The Oceanic Feeling
A Freudian reading of Katherine Chopin’s novel The Awakening
Maria Gudmundsson
English
Literature
15 hp
Supervisor: Åke Bergvall
Examiner: Anna Swärdh
Date 18-06-2014
Serial number
0 Abstract Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a book about women’s position in late 19th century, showing a woman’s attempt to find liberation and emancipation in a restricting, male‐dominated society. Much is revealed already in the title. We understand that the text is about someone who will awaken, and the heart is in fact a story about Edna Pontellier’s gradual awakening to her own sexual and individual being, what it is and what she has to do. She is a woman living in a society where a wife is expected to be rather weak and dependable on her husband. Step by step she discovers why she does not feel pleased with doing what is expected of her by her husband and by society. The acts of Edna Pontellier, the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, is in this essay analysed with help of the Freudian terms oceanic feeling, the unconscious, and the pair Eros and Thanatos. Edna’s different swims gradually help her to find what is hidden in her unconscious. At the start of the novel, she is not conscious of the fact that there is another, deeper set of feelings, but the essay shows how through her minor swims she is driven by the Eros drive towards an overwhelming awakening which leads her to Thanatos and her final oceanic swim. 1 Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a book about women’s position in late 19th century, showing a woman’s attempt to find liberation and emancipation in a restricting, male‐dominated society. Much is revealed already in the title. We understand that the text is about someone who will awaken, and the heart is in fact a story about Edna Pontellier’s gradual awakening to her own sexual and individual being, and what that entails. She is a woman living in a society where a wife is expected to be rather weak and dependable on her husband. Step by step she discovers why she does not feel pleased with doing what is expected of her by her husband and by society. I want to connect that awakening to the fact that Edna likes to swim. This essay proposes that Edna’s recurring dives into the water are significant for her awakening by connecting them to what Freud termed “oceanic feeling,”1 a concept connected to the more widely known Freudian term the unconscious, as well as his concepts of Eros, the sex drive, and Thanatos, the death drive.2 I will show how Edna comes in contact with her Eros/Thanatos drives which are normally hidden in her unconscious, triggered by her bathing. However, her bathing is also a sign of the “oceanic feeling”, a regression into childhood, futilely trying to find protection from her domestic, maternal responsibilities. After some preliminary definitions of the terms used, I will analyse the novel with the help of the proposed Freudian terms. I will explain the way Edna, as an escape from reality, becomes submerged in a state of “oceanic feeling”, a safe place for her to be in. However, the ocean also figures as the place where her unconscious breaks through to her conscious self, first releasing the Eros drive, and then the Thanatos drive. During her mental journey Edna finally combines the effects of the Thanatos drive with the desire to remain in an oceanic feeling because she is not brave enough to face the encounter with Eros. Based on my analysis earlier in the essay, I will conclude the essay with a discussion about how we should interpret the ending of the novel, the tragic incident of Edna taking her life. There is a lot of critical controversy about the ending, and whether it should be interpreted with the help of Freud. One side states that Edna is the true feminist and that her act of suicide ends the novel in triumph, while others are convinced that Edna loses the struggle and gives 1
Suzanne Wolkenfield has argued before me that the ocean corresponds to Freud’s oceanic feeling (246), but as we shall see below we differ in our interpretation of what that means. 2
Freud himself did not use the term Thanatos, but post‐Freudian theorists have given this name to the Freudian death drive. 2 herself to the ocean as a surrogate for her mother’s womb. As Rosemary Franklin sums it up, “Despite the intense critical attention Kate Chopin's The Awakening has received in the last fifteen years, it is still not clear whether Edna Pontellier is a hero or a victim” (510). One critic who is not at all satisfied with the ending is George M Spangler, who suggests that the “trivial” ending does not correlate with the rest of the novel, which, he suggests, goes deeper: “In a word, a complex psychological novel is converted into a commonplace sentimental one” (210). However, this essay is arguing the opposite: looking at the story of Edna Pontellier From a Freudian perspective, one cannot say that the conclusion is the least trivial. First, I want to briefly explain the Freudian terms used. Freud argues that the “oceanic feeling” is the preserved “primitive ego‐feeling” from infancy. In Civilization and its Discontents, he explains the oceanic feeling as follows: Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego‐feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive – indeed, an all‐embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more sharply demarcated ego‐feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe … the oceanic feeling. (Freud 21) Oceanic feeling is to be explained as a psychological defence mechanism, a childish state where one does not take responsibility for one’s actions; in this state the person is in the centre of their world and does not have to answer to anything or anyone. As for the unconscious, there are according to Freud “three qualities to mental processes: they are either conscious, preconscious, or unconscious” (Freud, “Unconscious”). The unconscious, explains Lois Tyson, is for Freud “the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions, those wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them” (15). While the unconscious may seem unreachable to the conscious mind, Freud actually opens up for the possibility of a change from something being unconscious to becoming conscious: “The division between the three classes of material which have these qualities is neither absolute nor permanent. [… ;] what is unconscious can, as a result of our efforts, be made conscious, though in the process we 3 may have an impression that we are overcoming what are often very strong resistances” (Freud, “Unconscious”). The concept of Eros and Thanatos, Tyson explains, is “a matter of biological pressure that is discharged in the act of sexual intercourse. Freud called the drive Eros and placed it in opposition to Thanatos, the death drive. The two drives, Eros and Thanatos, according to Freud, are natural within the human mind: “The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents 66). In The Awakening the main character, Edna Pontellier, knows that there has to be some change. She is not aware of what she has to do, only that there is something that bothers her. On her way towards her awakening, Edna becomes gradually aware of what the problem is and what she has to do about it. She finds herself in a position of a wife and mother living in New Orleans, married to Léonce Pontellier, a husband who is a creole and a Catholic, but her life had started in a Presbyterian home in Kentucky. As Freud would have argued, Edna’s problems stem from her childhood. She had become motherless early in life. It is implied that her father had driven her mother to commit suicide: “The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave” (Chopin 102). With the loss of a mother came insecurity, and the never‐ending longing for her, the mother. Edna and her younger sister were brought up by their older sister Margaret. Margaret was very much Edna’s opposite: she was first of all practical, and even if she could never replace the real mother. Edna’s father had been a strongly religious and military character who did not give his daughter much attention. These are facts that affect Edna’s present life. She marries not from love since the marriage to Mr Pontellier was more of a protest done in order to get away from her family than a successful allegiance. She then gets unwanted children, and subsequently shuts herself down, putting herself to mental sleep. People look upon her as something very inappropriate, a woman who does not take her wifely and motherly duties seriously: “Mrs Pontellier was not a mother woman” (Chopin 18). She is a woman living in a society where a wife is expected to be rather weak and dependable of her husband. Step by step she discovers why she does not feel pleased with her situation: “Mrs Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (Chopin 24). As a woman and wife, Edna is supposed to do what is expected of her, by her husband first of all but also by society: ”He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his 4 existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation” (Chopin 14; my emphasis). Women in those days were their husband’s property, the men looked upon their wives as objects, and were not allowed to have a life of their own, and they certainly were not allowed to have sexual needs. In that case they were “bad girls,” and were not welcome in polite society. As Tyson points out, “‘good’ women were expected to find sex frightening and disgusting” (89). This makes Edna repress her needs. In effect, in order to defend herself she regresses, and enters the state Freud terms oceanic feeling. That regression can for example be seen in her relationship with Mme Ratignolle, also referred to as Adele, a creole woman who becomes her friend. Adele is very much Edna’s opposite: “The embodiment of every womanly grace and charm” (18). Edna’s strong connection to her is tied to her insecurity from being motherless: she might find her long lost mother in her. Edna’s actions, or sometimes inaction, make Adele wonder: “In some way you seem to me like a child, Edna. You seem to act without a certain amount of reflection which is necessary in this life” (Chopin 135). Adele hints that Edna acts on drives, instinct, rather than intellect, an indication of her childish behaviour. In this particular passage Adele is lecturing Edna about the effects of having men visiting, but Edna, in a very childlike way, just neglects everything she says. Adele is expecting a child, and despite the fact that Edna is not at all comfortable with the pain and unpleasant circumstances to giving birth, she spends a lot of time with her. I believe Edna’s urge to be with Adele when she is delivered is an indication of her attempt to get out of the oceanic feeling she still is in, although she is not conscious of the exact nature of what bothers her: She began to wish she had not come; her presence was not necessary. She might have invented a pretext for staying away; she might even invent a pretext for staying now for going. But Edna did not go. With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of nature, she witnessed the scene of torture. (Chopin 154) Edna regrets being present during Adele’s labour, yet regardless of that, she stays. The horrible childbirth functions as a cleansing act to her confused mind. