The Ironic Strategies of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Abstract

This chapter argues that Kate Chopin’s novel is not only about a transgressive woman but is itself also deeply transgressive in its form and style.

The chapter (building on previous critical works by Elaine Showalter, Patricia Yaeger, Sandra Gilbert, Cynthia Wolff, etc.) will start from what we can learn about the exact nature of the protagonist’s and the novel’s transgressiveness from the almost uniformly hostile contemporary reviews, one of which was outraged by what it quite mistakenly refers to as Edna’s ‘manifold’ love affairs—a symptomatic error duplicated in the cover blurb for the current best-selling student edition of the novel which refers to Edna as a woman who ‘seeks and finds passionate physical love’ in adultery. These are symptoms of a wilful misreading that point to an unexpressed and inexpressible outrage at the true nature of Edna’s transgressiveness, which the chapter traces in detail and which is matched by the verbal and stylistic and intertextual subversions that are detailed in the chapter and which structure this still shocking, and deeply moving, examination of a woman struggling with the furthest implications of being (in words that were originally going to feature on the title page) ‘a solitary soul’.