, the
battlefield of the dinner table – all these are scrupulously, and wittily, recorded. And
so, too, are the evanescent, ecstatic feelings of Edna Pontellier as she wanders or has
dreams of leaving, observes the flight of birds, listens to music or the voice of the sea.
As the story draws to a close, and Edna commits herself to the ocean, it is, of course,
the sense of the miraculous, the potential for freedom and adventure, that has the
major stress. This is a death, certainly, but it is a death that is seen as a liberation and
affirmation, an echo and anticipation of all those moments of lighting out or break-
ing away that supply an open ending, a sense of continuing possibility to so manyGGray_c03.indd 246ray_c 03 .indd 246 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM