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77 5 So Long As We Read Chopin mary e. papke I was a poor graduate student living in a cold-water basement flat in a city in which I did not speak the majority language. I had just that day found a paperback copy of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, a book I had seen passing reference to in one of the early overviews of women’s literary production. I certainly had not heard of it during my undergraduate study of American literature at a premiere American research university. Neither was anyone promoting Chopin’s work at McGill University, where I was pursuing study in American Marxist literary criticism and radical drama. I had found the copy in what was then, I think, the only English-language feminist bookstore in Montreal. I stayed up all night, one arm hanging outside the bedcovers holding up the book, exposing as little of myself to the cold air as was possible. And when I got to the end, I was profoundly shocked, so much so that I shifted the focus of my work to the American women writers Kate Chopin and EdithWharton, who wrote so powerfully about, within, and against the literary forms and themes I had been taught were the best. I had never before read a novel that so assaulted my senses and left me so distraught at its end that I had to return to it again and again to determine why. Many of my students over the past twenty-five years have also been distressed, if not by the book’s focus on a woman’s right to self-definition (and there are some who still find this mightily disturbing in the case of a woman who is also a mother), then by Edna’s final defeat in the face of a repressive system in which she has long been complicit. I have sometimes asked students to invent another fitting ending—fitting, that is, in terms of plot, time, and characters—but only one person in all this time has 78 mary e. papke come even close to a possible alternative end. As my students concede, Chopin’s ending seems the only one possible for Edna’s story. One might go on to argue, perhaps, that the novel should then be read as a thanatography , to use the terminology of forensic experts, a “written account of a person’s death” that “selectively relates aspects of a life that set a deadly sequence into motion,”1 and students familiar with the many crime investigation and medical emergency television series would probably relish the quest for the answer. But approaching the novel as a thanatography suggests that there is a definite reading that would satisfy by providing all the necessary answers to what has appeared heretofore mysterious or unthinkable , a simple solution to the case of Edna Pontellier.This approach would necessarily be a refusal of the purposeful lack of closure in this novel. That is, we cannot persuasively argue that Edna finds meaning in her death from the evidence given, though the jouissance inscribed in the final lyrical images is unmistakable, albeit potentially deceptive.We do see that Chopin writes Edna through her life experience, through memories, and then into what Mircea Eliade calls profane space,“the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established.”2 It is this extreme ambiguity, relativity, and existentialist profanation of the life force, the abrupt leaving of Edna in an untenable state of liminality occasioned by traumatic loss, self-abjection, and grief, that is so disturbing for most readers as to remain unspeakable. While I agree with my colleagues that Chopin was a rebel, a protofeminist, and a trailblazer, I also believe that her work is imbued with a sadness and a sorrow so deep that when one catches a glimpse of it—as one does at the end of her last novel—one turns away in self-defense against a sight so vulnerable and yet so brave. Indeed, one almost willfully misreads the novel in order not to have to deal with its sensibility of grieving for that which is already always lost and the impossibility of any meaningful recuperation. The fearlessness of Chopin’s writing, her insistence on staring the truth in the face, both frightens and enraptures us, much as the interior voice murmuring about freedom does to Chopin’s protagonist in her “The Story of an Hour.” But...

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