From Loss To Awakening

The Awakening was the masterpiece of Kate Chopin, a female American writer in the19th century. As a local writer and short novelist, Chopin was well-received and popular among American critics and the general public. However, her controversial novel The Awakening published in1899almost overturned her fame overnight, inflicting heavy loss on her later writing career. Fortunately, though this novel was unacceptable at that time mainly due to its daring touch upon some sensitive elements, for example, women’s sexual and love consciousness, it is now recognized as a classical work thanks to the progress of times and people’s banishment of moral prejudice. In The Awakening, the protagonist’s plight, her gradual consciousness towards such plight and her action to fight against it are important resources and experiences for contemporary women to absorb in and learn from. By virtue of some feminist theories, especially some conceptions and theories in psychoanalytic feminism, this paper will focus on how the protagonist Edna is repressed under patriarchal system; how she has undergone her awakening process and taken her action and how we understand Edna’s death. This paper argues that Edna’s subjectivity was repressed before she misrecognized her identity in the Mirror Stage as an independent individual; when she realized the falsity of her subjectivity, she rebelled bravely against her fate; but her fight was not thoroughgoing until she jumped into the sea to embrace the Pre-Oedipus Stage, showing her spiritual victory at the cost of physical existence.This paper mainly contains four chapters. The first chapter is the introduction part. Firstly, Chopin and her main works will be briefly introduced. Then, literature reviews and synopsis of contents and structures will be collected. The focus will be put on relevant researches and critical comments both at home and abroad. By doing so, the author found that most of these comments and researches are heavily influenced by or make use of feminist theories, but only in general, thus their interpretations of The Awakening sometimes set readers at a loss, or even mislead them. The next part in this chapter will be devoted to some explanation of feminist theories, especially psychoanalytic feminist theories, which provide theoretical perspectives and tools for this paper. At last, a brief outline will be given. The second chapter will narrate Edna’s process of awakening. At first, Edna experiences extreme repressions before her awakening. Edna’s repression, both physically and psychologically, forms a sharp contrast with her later independence and self-autonomy. As the sayings goes,"Things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme". People would rise to rebellion if they were extremely exploited or repressed, and Edna’s situation is just like this. Then Lacan’s Mirror Stage Theory and Pre-Oedipus Stage will be applied into detailed analysis of Edna’s arduous process of awakening, ranging from physical awakening to spiritual awakening, from living a muddle-minded life under the dominance of patriarchal culture to becoming aware clearly of those roles that do not belong to her. Edna immerses in the joy found in her newly-awakened Self and she also tries hard to protect it from invasion. But her fight does not gain support and understanding from her friends, her lover and the society, and she is enforced to realize that her rebellion is too weak and single-handed. She jumps into the sea not because she is desperate and pessimistic but because she is totally awakened. She would rather sacrifice her walking corpse than continue to live an indecent life in a society offering her no comfort and understanding. The third chapter will mainly analyze how to understand Edna’s death. Although Edna has two female friends Madame Adele and Mlle. Reisz who respectively awakens Edna’s sense of physical beauty and encourages her to defy traditions and conventions as a spiritual mentor, however, Edna who is arrested between the Imaginary and Symbolic Order can not repeat their life models. Edna finally jumps into the eternal embrace of the sea, marking a return to the pre-Oedipal stage where women are detached from male dominance and her spiritual victory though at the expense of corporeal extinction. The last chapter is the conclusion part. Main ideas are summarized and the following conclusions will be drawn:firstly, Edna lives an extremely repressed life before her awakening. She has no concept of Self and always lives under the cover of traditional female role defined by society; secondly, Edna experiences an arduous process from loss to awakening. Such process includes not only the awakening of her realization of Self, but also her acknowledge of her sexual desire, her longing for love and her fight against various roles enforced by society; Thirdly, Edna’s fight does not succeed on the realistic level, but her jumping into the sea shows that she is totally and thoroughly awakened, that she does not want to reconcile with the reality, to reach a compromise. She would prefer to die to arouse people’s attention about women than stoop to compromise. This just embodies the significance of Edna’s awakening:it is not so much as she fails in desperation and despair as she gains a thorough triumph of rebellion in a sober state and gets an eternal freedom.