"The Light Which, Showing the Way, Forbids It": Reconstructing Aesthetics in The Awakening

"THE LIGHT WHICH, SHOWING THE WAY, FORBIDS IT": RECONSTRUCTING AESTHETICS IN THE AWAKENLNG Nicholas M. Gaskill University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Whether in the "moving" force of a Mozart opera or in the promise of a "spine-tingling" experience on the back of a paperback novel, we tend to couch our descriptions of aesthetic experience in physical terms. Sometimes, though, theoretical and critical discourse loses sight of the experiential force bound in these colloquial phrases, and, as a result, our aesthetic theories develop accounts of art detached from corporeal sensation. Recently, a number of critics have tried to correct this oversight, combining a basic appreciation for the intensity of art that comes with any serious phenomenological or radical empirical investigation with an attention to the institutional forces that, as a number of cultural materialist critiques have shown, shape both the grounds for and the perception of aesthetic experience. These thinkers have attempted to reinstate the aesthetic as a subject for critical and literary inquiry, positing in the subjective states made possible through engagements with art a source of social change through "postidentity or non-normative forms of collectivism."1 Paul Gilmore captures the project of these material aestheticists succinctly, suggesting that in returning to the aesthetic, critics must "[pay] particular attention to the confluence of political, economic, and cultural forces that enable certain manifestations of an experience imagined to transcend, suspend, or displace those very forces."2 Kate Chopin's The Awakening provides an exemplary case for working out aesthetic theories rooted in corporeal experience and articulated through and within a cultural context. Chopin's sensitive prose expresses both the intense moment of reverie and the co-opting forces that contain such experiences by "making sense" of them. In this essay, I will draw from the work of a number of theorists who have investigated the subject of aesthetics, including Pierre Bourdieu, John Dewey, and Charles Altieri, to demonstrate the way in which Chopin dramatizes the complex interaction between the particular aesthetic experience and the nineteenth-century ideological structures that determined acceptable articulations of "art." In examining these 162Nicholas M. Gaskill issues, I treat cultural forces and individual, material experience not as two isolated or incommensurate explanations for art but rather as mutually constituting elements involved in the production and perception of aesthetic experiences. This essay challenges literary criticism to return to the aesthetic not as a set of formal properties guiding an encounter with an ideal realm but as a site for the phenomenological exploration of the dynamic relationship between art, affect, and cultural constructions. I begin by analyzing Chopin's delineation of a cultural mindset— rendered especially visible in late nineteenth-century America and still central to cultural critiques of the aesthetic—that collapses art into bourgeois performances of class status. After charting this "economy of art," I turn to the distinctions Chopin draws between artists and aesthetic experience and, using Dewey, suggest the challenges these differences pose to ideological accounts ofart. I then look at how Chopin uses the particulars ofEdna's aesthetic experience, characterized by immediacy, intensity, and corporeal pleasure, to posit a "reconstructive" aesthetic that pertains not only to art but also to the desires, projects, and subjectivities made available through aesthetic experience. Finally, I move from the action of the text to the experience of reading the novel, showing how Chopin creates a readership bound by affective solidarity and enabled, through the imaginative project of relating to Edna without fully subscribing to her position, to re-envision cultural structures. The end of the essay extends the implications of this argument beyond Chopin's novel to the realm of culturally-oriented literary criticism, offering an alternative to ideological critiques ofthe aesthetic and to theory too limited by cognitive biases. An Economy of Art To begin, a statuette and a spoon. The statuette sits in the Pontellier residence on Esplanade Street, and the spoon serves as an illustration in Thorstein Veblen's declamation against American capitalism, The Theory ofthe Leisure Class: each offers a late nineteenth-century critique of aesthetic "taste" as a thinly-veiled performance of class status. First, in introducing the Pontelliers' New Orleans home, Chopin emphasizes Léonce's delight in...