Thus The Awakening is American’s first major portrayal of the Protestant-adrift-among-Catholics, and it is only as such that it becomes our proto-feminist exploration of a wife’s quest for sexual and aesthetic autonomy. When the story begins, Edna is chafing in her marriage to a self-involved financier and, despite her Calvinist upbringing and persisting individualist sensibility, becomes increasingly involved, Theron-style, with a Creole trio: Madame Ratignolle, the mother-woman who is sensual in aspect and touch Robert Lebrun, a serial acolyte of older women who refuses to deliver on his sexual promise despite beguiling her on the refulgent isle of La Chenière Caminada and Mademoiselle Reisz, a spinster artiste, whose way with Frédéric Chopin’s nocturnes is her way with Edna, soul and (implicitly) body. In The Awakening, Edna, a married Kentucky Presbyterian, is set adrift among Creole Catholics who embody a sexual sacramentality that attracts her but that she can’t, herself, achieve, beyond eventual submission to adultery with a local lothario. Chapter 3 argues that the now-canonical reading of Kate Chopin’s small masterpiece, The Awakening, which takes Edna Pontellier’s sexual wanderlust as symptomatic of a racist, primitivistic projection (per Toni Morrison’s general formulation), utterly neglects the founding plot and concerted characterizations.
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