Awakening the Female in Kate Chopins Works - Research Paper Example

Awakening the Female in Kate Chopin’s Works Abstract Kate Chopin lived and worked in a time when women were not expected to work or do anything for themselves. For many overworked women today, this may seem like an ideal situation. However, as Chopin points out again and again in her short stories and novels, this led to a condition in which women were not able to seek the full expression of their characters in deference to fulfilling their proper roles as wives and mothers. They lived lives of desperation, never able to fully express or explore their own inner inclinations. On the rare occasion when one 'woke up' from her enforced dullness, she was either reduced in social status, ruined forever, or killed by the restrictions keeping her from remaining fully awake. These are the issues Chopin explores in her work, reminding us, even now, of the need to protect women's rights and freedoms. Perhaps the greatest single characteristic of the Victorian age was its nature as an era full of strong contradictions. These contradictions are often captured in the works of female writers working during this time period. As the greater world of farm and commerce changed around them, women as a gender began to question their expected roles in society and began demanding more opportunities available for personal fulfillment. This wasn't simply a selfish desire to follow their own dreams, although this was a factor. It was also a recognition of the fact that many women found it necessary to have more options open to them for self-support and for the greater welfare of their families. Although women throughout time had found various ways to make it on their own, it was rarely possible for them to attain both material comfort and personal independence without the interference of a man. These are issues that figure prominently in women's writing of the time, such as in the work of Kate Chopin. Within her short stories and novels, Chopin reveals deep meaning and strong feminism embedded within the text due to her careful use of perspective and imagery. Her talent enables her to ‘paint a picture’ of life as it was experienced in that moment. Her stories gain their strength by focusing on key elements of the environment in which the characters move and through the special attention she gives to just how the story should be told. Her style enables the reader to experience the various constraining forces, both material and psychological, that were experienced by women of her time and illustrates why they would want to escape from it. These ideas are easily discovered in a comparison among some of Chopin's short stories, such as “The Story of an Hour” and "The Storm," and her novel Awakening as the women experience an awakening to their own long-hidden inner nature. The possibility that one can actually awake to a hidden inner self is the primary action of many of Chopin's works and can be easily found in her short short story "The Story of an Hour." The story begins with the introduction of a frail woman later discovered to be named Louise. Louise is sitting in her home's living room being told by her sister and a close family friend of the sudden death of her husband during a railroad accident. “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms” (Chopin 199). Following her somewhat alarming outburst, Louise closes herself in her upstairs bedroom and sits in another chair looking out the window as she considers her new position as a widow. Her feelings toward her husband are revealed in this scene to have been strangely ambivalent: “And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter?” (Chopin 201). The horror of her emptiness as a married woman is clearly expressed in her nearly emotionless assessment of what she’s lost in conjunction with her dawning realization that she is finally free to follow her own idea of happiness: “Many [women] accepted the promise of domestic happiness and the circumscribed authority that supposedly inhered in piety, purity and submissiveness” (Roberts 150). However, in accepting such ideals, the women often lost their sense of self and dulled the human impulse to examine closely their cause for misery. According to Harding, Olivier and Jokic, things were often so bad that women who could not find a way to subdue their internal natures to the proper degree were given laudanum, a strong mix of opium and alcohol, as a means of dulling their wits to the required submissive state. With her new awareness of freedom, Chopin allows Louise to come to life in a way that has never before been recognized as a part of her spirit. As she sits in her chair by the window, Chopin describes the transformation that came over Louise: “The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” (Chopin 200). Perhaps unknowingly, Louise whispers the word ‘free’ over and over again, surprised to hear the sound coming from her own mouth and excited by what it might mean to her future. Hewitt suggests women of this period “were not passively awaiting their liberator, but were instead cultivating the seeds of destruction that the cult of true womanhood itself had sown,” which is an idea expressed in Louise’s quick acceptance of her new status as a free widow. She may not have actively fought for it before, but now that she had met it however briefly, she becomes completely unwilling to let it go. Indeed, the way Chopin shapes the story, Louise is not actually alive until she confronts the possibility of freedom for herself. Her tragic death at the end of the story is brought about not because of any sudden joy experienced as her alive husband walks through the door, but instead by the shock of the slamming prison door as Louise understood with a glance that her freedom was only illusion. Her death thus stands as a metaphor for the spiritual death experienced by women living in these conditions. Some women were able to find a degree of happiness in their lives, even when constrained, but only after having the chance to explore for themselves what they want. In “The Storm,” most of the story is directed on the activities of the primary protagonist Calixta and Alcee, a neighbor who was caught out in the open near Calixta's home when a fierce storm broke overhead. Dialogue and uncomfortable, tense action reveal that Calixta once had a passion-filled relationship with Alcee that was cut off against her will. Although Calixta has apparently buried much of her emotions from this earlier relationship, Alcee's thoughts and emotions betray its intensity. The first accidental physical contact between the two as they stand in the present, looking out the window at the lowering storm, dredges up this past as well as the reasons why the two of them are not married now. “In Assumption he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her; until his sense would well nigh fail, and to save her he would resort to a desperate flight. If she was not an immaculate dove in those days, she was still inviolate; a passionate creature whose very defenselessness had made her defense, against which his honor forbade him to prevail” (Chopin 255). This shared memory indicates Alcee fled from their previous relationship before he and Calixta could satisfy their physical desires in spite of the fact that she had obviously