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues, “To make it the being that is outside her, the mother must deliver the child from the 5 depth of herself…” (240). Edna’s life is an attempt to stay in the womb of a mother, and she finds the delivery grotesque but she needs to go through it in her way out of the Oceanic feeling. Missing a mother, she therefore seeks comfort in Adele Ratignolle: “Madame Ratignolle laid her hand over that of Mrs Pontellier, which was near her. […] She even stroke it a little, fondly, with the other hand, murmuring in an undertone, ‘Pauvre chérie’” (Chopin 29). The root cause of the main character’s anomalous actions is that she is, and always has been, lacking a mother. In conversation with Adele, Edna connects her swimming (they are spending time at the Mexican Gulf near New Orleans) with her childhood in Kentucky. All of a sudden she discovers a connection. She compares the Kentucky meadow, the place of her childhood, to the Mexican Gulf where she spends her days now as a grown married woman: “She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. ‘Oh I see the connection now!’” (Chopin 28). This is not only another example of her still remaining trapped in her childhood, but without herself knowing it, she is in fact alluding to Freud’s concept of oceanic feeling: the ocean has become a substitute for her lost childhood. Adele asks her where she had been going that day: “I was running away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, read in a spirit of gloom by my father that chills me yet to think of” (Chopin 29), i.e. she had run away from obligations then, and she still does. When Adele then asks her if she had run away from any services after that one, Edna says no: “I was a little unthinking child those days, just following a misleading impulse without question” (Chopin 29). Yet, remaining in a state of oceanic feeling, she acts just in the same way today, when she has become an adult, a wife and mother of two children. The connection of the sea with her childhood summers is crucial: ‘sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through that green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided’” (Chopin 29). Clearly, she over and over again shows that remaining in an oceanic feeling brings her comfort. She still is idle, unthinking, and unguided. Maybe the unguided part is not that comforting, but still there are no obligations. Another example of her childish state can be seen in her actions or non‐actions when her child takes ill. Edna might not actually mistreat her children, but again Mr Pontellier questions her ability to be a mother when he comes home and finds one of their children ill with fever. He accuses Edna of being neglectful: “He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother’s place to look after 6 children, whose on earth was it?” (Chopin 15). Edna’s way of treating her husband and sons shows her inability to act like a mature adult. As Per Seyerstedt points out, she even sees “Léonce and her children as foes” (142). This can be seen as a matter of Edna being submerged in a state of oceanic feeling. She cries from a feeling of not being able to be the mother she is expected to be. She loves her children but cannot take care of them as wanted by her restraining husband and a conventional society. There is a change underway, however, triggered by Edna’s separation from her husband. She refuses to attend her sister’s wedding, once again defying her father and her husband. Edna tries to feel sorry that her husband will be away from her a very long time, but she also likes the situation: “She bustled around, looking after his clothing […] She cried when he went away, calling him dear good friend […] But after all, a radiant peace settled upon her when she at last found herself alone” (Chopin 103). This ambivalence shows how Edna is unable to behave like an adult (as defined by her surroundings): “When Edna was at last alone, she breathed a big, genuine sigh of relief. A feeling that was unfamiliar but very delicious came over her. She walked through the house, from one room to another, as inspecting it for the first time” (Chopin 103). Without the husband keeping her in a state of sleep, she awakens from the oceanic feeling. So to sum up this section, Edna, by neglecting her children, husband and her social duties, is stuck in the infant state of oceanic feeling: she is not mature enough to function as an adult. However, her bathing, both in the ocean and at home in her bathtub, not only alludes to her regressive oceanic condition, but, as we shall see, will also trace her ultimately failed attempt to come out of this state. A growing realization that all is not well can be seen in her comment: “Think of the time I have lost splashing about like a baby!’” (Chopin 44). An awakening is about to take place, and her unconscious desires are the trigger. The ocean now begins to fill a different but supporting function, representing the unconscious as well as the oceanic feeling, a place of discovery as well as a hiding place. The ocean triggers Edna’s immersion into her unconscious drives, what Freud terms Eros and Thanatos. At the beginning of the novel, Edna is at first in an unaware state. She is initially comfortable in her marriage to Léonce and unaware of her own feelings and ambitions; this is due to the fact that she is in hiding, using the regressive state of the oceanic feeling as a defence against reality. Gradually, she more and more ignores her wifely obligations: she takes walks all alone, does not bother when her husband is complaining, and she also stops 7 being intimate with him. Edna is no longer feeling at ease because she is slowly becoming aware of having needs that have been repressed until now. That is how she comes in contact with her hidden needs. Her state of oceanic feeling had for a while worked as a defence against her true feelings, by submerging her in a childish state. Thus far in her life Edna has not been forced to face the real problems, and thereby she has not been required to take responsibility for them, yet that is changing. It is Edna’s bathing that seems to trigger her change. After bathing the first time she defies her husband. For the first time in her life she does something she wants for herself, following an instinct, a drive: “’Léonce, go to bed’, she said. ‘I mean to stay out here, I don’t wish to go in, and I don’t intend to. Don’t speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you’” (Chopin 49). Defying her husband connects her with hidden issues: “Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul” (Chopin 49). She has started a journey of discovery in which she finds herself living in “a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream” that shields her from a husband who owns her, and children who claim her all the time. As mentioned above, the ocean is now beginning to fill different functions, and can be seen as an