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revengeful” (p. 50), and Victor relays a trite story about “a Mexican girl who served chocolate one winter in a restaurant in Dauphine Street” (p. 50). Not only do they know nothing of Mexico, but lacking resources to understand genuine cultural or geographic difference, they can relate to the foreign only though the lens of their own limited experiences. Even less worldly than her companions, Edna remains silent during this conversation because she can “think of nothing to say about Mexico or the Mexicans” (p. 50). Nor, for that matter, can Robert, whose exact reasons for going, aside from an obscure business prospect, remain murky. Critics have noted that the character of Mariequita and an unnamed “Mexican girl” who gives Robert an embroidered tobacco pouch serve to associate travel south of the border with sexual adventure. But they have differed over the meanings of that association, some seeing it as a place of homosexual license, a reading that explains the unconsummated romance between Edna and Robert as well as “the gentleman whom he intend[ed] to join at Vera Cruz” (p. 49), others as a place of heterosexual opportunity.

While the narrative provides little means to resolve these questions, it is possible to remark on Mexico’s significance to Edna and her fate. She has nothing to say about it because she cannot conceive of places beyond the bounds of her own limited world. Having led a protected and uneventful life, she is unable to imagine that the solution to her problems lies in going elsewhere. Whereas men move to expand the horizon of experience - Léonce leaves his family behind for business trips to New York, and Robert leaves the country altogether—Edna’s only movement (other than circular wanderings in the city) is toward greater confinement, as she relocates from her spacious home into the more enclosed “pigeon house” around the corner. While it might be possible to see the new house as a cozy version of Virginia Woolf’s longed-for “room of one’s own,” it is also, more ominously, akin to the cage in “Emancipation.” Facing an increasing claustrophobia, which is inescapable through either imaginative or literal movement, Edna comes to believe that death is the only possible solution.

The profound ignorance of the characters in The Awakening about the rest of the world returns us to Chopin’s own last activity, her visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair. The Fair spoke to Americans’ thirst for knowledge about the rest of the world. At the same time, its allegedly wide-angle vision was actually a telescope that used other nations as a reference point to establish American superiority. As much as it addressed the desire to learn about and collaborate with a global community, it was also designed to parade the nation’s cultural advancement and growing economic and military might on a world stage. The sad irony that with supremacy come loneliness and isolation is crystallized in the image of Edna’s favored musical composition, “Solitude,” which evokes a man standing desolate and despairing before the sea. In addition to its many other accomplishments, The Awakening succeeds in illustrating the alienation that results from having the best that the world can offer, but existing under conditions that make it impossible to give of oneself in return. Chopin, who read widely, traveled to Europe, and witnessed pivotal events of her time, should not be confused with her protagonist. A widow, single mother, and professional writer, she lived her life fully and to its end. Such experience grants the far more worldly author the insight to depict a character whose lack of reciprocity is less an individual flaw than a flaw of a culture that treated women as property and maintained rigid racial and class structures. Although Chopin herself is often able to see around such obstacles, she also blames them for preventing Edna from finding other opportunities for self-realization on the rich and seething margins of her own empty, white world.

Rachel Adams teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature at Columbia University.