Quotes from The Awakening

“I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.”

Edna to her friend Adele, after Adele has called her a devoted mother. The hierarchy in the sentence (money, then life, then self) is the radical claim of the novel. In 1899 a woman's life was already assumed to belong to her children; Chopin's heroine concedes that and then defends one further thing, the self, and refuses to give that up. The novel is the slow working-out of what that refusal costs.

“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

The narrator describing Edna's slow change over the summer at Grand Isle. The image of the fictitious self as a garment is Chopin's central metaphor for nineteenth century femininity: a wife is something a woman puts on in the morning. The novel is interested in what is left when the garment is removed, and willing to admit the answer might not be a happier woman.

“I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others.”

Edna to her would-be lover Robert, late in the novel. The second sentence is the moral honesty that distinguishes Chopin from her imitators. Edna does not pretend her freedom is costless. She knows it tramples on her children, her husband, on Robert himself. The novel refuses to glamorise her awakening; it shows it as a choice with victims, and lets Edna make it anyway.

“Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate.”

Chopin's narrator on how Edna came to marry Leonce. The phrase masquerade as the decrees of Fate is doing precise work: nineteenth century marriages liked to call themselves destiny, and Chopin will not let them. She names Edna's marriage an accident, then generalises to many other marriages. The sociology is unsparing: most marriages in this world are arbitrary arrangements dressed up as inevitability.

“He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation.”

Leonce's view of his marriage, early in the novel. Chopin's irony is structural: from Leonce's perspective, Edna is failing the role of wife. The novel will, page by page, make the reader see that Leonce's idea of being the sole object of his existence is itself the problem. The complaint of a respectable husband is the diagnosis of his wife's awakening.

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude.”

The first long description of the sea at Grand Isle, where Edna's awakening begins. The sea is the novel's most important character apart from Edna. Notice the four verbs (whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting); the sea is being given the same range of address a lover would have. Chopin will end the novel by returning Edna to this water, and the symmetry is part of what makes the ending impossible to read consolingly.

“How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!”

Two sentences after the previous quote. Chopin's narrator is unusually willing to step outside Edna and address the reader directly. The line warns: most women who begin to wake up do not emerge from the process. The Awakening is not a novel about self-actualisation succeeding; it is a novel about how often self-actualisation, in 1899, drowned.

“She walked on. She did not look back.”

Edna walking into the sea at Grand Isle in the final chapter. Two short sentences. Chopin refuses dramatic interiority for the death; she gives the reader only the gait. Whether this is suicide, transcendence, defeat or freedom is the question the novel will not answer for you. Critics have spent a hundred and twenty-five years on the question, and the prose remains as flat as Chopin made it.

“The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.”

The pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, the novel's only female artist, warning Edna. The image will return in the novel's final chapter as a bird with a broken wing reeling over the sea before Edna walks in. Chopin plants the metaphor in chapter twenty-seven and lets it pay off twelve chapters later. The warning is structural: most women who try to soar do not make it; the novel will not let us forget Reisz said so.

“I am becoming an artist. Think of it!”

Edna to Mademoiselle Reisz, after she has begun painting more seriously. The exclamation is double-edged. Edna is sincere; Chopin is sceptical. The novel will show that Edna's painting, while real, is not yet the sustained discipline Reisz has spent decades on. Becoming an artist is not the same as being one, and one of the quieter cruelties of the book is its refusal to let Edna shortcut the difference.