extension of her unconscious, a fact state is reflected in the narrator’s comment that “[t]he voice of the sea is seductive [… .] The voice of the sea speaks to the soul” (Chopin 25). Like her unconscious, the ocean is big and unexplored, but unlike her unconscious the sea is possible to physically dive into during her vacation on the Grand Isle. Bit by bit the bathing helps her to reach her true feelings: “As she swam, she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (Chopin 44). Here Chopin clearly demonstrates that Edna uses the ocean as a substitute, as a help to get in contact with her inner emotions. Her awakening happens little by little. She becomes afraid out there in the water, afraid of the undiscovered. Her husband comforts her: "You were not so very far, my dear; I was watching you, he told her” (Chopin 44). What he does not understand is that it is her inner journey that has started, and it is not actually the water she is afraid of, but her feelings of coming in contact with something previously undiscovered, the suppressed drives hidden in the unconscious. The day after her row with her husband, Edna calls on Robert LeBrun to come with her to “the Chênière,” an island near the Grand Isle: “She had never sent for him before. She had never asked for him. She had never seemed to want him before” (Chopin 51). She wants 8 Robert to come to her, but is not fully aware of her situation. The ocean might trigger her unconscious self and its drives, but that is mostly hidden from her conscious thought: “She did not appear conscious that she had done anything unusual in commanding his presence” (Chopin 51). However, by wanting a man she begins to connect with the Eros drive. Edna is also discovering her own body as something usable, something to draw the attention of other men than her husband: “She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time”(Chopin 56). Robert Lebrun is the son of Mme Lebrun, who owns the recreation place where the Pontelliers stay for their vacation. Robert finds a new “love” every summer in a woman who is advantageously married. He is never very serious in his actions with those women. This summer, Edna is the object of his attentions. Edna falls in love with him, and thereby activates Eros in terms of love, creativity, sexuality, self‐
satisfaction, rather than the species preservation she had experienced with her husband. Robert and Edna´s relationship grows to something more than just a fling, Robert has fallen in love with her. Still Robert strives between the love he feels for her and the fact that she is married, and the society does not allow such alliance. Now Edna has discovered that she has another self that she tries to connect to her “present self”: “and she tried to discover wherein this summer had been different from any and every other summer of her life. She could only realize that she herself – her present self – was in some way different from the other self” (Chopin 61). Something has changed, and she can feel that change even though she is not aware of what exactly has happened. She discovers, however, that she is not there yet: “That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changes the environment, she did not yet suspect” (Chopin 61). Edna discovers how she now looks upon the world, the surroundings, people, in another way than she did before. The Eros drive comes to the surface in sensual moments, and again the sea is involved. Robert seduces Edna by using the sea. Her Eros drive calls her when Robert takes help from the ocean: “’Oh come’, he insisted. ‘You mustn’t miss your bath. Come on. The water must be delicious; it will not hurt you. Come’” (Chopin 24). What he really means is: come to me, let the boundaries loose, I want you! At the same time the ocean speaks to her, a “sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty” (Chopin 24). The following quote 9 reveals how Edna’s unconscious connects with her conscious mind, by Chopin described as “a certain light”: Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her. A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, ‐ the light which, showing the way, forbids it. (Chopin 24) That the light “forbids it” brings in the superego, which George M Spangler alludes to when he argues that Edna has “sinned in thought and deed against accepted sexual morality” (210), a “sinning” that is caused by her sexual instinct, Eros. The sea being an extension of Edna’s unconscious, she connects to her Eros drive when diving into the water, a hidden expanse loaded with erotic feelings. It is after the first swim that she feels a desire for Robert for the first time, thereby getting in touch with her Eros: “No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first‐felt throbbing of desire” (Chopin 47). And the influence is mutual. As Rose‐Mary Franklin argues, The entry of Edna, however, marks the intrusion of the "mortal" whose need for consciousness threatens to thwart the comfortable status quo of unconsciousness. Edna stirs up in Robert a part of his nature which has been suppressed, leading him to initiate the moonlight swim, the beginning of her awakening, and to suggest the excursion to Cheniere Caminada, an intensification of the first awakening. (514) It is Edna´s hidden drive that pushes Robert to his actions, which in turn makes a part of Edna’s unconscious surface. Edna is not aware at first of what she is doing or why, but she is imagining that the water is calling her: “It was some utter nonsense; some adventure out there in the water” (Chopin 11). It is out there in the water that her discovery lies. Edna is anxious of what the bathing might lead to, but since she is not even aware of why she wants to bathe, she has no 10 clue where she will end up. What she feels is an instinct, the urge for something she is not aware of. At first Edna is afraid when bathing: “A certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water” (Chopin 43). What she is afraid of is quite clear: “As she swam, she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (Chopin 44). Edna is afraid of losing control by letting