Intuiting Freud in Darwinian Times. On Edna Pontellier’s Silence and Voice in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
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Abstract
A practical definition for Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is that of a ‘pre-Modernist’ novel. Even though it belongs to the 19th century, we can already perceive traces of proto-stream of consciousness in it, which would become a major technique for Modernist writers. Interestingly, stream of consciousness can be related to Freudian therapy as it consisted on the patient speaking until finding keys to the origin of their problems and because Modernist authors were the first ones to be influenced by Freudian thought. This essay shall cover these topics, but it will also analyse Chopin’s contemporary times, during which Darwin’s name was used for obscure practices of social domination against women. Thus, the asylums we can relate The Yellow Wallpaper to isolated those who did not conform to the patriarchal norm so that they would not disturb wider society. It is not only surprising that Kate Chopin avoided such fate, but also her progressiveness both as a writer and as a woman. Beyond the imposition of silence, Edna Pontellier’s thoughts become a murmur the reader has access to and, although these are mediated by the narrator, the will to speak out gains force in Chopin and paves the way to Modernists.
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References
Something possibly related to her being an orphan, who lost her mother quite young and with a difficult relationship with her father.
The Awakening, 1994: 63.
Shorter, 1997: 34.
“It sometimes entered Mr Pontellier’s mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally.” 1994: 55.
1896: 564.
Darwin "reasoned that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females." (Kevles, 1986: 8).
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One further example of the anti-egalitarian scientists in the 19th century was Broca, the famous anthropologist, who endeavoured on measuring human skulls, believing in a correlation between size and intellect. As we read in Gould, 1981: 83, Broca argued that skulls were “larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races…”.
Walmsley, 1993: 748.
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Just like Chopin’s characters sometimes “drink music”, as studied in Piñero Gil, 2015; also for an examination of Kate Chopin’s, and her protagonists, creative will and artistic eclecticism.
More on this in Freud and Breuer, 2004.
Or, for that matter, with Edna Pontellier and their shared death by water.
Who is defeated in the end, following Gray, 2004, 54: “Because of her strong interpellation as a mother, a role dictated for married women by hegemonic ideology in her society, she finds that she cannot exist in an alternative or oppositional female role. However, because of her awakening to herself as an individual, she cannot exist in the female roles sanctioned by patriarchal ideology. Her only escape from this ideology is death, and hence, Edna commits suicide at the site of her awakening, "the sea"”.
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