CIRCULATING PORTRAITS

“They all knew each other and felt like one large family,” Kate Chopin writes of the “society of Creoles” Edna Pontellier marries into in The Awakening (1899). Edna is not quite a member of this family and is in some degree scandalized by its behavior, which is to say, by the general “absence of prudery” that characterizes Creole conversation and by the particular profusion of “intimate detail” in the “harrowing story” of the “mother woman,” Madame Ratignolle's “accouchements.” When a sexually explicit book makes the rounds of the pension, she is “moved to read [it] in secret and in solitude, though none of the others had done so” and when Madame Ratignolle tells about the accouchements, she blushes. But Edna's blush does not exactly express a prudery about sex, any more than her desire to read the novel in private expresses disapproval of it. It is to the public – the familial – discussion of such topics that she objects, and this on grounds that The Awakening only gradually makes clear.

For “solitude” is not only the condition in which Edna reads, it is the name she gives to a piece of piano music she particularly likes, a piece that evokes in her imagination the figure of a naked man “standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore … His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him.”