the drives take over. However, from being afraid of what the swim might lead to, she discovers that “[s]he wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before” (Chopin 44). The ocean becomes a metaphor for her unconscious: no one has ever been there. She discovers that the enticing water is not as dangerous as she had thought, since what had really scared her was the feeling of being close to something no one had ever touched before. This fear is tied to the unconscious, with its hidden “wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts” (Tyson 14‐15). It is Edna’s swimming that causes the gradual steps towards her awakening, i.e. becoming partly aware of what is suppressed in her unconscious. She swims out into the ocean, taking her closer and closer to those hidden issues, something that is both appalling and enticing to her. Cynthia Griffin Wolff describes Edna’s and Robert’s visit to the Grand Isle as if it was in a fairy‐tale: “Edna’s fantasy world has come into being” (231). I think the connection to Sleeping Beauty is obvious when Robert gives the answer “you have slept precisely one hundred years” to Edna’s question “how many years have I slept?” (Chopin 57). However, the story of the Sleeping Beauty can easily be connected to Freudian theory: before coming in contact with the unconscious you are in a deep sleep, a sleep, as is discussed above, that Edna is waking up from. And the reason for Edna’s sleep is that she is imprisoned by an inconvenient marriage that does not suit her. Therefore, on her way to the island Chênière Caminada she discovers that her “chains had been loosening” (Chopin 53). Edna is on her way of discovering her unconscious, where sex as pleasure has a place, but not a husband and children. The society around Edna notices the change she goes through and, not the least, so does her husband. Wondering why she acts so peculiar, Leonce is very concerned about his wife, which makes him see their house doctor, Dr. Mandelet, about the situation. The doctor hints at the fact that the married couple do not have any intimate moments: it worries him when Leonce tells him that “We meet in the morning at the breakfast table” (94). Dr. Mandelet’s advice is for Leonce to leave his wife Edna alone: “Don’t bother her, and don’t let her bother you. Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism – a 11 sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar” (Chopin 95). The two men cannot imagine that Edna is on her way towards awakening. Mr Pontellier listens to the good doctor and leaves his wife alone for a while, travelling to New York without her. The Eros drive, found in her unconscious, comes to the fore when, in her husband’s absence, Edna meets Alcée Arobin, a charming young man well at home in society. Edna is rather bored when being alone. Not that she misses her husband and the children, yet: “She wanted something to happen – something, anything; she did not know what” (Chopin 107). She may not be aware of what or why, but Arobin awakens something in her. When he calls upon her a few days later she finds several excuses for not bringing a chaperone. Yet her inner emotions are so forbidden and thereby painful that the night ends with Edna rejecting Arobin, but she cannot stop thinking of him: “Yet his presence, his manners, the warmth of his glances, and above all the touch of his lips upon her hand had acted like a narcotic upon her” (Chopin 110). The narcotic mentioned is an indication of the Eros drive, which she does not dare to let loose, and yet Edna is now guided by her drives rather than intellect, seen in the comment that Arobin is “appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her” (Chopin 111). Edna is again in contact with the Eros drive. Another attempt to come out of the oceanic feeling is when Edna decides to move away from her family. She is quite convinced of the fact that her husband will think she is “demented,” but when her acquaintance Mlle Reisz questions her it becomes clear that Edna does not really know the reason why she moves out since she is driven by the Eros drive: “Neither was it clear to Edna herself [… .] Instinct had prompted her to put away her husband’s bounty in casting off her allegiance” (Chopin 113). Edna’s lack of allegiance brings her back to Arobin. When he kisses her she feels that “[i]t was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire” (Chopin 118). It is her nature that responds, not her intellect. She cries that night when her feelings overwhelm her. However, that in turn leads to some kind of understanding: “Above all, there was understanding. She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality” (Chopin 119). It is this awakening that makes her cry. What she discovers is her forbidden lust: “But among the conflicting sensations which assailed her, there was neither shame nor remorse. There was a dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which 12 had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips” (Chopin 119). What she discovers is not love but desire, the Eros drive. The Eros drive rears its head when Edna has sexual relations with not only one but two men other than her husband, with whom she stops having sex. In a novel written at the end of the 19th Century, however, this could not be spelled out even if it should be clear enough. According to Emily Toth, “In Kate Chopin’s day, readers of The Awakening knew exactly what Edna was doing with Alcée Robin, but a century later they are less sure” (214). Expressions like “fires flaming up” and “waves across the sand” are telling examples, as is the following: “It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire” (Chopin 118). Her sexual encounters are to Edna like wake‐up calls: “There was the shock of the unexpected and the unaccustomed” (Chopin 118). While she feels a little remorseful “because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips,” (Chopin 119) she is now fully in contact with her Eros instinct: “She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality” (Chopin119). The Awakening has occurred, but is now to take a