Edna Under the Sun: Throwing Light on the Subject of The Awakening

MYLENE DRESSLER Edna Under the Sun: Throwing Light on the Subject of The Awakening If traditional readings of Chopin's novel of awakening may be said to emanate from a single source, that point of departure — and the origin of so much critical light and heat generated by the text — might be located in what Wendy Martin has described as "the primary concern of Chopin's fiction — the celebration of female sexuality, and the tension between erotic desire and the demands of marriage, the family, and a ttaditional society."1 From this shared starting point the ever-increasing body of critical reflection on The Awakening has refracted along certain, quickly established lines: these find in Edna's ending either a transcendence that "abandons . . . self . . . [in] a reaching out for, an attainment of, more self"; or a movement towatd "defeat and regression, rooted in a self-annihilating instinct [and] a romantic incapacity to accommodate ... to the limitations of reality"; or again a gesture of such impenetrable ambiguity that in this, Chopin's "most complex vision of an individual's search fot selfhood . . . the teadet has no sense of completion and no undeistanding of the meaning of Edna's total experience."2 Under these split-visions the novel itself becomes interestingly refractory, stubbornly unavailable to critical authority even as it lays itself bare (as Edna will by the end) to the peering critical function. Yet is the novel ultimately resistant to any definitive exposure of its meanings? In what light finally does Chopin ask us to see, or not see, het heroine? Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 3, Autumn 1992 Copyright © 1992 hy Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 6oMylène Dressler The mattet of light has indeed been linked to several readings of the novel, and the presence of the sun in the text, in particulai, brought into line with each new critical bent. Fot Ciistina Giotcelli, author of the preceding transcendent vision, the solat force of The Awakening is a "symbol of plenitude," "the most powerful symbol of intuitive knowledge ," and "the beginning and end of all" (? 17, 124, 125). Fot Martin, howevei, it is overwhelmingly the "traditional symbol of male power," which is and "remains the driving force of [Edna's] life" (22). In his own argument that the novel attempts (and fails) to challenge a system of representational aesthetics, Michael T. Gilmore has associated the sun with the text's visual aspects, finding "the book's prose . . . 'one with the sunlight, the colof,"' as Chopin "flecks her pages with vivid dabs ot paint." Fot Gilmore, the novel essays an Impressionistic view of the world even as Edna attempts a similai "emancipation from the authoiity of natural fotms." It is foi this reason, he argues, that music is privileged in the text: as "an imageless art [which] is autonomous."' Gilmore in fact strikes close to what I take to be a central issue in the novel: the impossibility of escape, not merely from the authoiity of natural forms, but from the realm of the visual altogether. Although The Awakening has traditionally been explored as a stirring into sexual consciousness, I would like to suggest now that the novel also and specifically addresses its title as a trope fot eye-opening— foi an entty, that is, into sttuctuies of seeing and being seen commonly theorized under the rubric of the "gaze" ot "look," and which, fot my own putposes , have been best enunciated by Kaja Silvetman in her formulations on Lacan. What is it that might be gained by such an approach? It is my own belief— my own particular bent of thought — that, with Edna newly viewed as a subject engaged fundamentally with the problems and realities of the gaze — problems which are given scope and shape in the novel by the presence of light and sun — hei ending likewise becomes newly foimulated: as one which refers not to transcendence, 01 defeat, 01 even to a hopeless ambiguity, but rather to limitation and possibility as they exist within a construct of Lacanian illumination. In what follows, then, I chart a seiies of "awakenings," 01 versions of experience as it is constituted within the sight/site of the gaze...