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physical charm” (p. 17) of her female companion. Seeking words to describe the intense bond between Edna and Adèle, the narrator concludes that “we might as well call [it] love” (p. 17). Edna develops a very different but equally intense attachment to the dour Mademoiselle Reisz. Hearing her at the piano arouses Edna’s passions to an orgasmic intensity that resonates “within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body” (p. 31). As this passage suggests, when it comes to women, love and physical desire are closely aligned. In Edna’s relationships with men, the two are more often at odds. With a history of romantic attachments to unattainable male figures—“a sad-eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky” (p. 21), her neighbor’s fiancée, a great tragedian—it is not clear that Edna is actually seeking to consummate a heterosexual relationship. Although she loves Robert, she has sex with Arobin because his kiss awakens her desire. The regret she feels afterward is “neither shame nor remorse” (p. 97), but more a dawning awareness that she is “assailed” by emotions more powerful than reason or affection.

The seeming paradox that a greater knowledge of self comes through the suppression of rationality is at the heart of Edna’s development. In spite of its title and the many references to awakening that appear throughout the novel, readers are often surprised at how often Edna is either sleeping or overcome with a drowsiness that obstructs clarity of thought. For every image of a stirring, emergent consciousness there is another of narcotic stupor. As a “light was beginning to dawn dimly within her” (p. 16), Edna is moved not to wakefulness but to dreams; learning to swim gives her new power “to control the working of her body and her soul” (p. 33), but it also inspires her to reach “for the unlimited in which to lose herself’ (p. 33). Whereas Adèle is a figure of bustling, productive maternity, Edna is listless and disengaged. Whereas Mademoiselle Reisz turns her artistic talents into a career, Edna is satisfied to dabble at her painting “in an unprofessional way” (p. 14). Ironically, then, the awakening intimated by the novel’s title is not an initiation into any of the recognizable social roles modeled by its characters, but rather an escape from them.

This conclusion troubled Chopin’s contemporaries because it seemed to endorse a destructive self-absorption at the expense of social responsibility. It has provoked more recent readers because they see the extent to which Edna’s freedom is bought through the labor of others. She is surrounded by people who work, either in the home, like the resourceful Adèle, or in professions, like her husband. At the same time, the anonymous and rather disagreeable quadroon who cares for her children, the servants who shop, cook, and clean, and the Mexicans, Acadians, and African Americans who exist on the narrative periphery, create an environment in which Edna has no productive function. It is no wonder that early in the novel Léonce regards his sunburned wife as a piece of damaged property. Her crisis has been described by Michelle Birnbaum as that of the “colonial subject,” who cannot consciously recognize the racial and class inequities around her and consequently internalizes those conflicts as divisions within herself. Instead of acknowledging the disparities in her social environment, she experiences an imbalance within her own psychic landscape.

That Edna accepts the racial and class hierarchies of her culture is unsurprising. She lives in a sheltered and highly regulated environment that is rarely interrupted by the surrounding world. This insularity explains why the party at Grand Isle is so dismayed to learn of Robert’s imminent departure for Vera Cruz. It also explains the striking ignorance of their observations about Mexico: The pious lady in black asks him to investigate whether the power of her Mexican prayer beads extends beyond the border; Madame Ratignolle remarks that Mexicans are “a treacherous people, unscrupulous and