sinister turn from Eros towards Thanatos. Edna discovers what she has to do about her situation: “One of these days’, she said, ‘I’m going to pull myself together for a while and think – try to determine what character of a woman I am; for candidly I don’t know” (Chopin 117). This statement is another turning point where Edna discovers what is necessary for her to do in order to be confident in her life. She decides to reveal the iceberg. Edna walked down to the beach rather mechanically, not noticing anything special except that the sun was hot. She was not dwelling upon any particular train of thought. She had done all the thinking which was necessary after Robert went away, when she lay awake upon the sofa till morning. She had said over and over to herself: “To‐day it is Arobin; to‐morrow it will be someone else.” (Chopin 159) Edna has awakened, but she discovers that she will never be fully satisfied. Always haunted by her Eros drive, she therefore gradually submits to darkness and death. As a result of this process, Edna’s temper differs from day to day: “There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy being alive and breathing […] There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, ‐ when it did not seem 13 worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead…” (84). Those sad days are Edna’s private eves of destruction. In her discourse on melancholia, Black Sun, Julia Kristeva sums up the difficulties of someone in Edna’s situation: the melancholic symptoms “point to a primitive self‐wounded, incomplete, empty [person … with] an unnameable narcissistic wound, so precocious that no outside agent […] can be used as a referent [… ;] sadness is really the sole [love] object” (12). “In such a case,” Kristeva continues, “suicide is […] a merging with sadness and beyond it, with that impossible love [the Maternal Presence], never reached, always elsewhere” (12‐13). The unnameable wound that Kristeva refers to has a name, Thanatos. The two psychological drives Eros and Thanatos are as much connected to each other as they are contrasts, at least that is the case in The Awakening. Freud states that “human beings, following Thanatos, have invented the tools to completely exterminate themselves” (geneseo.edu). The extermination mentioned by Freud is in this novel begun when Edna through bathing and swimming discovers her sexual drive, Eros: this is when her degeneration starts, subsequently the trigger for her death drive, the wish to exterminate herself, according to Freud’s theory. It is through bathing that Edna attempts the sexual and social liberty associated with Eros, yet she soon discovers the impossibility of leading that kind of life within the society she is placed, and as a result, the Thanatos drive takes over. So Edna’s series of bathes are therefore as connected to Thanatos as to Eros. Since the awakening also involves the destructiveness of the Thanatos drive, every swim is potentially a destructive action. Edna thinks about death when she gets too far from the shore; it is not real death, just fear of the relief she feels by loosening the bounds rather than an awakening, i.e. destruction by drowning. The fact that her husband does not think she is very far out implies that it is not the factual swim that scares her, but that it is a metaphor for a mental dive. When she is in the water and looking back towards the shore, Edna is rather reminded that she is very far from being safe: she feels unsecure and starts to discover, even if not to a full extent, that she might have to die if she fulfils this thing she has started: “A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her senses” (Chopin 44). The death vision here is the Thanatos drive showing up in her mind. This shows how Edna is leaving her comfort zone, heading out for the unknown, and she implicitly realizes that if she lets herself go, she will be seen as pariah in her society. As Jennifer B Gray argues 14 (without using the term), Thanatos is her only solution: “Because of her strong interpellation as a mother, a role dictated for married women by hegemonic ideology in her society, she finds that she cannot exist in an alternative or oppositional female role. However, because of her awakening to herself as an individual, she cannot exist in the female roles sanctioned by patriarchal ideology. Her only escape from this ideology is death” (54). This is where Edna begins to discover that death is the only solution to the new development of her life story. The first swim that really shows Edna’s way towards a new consciousness is on Robert’s draft, where bathing is so connected with sensuality. When Robert is teaching her how to swim, this is the first time, after repressing her Eros instincts of course, that Edna feels anxious: “A certain ungovernable dread hung above her when in the water” (Chopin 43). The Thanatos drive is surfacing, and that is why she feels anxious. The swims definitely change her self‐knowledge. Edna’s bathing starts with her being unaware, but being curious it ends with her going beyond boundaries that are set on women as wives and mothers. She dives to find herself a free and independent woman, i.e. liberating an unconscious that has been repressed for a lifetime. Unfortunately, the Thanatos drive will win this battle, which concludes when she gets into the Mexican gulf for the last time. The big question as we reach the end of the novel is of course why Edna ends her life. In this final section I shall first state my own position, based on my interpretation so far, and I shall then engage with some of the many scholars who have discussed her suicide. There are of course several possible reasons for Edna’s suicide. Edna’s end can be a result of her frustration at not being able to express herself in a patriarchal culture. She is looking into a life she actually thinks is much better, and where she can be free living out her Eros drive. Unfortunately, this life is impossible to live in this time period, due to the mentioned patriarchal structures; at least you cannot maintain respect from the society you have been a member of so far. So, the reason can therefore be her desertion from a life she cannot live according to the surrounding society. Or, one can see her as a coward, and that she finds it more comfortable and in her childish state takes the easiest way out. Another possible reason for Edna becoming suicidal is the anxiety she feels when not enveloped by the oceanic feeling: “And for the first time she stood naked in the open air […] . She felt like some new‐born creature” (Chopin 160). Before the final swim Edna is loosened from the Oceanic feeling, although she cannot live with that, she will not be able to cope with the world if she is not being protected by the Oceanic feeling. 