Abstract
This chapter argues that Kate Chopin’s novel is not only about a transgressive woman but is itself also deeply transgressive in its form and style.
The chapter (building on previous critical works by Elaine Showalter, Patricia Yaeger, Sandra Gilbert, Cynthia Wolff, etc.) will start from what we can learn about the exact nature of the protagonist’s and the novel’s transgressiveness from the almost uniformly hostile contemporary reviews, one of which was outraged by what it quite mistakenly refers to as Edna’s ‘manifold’ love affairs—a symptomatic error duplicated in the cover blurb for the current best-selling student edition of the novel which refers to Edna as a woman who ‘seeks and finds passionate physical love’ in adultery. These are symptoms of a wilful misreading that point to an unexpressed and inexpressible outrage at the true nature of Edna’s transgressiveness, which the chapter traces in detail and which is matched by the verbal and stylistic and intertextual subversions that are detailed in the chapter and which structure this still shocking, and deeply moving, examination of a woman struggling with the furthest implications of being (in words that were originally going to feature on the title page) ‘a solitary soul’.
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Notes
- 1.
All subsequent quotations from the novel and from critical sources are from this edition unless otherwise detailed in references.
- 2.
Pinero Gil emphasises the ‘synesthetic experience’ that regularly affects Edna (Pinero Gil 2015, 89).
- 3.
These two examples are also noted by Jean Ann Witherow in her doctoral dissertation (Witherow 2000).
- 4.
This story might have another source in Madame Bovary when Charles Bovary discovers Emma’s love letters after her death.
- 5.
Beer speaks of Chopin’s ‘refusal of endings’ (Beer quoted in Knights 2000, xxv).
Works Cited
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———. 1994. The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: Norton.
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———. 2000b. The Awakening. Ed. Nancy Walker. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.
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Eble, Kenneth. 1956. Excerpt from ‘A Forgotten Novel: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening’. In ed. Margo Culley, 188–193.
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Jacobs, R. (2021). The Ironic Strategies of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In: Aughterson, K., Philips, D. (eds) Women Writers and Experimental Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_6
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