Feminism And Criticism In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Kate Chopin’s short novel, The Awakening, was published in 1899, five years before her death. The Awakening follows Edna Pontellier as she navigates through the summer and fall of her twenty-eighth year. She learns to swim, engages in two extramarital affairs, moves out of her husband’s house, and, upon hearing of her lover, Robert’s rejection, she drowns herself. For over fifty years, The Awakening has been heralded as a deeply feminist text. Chopin destabilizes traditional family values and puts a woman in a position of sexual power and quasi-liberation. The feminism of this text is complicated by Edna’s final action. Edna’s inability to continue living after being rejected by Robert would indicate a feminine dependence on a masculine figure,

Ryan approaches The Awakening from a less psychoanalytic and more psychological perspective. He argues in his article “Depression and Chopin’s The Awakening” that Edna shows enough symptoms to be diagnosed with Bipolar Type II disorder, and that the “denial of her early needs for intimacy left her with a lifelong struggle both to break from her own neediness and to achieve a human achievement that would not smother her emerging sense of an authentic self” (254). Bipolar Type II disorder is characterized by hypomanic episodes and depressive episodes. “If one combined Edna’s sudden drive to become an artist…the troubled observations of Edna by Dr. Mandelet… and her affair with Alcée Arobin, one can see application of possibly all five” (257) of the symptoms of hypomania described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Because Chopin begins the book at Edna’s awakening, identifying depressive symptoms is more challenging. However, “ the quick changes in Edna’s mood seem to characterize… rapid cycling bipolar.” Rapid cycling bipolar carries a high suicide risk, and Ryan notes that the ‘good’ feelings a manic episode are misleading. He also notes that in mixed-state bipolar II, the mania is combined with dysphoric feelings, putting the person in the episode at a greater risk for suicide. Ryan explains that Edna’s sexual awakening “emotionally resurrects her frustrated need for intimacy” (258). Because she was raised by her emotionally cold father, Edna “observed no model for nurturing” (263), and therefore chooses a husband who is equally unaffectionate, because she associates coldness with security. Because she feels “a loss of self within the roles of wife and mother” (259), Edna’s reawakened need for intimacy leaves her stranded. She wants something she can’t have without a loss of self, and refuses to lose herself. Ryan suggests that Edna’s “infatuation” (267) with Robert fails to meet the standard of “mature love or intimacy”