15 But I would argue that it is the Freudian concepts oceanic feeling and Thanatos that provide the more fundamental understanding of her suicide, why she, in order to escape the bonds of patriarchy and motherhood, succumbs to destruction. She cannot live outside the oceanic feeling, this childlike state, so after being through the process of coming out from the feeling she once more succumbs to it a final time, feeling like a child, and that comforts her. This regression is now connected to the death drive, where the sea is a symbol for Thanatos, as well as Eros: “The voice of the sea is seductive” (Chopin 160). As a matter of fact, Eros and Thanatos are connected but are also in conflict with each other, which Edna Pontellier’s story shows. Discovering Eros should lead to a state of pleasure, but in this story, partly because of Edna’s own childhood traumas and partly because society around her does not accept her choices, it ends in her destruction through the Thanatos drive. The death drive is hidden in the sea, which is calling her, telling her that disappearing into its waves is the only way to go. The Thanatos drive finally overpowers even the Eros drive. Her last swim thus becomes the last tribute to Thanatos, a consequence of her awakening from the limitations of being a female in a male‐dominated world. She goes back into the water where she can reconnect to her psychological drives, in order to find the final rest from a life too much complicated to sort out. The ending of the novel, from this perspective, can be read as Edna’s final attempt to recapture the oceanic feeling. She commits suicide by diving into the Mexican gulf, her safe amniotic fluid. Having experienced an overpowering awakening that pulled her out of her oceanic feeling, she now sees no other way than to reach for Thanatos by diving into the Mexican Gulf, once again retreating back into the safe zone of the oceanic feeling: “The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (160). The quote shows how comforting she feels the ocean to be, and in her dying moment she finds herself back in childhood: “Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to a sycamore tree” (Chopin 161). A question connected to the novel’s title is whether Edna is conscious about her awakening or not. Suzanne Wolkenfield agrees with me that the ocean corresponds to Freud’s oceanic feeling, yet she argues that Edna is not consciously seeking suicide: “This symbolic invocation of the seductive sea that calls one to the ecstasy of immersion corresponds to Freud’s conception of the oceanic feeling of absolute fusion of the infantile ego”, but being childish Edna “was ‘not thinking’ as ‘she walked down to the beach’”, and is 16 striving “backwards to the womb” (244, 246). That regression I agree with, but I would argue on the contrary that this, her final action, however driven by the Freudian concept of Thanatos, is conscious. Edna’s last swim is one she has prepared herself for, and she is deliberately swimming far out: “She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue‐grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end” (161). Because of the long hibernation inside the hegemonic life with Mr Pontellier, she had not previously been aware. As Gray puts it, ”She is repressed by cultural forces that she does not understand and cannot articulate” (54). However, her awakening means that all of a sudden she does become aware. Moved by the drives of Eros and Thanatos, she nevertheless acts on her own volition as she leaves her oceanic feeling. Discovering that she cannot in the final analysis live her life outside it, she takes her final conscious step, the fatal step into the Mexican gulf. The act of suicide is an act of defiance against her former life, in which she was held like a bird in a cage. She cannot go back to the former life: “She thought of Léonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could have possessed her, body and soul” (Chopin 160). In the middle of the novel, Edna had thrown away her wedding ring as a symbol for the Pontellier couple’s unsuccessful alliance, and then trampled on it. However, this premature awakening had been doomed: “When she saw it lying there she stamped upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet” (Chopin 77). Edna had been left with three options: stay with her husband and children in a world where, since she is not a womanly woman meant to please a husband and take good care of children, she does not fit in. The second option for Edna is to choose love, and the Eros drive, stay in a bad marriage and live out her sexual needs with other men than her husband. Her third option is what she finally chooses, to commit suicide. Yet it is clearly shown in this essay that Edna is both a heroine and a victim: a heroine because she has discovered the Eros state and she has tasted the sweetness of a sensual love affair, and a victim because she cannot live this life without becoming a pariah. The novel therefore ends in triumph and rebirth, but also in defeat. Susanne Wolkenfield says: “But ultimately Chopin places Edna’s suicide as a defeat and regression, rooted in a self‐
