3 - Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening

Summary

When Adele Ratignolle gives birth in Chapter 37 of The Awakening, Kate Chopin writes that her heroine, Edna Pontellier, witnesses the suffering of her friend “with an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature.” Of all the verities against which Edna sets herself in shattering her conventional marriage – the religion of domesticity, the family, property, the social order itself – none enjoyed greater prestige in latenineteenth-century American culture than “Nature,” a word Chopin capitalizes as though she were referring to Providence or the Supreme Being. Indeed, one might justifiably regard the natural as the privileged category undergirding almost all of those institutions venerated by Edna's and Chopin's contemporaries. Within the novel, Dr. Mandelet underscores nature's centrality as the impediment to Edna's self-realization when he and Edna leave the Ratignolle home together after Adele's ordeal. “Youth is given up to illusions,” sighs the doctor. “It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost” (Chap. 38).

Edna's “revolt” takes place within the larger context of a crisis in her culture's perception of nature, a crisis that deeply troubled Americans, though it was not confined to this country. There developed a widespread feeling around the turn of the century that Western civilization had lost touch with nature and was consequently entering or, in the more pessimistic assessments, already well advanced toward a state of decay.