In brief
Edna Pontellier, the Kentucky-born wife of a New Orleans businessman, spends a summer at a Creole resort on Grand Isle. She learns to swim, falls in love with the landlady’s son and finds she no longer wants to be what she has been. Back in the city she stops receiving callers, takes up painting seriously, has an affair with a man she does not love, moves out to a tiny house of her own and at last swims out into the Gulf and does not come back. It takes thirty-nine short chapters.
It was read as a scandal and then forgotten, and when it returned in the 1970s it was read as a manifesto. It is neither. It is a cool, sensuous and very clever book about what happens when someone discovers a self and finds nothing in the world built to hold it, and its real difficulty is that Chopin will not tell you whether Edna’s end is defeat or the last free act she has left.
The argument
The opening chapter states the problem without fuss. Léonce comes back from the beach, sees that his wife is sunburnt, and looks at her “as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.” He is not a brute. The women on the island think him the best husband in the world. That is the force of the book: nothing is wrong with Edna’s marriage by the standards available, so whatever is wrong must be wrong with the standards.
What happens to her is described almost as a change in physics. By the sixth chapter she is “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.” The narrator at once adds a touch of irony: this may seem “a ponderous weight of wisdom” for a young woman of twenty-eight. Chopin is serious about the awakening and unsentimental about the person having it.
The book’s central statement comes in a conversation with her friend Adèle, in which Edna tries to say what she will not surrender: “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.” Adèle cannot follow this, and the novel shows that nobody else can either. Near the end, Edna puts the same thing to Robert as a declaration of independence: “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose.” He goes white, and within two chapters he has gone for good.
That is the trap, and it is why the ending does not read as a simple punishment. Three things have closed in. Robert, whom she loves, cannot imagine a woman who is not given by one man to another. Desire by itself, she has learned from Arobin, is repeatable and impersonal: “To-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be some one else.” And there are the children, who stand for the claim she can neither meet nor shed: “The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her”. She has found out that she can escape everything except being their mother and being talked about in a way they will have to live with. Her solution is the only one that gives up her life rather than herself, which is exactly the distinction she drew for Adèle.
The shape of the book
The novel falls into three movements, marked by place. The first sixteen chapters belong to Grand Isle, a summer of bathing and small talk in which almost nothing happens and everything changes. Edna cries on the porch for no reason she can name; she sits on the beach with Adèle and remembers running through a Kentucky meadow; she hears Mademoiselle Reisz play and is shaken by it; she swims out alone for the first time. Then comes the strange excursion to the Chênière Caminada, when she leaves Mass in a panic, sleeps for hours in a stranger’s cottage and wakes as if into another age of the world. Robert takes fright and leaves for Mexico.
The second movement, in New Orleans, is the most modern part of the book because it is largely about refusal. She stops keeping her Tuesdays. She lets the house go. Léonce consults Doctor Mandelet, who has the wit to advise him to leave her alone. Husband and sons go away, and she takes up the races, Arobin and the “pigeon house”, a tiny place round the corner that she pays for herself with her own money. The birthday dinner she gives before moving there, with candles and champagne and a young man wreathed in roses, is the high point of her power and one of the loneliest scenes in the book.
The last movement is very fast. Robert comes back, confesses and hesitates. She is called away from him to Adèle’s labour, and by the time she returns he has left a note: “I love you. Good-by—because I love you.” The final chapter returns her to the empty island out of season, and the novel ends in the sea. The end repeats the beginning: the swim that gave her power in chapter ten is the swim she does not return from in chapter thirty-nine.
The voice
Chopin’s prose is light and quick, and the lightness is its daring. She learned from Maupassant, whom she admired, to state rather than plead, and she reports desire as coolly as she reports the weather. After Arobin first kisses her, the chapter ends with an unadorned claim that no American novelist of the time would have put quite so plainly: “It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded.” The next chapter, a single paragraph, is the most remarkable in the book. Edna reviews her feelings and finds “neither shame nor remorse”, only a “dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her”. The problem is not sin. It is a misfit of desire and love, and Chopin treats that as a fact.
There is also a thin, disciplined line of comedy. The book opens with a parrot screaming “Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!” at a man trying to read a newspaper. The narrator can move from irony, as with the mother-women who “esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels”, to complete sympathy within a page.
Léonce’s response when his wife moves out is the best joke in the novel and the most chilling. He cares nothing for the moral question and is only anxious about his credit, so he sends instructions to an architect and has it announced in the papers that the house is being remodelled. The marriage is saved in the only place he thinks it exists.
The sea
A refrain runs through the book, and you hear it first in chapter six: “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude”. It comes back, almost word for word, in the last chapter, and that return is the most deliberate effect in the novel. It tells you that the ending was there from the start, and that the sea’s offer of freedom was always also an offer of dissolution.
Swimming is the book’s best idea. It gives a physical event to what might have been pure inwardness. When Edna first manages it she is “like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its powers”, and in the same scene she goes too far out and has a moment of terror she does not mention to anyone. Both halves of the book’s meaning are already there. In the last chapter she takes off the old bathing suit: “for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air”, feeling “like some new-born creature”. The language is that of birth, and it comes straight after she has watched a real birth and called it torture.