annihilating instinct, in a romantic incapacity to accommodate herself to the limitations to 17 reality” (243). But as we have seen, Edna is recaptured in the amniotic fluid of the Mexican Gulf, having finally discovered Eros through sexual relations with at least two men, but also become a victim of the death drive, Eros having lost to the destructive Thanatos. I therefore agree with Sandra M Gilbert’s claim in her article “The second Coming of Aphrodite” that Edna is “suicidally born back into the Gulf near Grand Isle” (272). The story ends in rebirth as well as in defeat because it is by dying that Edna wins her triumph: just like Aphrodite she “is forever swimming back to Cyprus or Cythera in the full glory of immortality” (Foata 1). To determine how complicated the ending of the novel is, the best way is to explore the fact that Edna cannot live with herself after discovering her hidden drives. Edna is in a sense reborn, but she also suffers the “archetypal separation trauma” (240) that Cynthia Griffin Wolf compares to childbirth: for Edna, who has been separated from her mother early in life and is now separated from her oceanic feeling, this separation is devastating. She needs a union that she can only find in a renewed experience of the oceanic feeling, which she in turn can only find in the ocean itself. That is what she seeks to find with her final swim, in what turns into her suicide. When Edna discovers her drives she becomes torn between the world of liberation and the world that she is used to, the safe world. When she dies she is again united and completely whole To conclude, the acts of Edna Pontellier, the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, is in this essay analysed with help of the Freudian terms oceanic feeling, the unconscious, and the pair Eros and Thanatos. Edna’s different swims gradually help her to find what is hidden in her unconscious. At the start of the novel, she is not conscious of the fact that there is another, deeper set of feelings, but the essay has shown how through her minor swims she is driven by the Eros drive towards Thanatos and her final oceanic swim. At the beginning Edna is a motherless woman trapped in a conventional marriage to a Catholic creole. The marriage is a result of a childish revolt against her Presbyterian family. On her path towards finding what is in her unconscious she is helped by a young man, Robert Le Brun, to discovers Eros, the love and sex drive. When she once starts to physically swim, she also discovers Thanatos, the death drive, as a consequence of discovering Eros. As a protection against a conventional marriage in a hegemonic society, Edna has remained in the secure but regressive state of oceanic feeling, in which she does not have to take responsibility for anything that is included in adult people’s lives normally. The different 18 swims bring her gradually and naturally out of this comfort zone, to the point where she ends up with three choices: to defy the social conventions and live as the Eros drive tells her, to stay in the oceanic feeling and go along with her life like she has done so far, or to give herself over to Thanatos and end her life. She chooses the latter. So why does Kate Chopin kill her protagonist: is it a defeat or is it a triumph? My answer to that is that it is both. It is defeat because the best thing from a feminist point of view would have been to continue to live her life defying conventions. Edna chooses the ego way by, in a way going back to the state of oceanic feeling by succumbing to the water in the ocean which is to be seen as a metaphor for the amniotic fluid in a mother’s womb. But it is still a triumph because by her suicide she also shows the world that she is not willing to live the life in a society that hinders women from being free individuals with free thoughts and feelings. Edna is never meant to be for that world: she was doomed from the start, being different from her husband and all her friends because she is a Presbyterian from Kentucky and the others are Creole Catholic. She is also different from other women even physically with her distinctive face and figure. More importantly, unlike the other women by whom she is surrounded she is not a mother‐woman, one who is willing to sacrifice her very self to her husband, children, and surrounding society. However, she is neither broken nor mentally ill: she suffers only from the hegemony common to those days set up by men, and her one way out is to submerge herself in the oceanic feeling. The outcome should be seen as a positive interjection in the feminist debate, and I hold that Edna in the end goes voluntarily from one oceanic feeling, via Eros and Thanatos, to another. 19 Works cited Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print. Foata, Anne. “Aphrodite Redux : Edna Pontellier's Dilemma” http://www‐irma.u‐
strasbg.fr/~foata/anne/papers/Aphrodite.html 29‐12‐2012. Web. Fox Genovese, Elisabeth. “Progression and Regression in Edna Pontellier”. In Chopin’s The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 257‐263. Print. Franklin, Rosemary F. The Awakening and the Failure of Psyche. American Literature 56: 4 (1984): 510‐26. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and its Discontents.” In Complete Works. London: Hogarth Press, 1971. Print. ___. "The Structure of the Unconscious". http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/freudselection.html 8‐6‐2014. Web. Gilbert, Sandra M. “The second Coming of Aphrodite.” In Chopin’s The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 271‐282. Print. Gray, Jennifer B. “The Escape of the ‘Sea’: Ideology and The Awakening.” The Southern Literary Journal 37: 1 (Fall 2004): 53‐73. Print. Griffin Wolff, Cynthia. “Thanatos and Eros”. In Chopin’s The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 231‐241. Print. Spangler, George M. “The Ending of the Novel.” In Chopin’s The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 208‐211. Print. Seyerstedt, Per. Kate Chopin. Oslo: Universitetsforlagen, 1969. Print. Toth, Emily. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Print. Tyson, Lois, Critical Theory Today: A User‐Friendly Guide. New York: Garland, 1999. Print. Wolkenfield, Suzanne. ”Edna’s suicide.” In Chopin’s The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 241‐247. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Print. 20