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In its emphasis on interior psychology at the expense of external description, and in its formal experimentation with time and perception, The Awakening also anticipates many of the strategies of modernist fiction. In contrast to the realist commitment to mundane surface detail, Chopin seems relatively unconcerned with mimetic representation. Michael Gilmore has described this quality as a privileging of subjective responses and expressions over the replication of external reality. He attributes Chopin’s interest in music to the fact that it is “an imageless art... neither mirroring nor duplicating an external form, and it shakes Edna to the depths because it provides immediate entrance to the subjective world of feelings.” The Awakening seems propelled more by impulse than measured narrative progression. While individual chapters are temporally coherent, the time that passes between one chapter and the next is highly varied, sometimes spanning a few hours and sometimes making a bigger or less clearly delineated leap forward. Memories, particularly of Edna’s childhood in the Kentucky blue-grass country, surface at unpredictable moments like a musical refrain that ties past and present together.

Just as time does not move in a predictable pattern, narrative perspective in The Awakening is constantly shifting. At some points the third-person narrator seems to echo Edna’s point of view. For example, in the final moments of her life, the narrative voice channels the protagonist’s own subjectivity: “How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (p. 133). At other points, it hovers at a remove that allows for ironic commentary. This is the case in an account of an evening at Grand Isle. When a tedious interlude by the Farival twins is interrupted by the parrot’s shrieks, the narrator observes wryly, “He was the only being present who possessed sufficient candor to admit that he was not listening to these gracious performances for the first time that summer” (pp. 28-29). We are to understand that these are not Edna’s observations, but the products of a more detached narrative consciousness. So, too, on the night of Edna’s first swim, the narrator checks Edna’s perceptions against reality. Believing herself to be far from shore, “a quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her senses” (pp. 33—34). The sublimity of Edna’s experience—in which she genuinely believes she has confronted the possibility of her own death—is put into perspective with a more measured description of the same event: “She had not gone any great distance—that is, what would have been a great distance for an experienced swimmer” (p. 33). This tonal disparity distinguishes Edna’s own melodramatic sensibility from a more reasoned narrative voice. Such experiments with narrative and point of view locate The Awakening somewhere between the realist commitment to external detail and the modernist interest in individual subjectivity.

Such varied cadences of tone and perspective are well suited to this story of desire and sexual awakening. Although the actual consummation of Edna’s affair with Alcée Arobin takes place in the space between chapters 31 and 32, the novel is suffused with sensual images, from the illicit books that circulate at Grand Isle to the luxuriant feel of expensive clothes and possessions, the gustatory pleasures of fine food and drink, the romantic intonations of the piano, and the caressing waves of the sea. Experiencing a heightened perception that engages all of her senses, Edna’s awakening is not reducible to heterosexual contact. And although the flirtations of Robert Lebrun are most commonly credited for prompting Edna’s desire, Showalter has rightly observed that her sensuality is actually ignited by intimate relationships with two women, Adèle Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz. Sitting with Adèle and Robert, Edna’s gaze is drawn not to Robert but to the “excessive