Swotting

Up Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

This is difficult, since I don't care for this novel and never did, from the first time I read it back when it was 'rediscovered' as a great lost feminist work.

What I didn't like about it is what was wrong with so much of that wave of feminism back then: an economically prosperous, white protagonist, who possess no sense whatsoever that her context in the world doesn't apply to about 99 percent of it, male or female. In the case of Edna Pontellier, this is further exacerbated by the large number of servants -- of color -- that cushion all aspects of her life everywhere and who are taken as much for granted by Edna and her author as are the other props that decorate and service her life. This kind of blindness runs through much of the so-called feminist fiction written by white feminists of the 70's and 80's. It is solidly bourgeois, it is  more about getting what bourgeois men have and that is denied bourgeois women than about an actual progressive liberation (but shoot, almost all progressive movements seem more to be about what men have been taught to value, than about what serves humanity, much less women (snark mode open).


Additionally, feminist literary criticism claims The Awakening as a progenitor of Southern Fiction as a class of American fiction. To me this means the progrenitor of the female character of Southern Fiction as insane and / or suicidal / homicidal and / or both. This female character persists to this very day  in Southern Fiction, unfortunately.  You have a young woman as a primary character in novel set in the South?  She's nuts!

There are elements that are indeed first rate: the eye of the author, the structure, the wit and wordplay that even approach jokes (particularly around music, since Chopin's works are what we hear in The Awakening). The novel's keen observation of much around her makes The Awakening a source of period, location and class information. The Gulf itself in many ways seems at least as much a character as any of the human individuals. There is the continental, particularly French influence of compositional and psychological composition -- a novel by Goncourt, for instance, like Chopin's music, that points the reader's recognition that Edna's taste is superior to the women around her.

I personally like this French sophistication very much. But where is the Zola view of class and privilege, political and economic oppression of the less so? Sometimes I've thought that the disappearance of Edna, the ambiguity around her suicide (did she?), that her body is never seen, is a reaction to the death scenes of Zola's Nana, or Flaubert's Bovary.

It's too bad that Kate Chopin didn't live long enough to absorb Colette's Chérie and The Last of Chérie. She might have reversed the crazy Southern female fiction protagonist right there, then.

I dunno that I'm really competent to talk with a bunch of undergrads about this.