chosen to do so. While he considered it his responsibility to protect her as yet untainted honor, she was given no choice in the matter. It is presumably because of her lack of honest choice that Calixta is portrayed as less than fully satisfied with her marriage. Chopin makes it clear that Calixta has always wondered if her first love would have been a better choice for her life mate. This was a difficult consideration for her and something she could obviously not talk out because in this period in time, “sexual enjoyment was a taboo not easily broken … Respectable women would never dream of indulging themselves in so profane a pastime as sexual pleasure" (Pope), yet it was this pleasure she felt she was missing in her life. Now trapped in a marriage with Bobinot and with a fine son who she is proud of and cares for deeply, Calixta's marriage does not give her the satisfaction that had been denied to her ever since Alcee ran out on her. Bobinot clearly does not understand his wife as he nervously attempts to find something at the store, where he and Bibi are trapped during the storm, that he can take home to Calixta as apology for the trouble he knows he’ll have caused. It is precisely because Bobinot and Bibi are trapped at the store that Calixta is finally able to satisfy her long-term buried longing for Alcee as they spend their passions during the storm. Chopin expresses the concept that each character is feeling a passion they have never felt before and are unlikely to ever feel again. However, understanding the moment for what it was, they each determine to revel in the experience. “Her firm elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world. The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached” (Chopin 255). Comparisons can be made between the blinding white flash of the lightening outside and the blinding whiteness of Calixta in this moment of passionate embrace. The comparison between her inner spirit and the outer environment are not to be ignored, not only as they affect her life, but also as they have bearing upon the lives of so many others. As Calixta and Alcee finish their love-making, the storm outside passes away, sending Alcee to continue his own journey home and leaving Calixta finally satisfied and able to take new enjoyment in her own domestic situation now that she's had a chance, however brief, to express her own true passions. Chopin's novel Awakening affords greater development of the character and plot, revealing more about the caged, trapped feeling that was suffocating women since well before Chopin began writing. The opening of the novel continues to illustrate Edna Pontellier's position as merely a part of the property owned and administered by her husband. This remains largely the case, except in Edna's mind, until the night she takes her first liberating swim away from her entrapments. Her status as an owned thing is introduced upon her first appearance in the novel in the way that her husband, Leonce Pontellier, speaks to her as she returns from a swim: “’You are burnt beyond recognition,’ he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage” (3). Vague ideas of independence and self-awareness continue to plague Edna as the story progresses, slowly building through the action until they finally break through to physical action on the night of the beach party: “that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who all of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence. She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water” (37). This experience of freedom while out on the water is unusual to a modern audience simply because it is something most women of Edna's, and Chopin's, time didn't have a chance to know. According to Barbara Welter, one of the experts on women's conditions for that time period, “Woman … was the hostage in the home” (Welter 21), subject to her husband's desires, vices, indulgences or restrictions. At last, Edna finds a means of releasing herself from the strict boundaries imposed upon her as wife and mother. She gives herself a chance to more fully explore her own sense of self by dramatically moving away from her home with Leonce and the boys. After placing the boys with their grandmother for safe-keeping, Edna rents her own place paid for with money she's earned herself by selling some of her artwork and as a result of having placed some successful bets at the races. “Instinct had prompted her to put away her husband’s bounty in casting off her allegiance … There would have to be an understanding, an explanation. Conditions would some way adjust themselves, she felt; but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself” (107). However, in attempting to reach such an understanding, Edna comes to realize that it is not possible within her world to both achieve the independent sense of self-satisfaction she had learned as a self-supporting artist and to meet the needs of the family she still loved in spite of it all. In the end, her only choice, like Louise, is to abandon herself to death. In these stories, each woman awakens to newfound concepts of self-expression and self-determination that were considered unusual or abnormal for their time but are accepted as natural and human today. Women were expected to be "another, better Eve, working in cooperation with the Redeemer, bringing the world back from its revolt and sin. The world would be reclaimed for God through her suffering” (Welter 152). Only by sacrificing her inner soul in order to devote herself entirely to the welfare of her husband and her children, constrained in this role by social standards and lack of opportunity or option, women like Louise, Calixta and Edna had little choice but to live lives of quiet desperation. As they began to awaken from their imposed stupor, urged by feelings of physical desire on Edna and Calixta's part and by the realization of her former entrapment for Louise, women much like these characters began seeking better solutions, greater opportunities and attempted to find a sense of independence that allowed them to become fully human. The characters' progression through their stories demonstrated how a woman could awaken to herself, understanding in small stages the emptiness inside of her and discovering the individual waiting within. Louise is not given as much time to realize these things, but is seen to be fully capable of imagining them, relishing the anticipation of the full life she has waiting for her outside her bedroom door. For too many women, though, the answer was, as it was for Chopin's characters, either a return to a form of the deadened state she'd had before her awakening or death. References Chopin, Kate. (2003). The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction. New York: Barnes and Noble. Print. Harding, Stephen; Lee Ann Olivier & Olivera Jokic. (2000). “Laudanum.” The Victorians’ Secret. Web. May 22, 2011. Hewitt, Nancy. (2002). “Taking the True Woman Hostage.” Journal of Women’s History. 14.1: 156-62. Print. Pope, Val. (2000). “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Lit Notes. Web. May 22, 2011. Roberts, Mary Louise. (Spring 2002). “True Woman Revisited.” Journal of Women’s History. 14.1: 150-55. Print. Welter, Barbara. (1966). “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly. 18.2: 151-74. Print. Read More