'There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit' - Ralph Waldo Emerson



Reading Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' (1899) for the first time, I was struck by the carefully constructed milieus within which Edna Pontellier's awakening takes place. The author's 'scene-painting' ensures that the protagonists growing perceptions and receptions of herself work in union with her emergent journey from object to subject, dilettante to artist and narrated character to focalized individual. Chopin often contracts and incorporates all the novel's themes, language and meaning into one paragraph, a small canvas.

'Framed' within Leonce Pontellier's view, his wife is viewed as an object from his perspective and the scene is described like a water-colour landscape:

'He fixed his gaze upon a white sunshade that was advancing at a snail's pace from the beach. He could see it plainly between the gaunt trunks of the water-oaks and across the stretch of yellow camomile. The gulf looked far away, melting hazily into the blue of the horizon. The sunshade continued to approach slowly. Beneath its pink-lined shelter were his wife, Mrs. Pontellier, and young Robert Lebrun'.

Abstracted within a representational piece of linguistic scene painting, Edna is a shape only - an indeterminate 'it'. As she gradually comes into focus (as she will later emerge from conscious to unconscious understanding), Edna becomes the central character within the scene. Later in the work the character seems to move beyond the control of the narrator, taking over the scene painting herself. Dependent upon her mood, Edna creates layers of fictions within her life in the guise of an enlightened 'reality', much as she reappraises her sketches so that 'she could see their shortcomings and defects, which were glaring in her eyes'.

Chopin chooses the horizon as a metaphor for the American frontier - where culture and society meet the wild and unknown - symbolic of the unexplored boundaries of Edna's identity. But although Edna is located within a specific period of American history and geographical locale, her growth as an individual moves beyond the boundaries of historicity and an identifiable cultural 'frame'. She is a woman we all recognise.

Edna struggles throughout the work to resist her forbidden love for Robert Lebrun; she is often land-bound, distanced from sin, and safe within the security of her Christian values. Her reveries into nature see Edna seeking the horizon like a lover. She becomes intoxicated with her own voice and its sounds are described in similar adjectives to those of the sea throughout the novel; indeed the two seem to work symbiotically. Edna's real love affair and the 'currents of desire' she later feels, is with the expression of her own thoughts now released from their 'harbour'. Edna's moods are in constant union with her surroundings, one informs the other, but she often has flawed vision. She faces the horizon and turns 'her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude'¦reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.' The expression of her desires for individuality is, like the Gulf stretching before her, greatly distanced from the shores of reality. Carrying deliberate overtones of the novel's conclusion, Chopin anticipates Edna's eroticised encounter with the sea as she almost makes love with the ocean, in a scene where her suppressed (or displaced) desires are finally fulfilled.

Edna's awakening, her 'sharp peaks and edges of truth' hold possibility, but they are ultimately unobtainable. Even Emerson admits that such 'realities' are counterfeit. Edna's journey to individualism might be read as anti-feminist unless we view her journey as an extreme interpretation of her reading of Emerson. For him, 'men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference', and by the end of the novella, she no longer retreats from it but seeks it to the point of death. Edna desires self-fulfillment, but it precludes the possibilities of a life in the present moment. Suggestions pervade the novella that Edna is seeking something 'intangible' and 'eluded', but reappears most noticeably at her dinner party, where she is overcome with longing and a sense of the unobtainable. Paradoxically, Edna is at once objectified - distanced by being depicted as a living portrait - and yet described as a 'real woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone' and we are informed that:

'Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life'.

By the end of the novel it is these very undercurrents that literally and metaphorically carry her away. Finally, no longer absorbed within culture or society, Edna is not seen as an American, or a Mother, or a wife ' but simply an individual. In a return to the opening scene painting, Edna is once again the central focus, but close-up. Her back is now turned upon the viewer, not the horizon, and we see it through her eyes.

Edna becomes part of the water, that which has represented her voice, her will and her freedom of expression throughout the work. Here she is absorbed once more and in a final moment of scene painting, we are inside Edna's mind, reeling cinematically through a montage of her life as she literally swims through her unconscious thought. Her children; her husband; her lovers; her art; her family and her friendships all return as she heads towards a horizon that moves before her 'on and on'.

Ironically, all that she has sought to elude during her contemplations of the Gulf now absorb her thoughts entirely. Everything that makes up the rich complexities of her life is present in her final communion with nature. She no longer perceives a horizon, but 'the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment' and I was once again reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson's words:

'Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-coloured lenses which paint the world in their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.'

'The Awakening' has been read variously by feminist critics as a tale of emancipation from patriarchal society, as a Creole 'Madame Bovary', or a feminist reclamation of pagan values. But Edna's very Emersonian quest for self-reliance and individualism cannot be confined to her gender. It might rather be seen as an American ideal that, Chopin ultimately suggests, is counterfeit - a frontier and a horizon forever out of reach.

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