The other image cluster is of birds. The caged parrot begins the novel. Mademoiselle Reisz feels Edna’s shoulder blades to see if her wings are strong, and warns her in Edna’s own telling that “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.” In the last chapter, “A bird with a broken wing” is beating the air above the water. The very last sentence pulls back to something else altogether: her father’s voice, a cavalry officer’s spurs, “and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.” The book ends not with her death but with a smell from Kentucky.
The people
Edna Pontellier
A Presbyterian from the Kentucky bluegrass among Catholic Creoles, she is an outsider who has never learned their code, in which women can speak frankly because they are never in any doubt about their place. She is sometimes careless, selfish and vague about others, and Chopin is content to let you notice.
Léonce Pontellier
Generous with money and gifts, attentive to his sons when it suits him, and baffled by her. The novel’s harshest judgement of him is that it is fair to him.
Adèle Ratignolle
The perfect mother-woman, beautiful, kind and a real friend. Her exhausted plea after labour, “Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children!”, is what finally reaches Edna.
Mademoiselle Reisz
The unpleasant old pianist who lives alone, plays better than anyone and tells Edna that the artist “must possess the courageous soul.” She is the model of a life without marriage or children, and she pays for it with loneliness, and with being disliked by almost everyone.
Robert Lebrun
Charming and idle, a young man who has spent earlier summers courting married ladies as a game. He is more conventional than he seems, and when the game turns real he leaves twice.
Alcée Arobin
A rake with good manners who gives Edna what Robert will not, and whom she does not love. Chopin does not punish her for him, which was a large part of the original offence.
The others
Doctor Mandelet sees more than anyone and can only say so in the last pages. Then there are those who make Edna’s freedom possible: the quadroon nurse who “followed them about with a faraway, meditative air”, the servants of the pigeon house, the Black and mixed-race people in the background of every scene. The book scarcely notices them. Its idea of the self is available only to a woman of Edna’s class and colour, and a modern reader should keep that in sight.
How it was made
Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis in 1850, married Oscar Chopin in 1870, raised six children in New Orleans and then at Cloutierville in Natchitoches Parish, and was widowed in 1882, heavily in debt. She went back to St. Louis and began writing seriously around 1890, and by the middle of the decade was known for the Louisiana tales collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her title for the novel was A Solitary Soul. It was published by Herbert S. Stone in Chicago in April 1899.
The reception did her real harm, and she responded with a short and amused printed statement saying she had never expected her heroine to make such a mess of things. Her next collection, already accepted, was cancelled when the publisher ran short of funds, though the reviews have often been blamed for it. She died in 1904 after collapsing at the St. Louis World’s Fair, and the novel went out of print for decades. The Gutenberg text linked here is the complete novel, followed by a selection of her short stories.
Readers and critics
The first reviews are a study in themselves. The St. Louis Republic called it “too strong a drink for moral babes”. The Nation called Chopin “one more clever writer gone wrong”. Public Opinion was “well-satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf.” Willa Cather, reviewing it in the Pittsburgh Leader and comparing it to Madame Bovary, admired the “flexible, iridescent style” and hoped it would be given to a better cause. Despite the legend, it was never formally banned; the disapproval needed no ban.
The recovery was slow and was the work of a few people. Edmund Wilson wrote about Chopin in Patriotic Gore (1962), and the Norwegian scholar Per Seyersted published a biography and the Complete Works in 1969. A column by Linda Wolfe in The New York Times in 1972 and an Avon paperback that year took it to the general reader, and the women’s movement of the time gave it a ready audience.
The debate since then has mostly concerned the ending. Is the last swim a triumph or a failure? Scholars such as Elaine Showalter and Emily Toth have placed her in the history of American women’s writing. I would say that the novel is too intelligent for the triumph reading. Edna does not defeat anything. She does, however, keep the one thing she said she would keep, and the novel stops there.
Afterlives
It is now a set text across American schools and universities, and that is its main afterlife. There have been two films: The End of August (1981) and Grand Isle (1991), with Kelly McGillis as Edna. Robert Stone’s novel Children of Light (1986) has doomed film people going to Mexico to shoot it, and the HBO series Treme has a New Orleans professor teach it. It is often paired with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which got the same kind of response twenty years earlier.
How to read it
- Read chapter six and the last chapter together. The refrain of the sea is there on purpose, and hearing the same words again is half of the ending.
- Keep Léonce fair. If you turn him into a tyrant, the novel gets simpler and worse.
- Ask who is doing the work. Whenever Edna is free, look round the room for the person carrying the tray or minding the children.
- Read the stories that follow in this edition. “Désirée’s Baby” in particular brings the book’s silence about race into the open.
Read next
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857). The obvious comparison, and a useful contrast: Emma wants what novels promised her, and Edna wants something she has no words for.
- Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879). The same door slam, with less ambiguity about whether you can live on the other side.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892). Written in the same decade, about a doctor and a husband who know best.
- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905). A woman destroyed by a code in a harsher and more exact New York.