Vouchsafed by the Holy Ghost

Abstract Chapter 3 argues that the now-canonical reading of Kate Chopin’s small masterpiece, The Awakening, which takes Edna Pontellier’s sexual wanderlust as symptomatic of a racist, primitivistic projection (per Toni Morrison’s general formulation), utterly neglects the founding plot and concerted characterizations. In The Awakening, Edna, a married Kentucky Presbyterian, is set adrift among Creole Catholics who embody a sexual sacramentality that attracts her but that she can’t, herself, achieve, beyond eventual submission to adultery with a local lothario. When the story begins, Edna is chafing in her marriage to a self-involved financier and, despite her Calvinist upbringing and persisting individualist sensibility, becomes increasingly involved, Theron-style, with a Creole trio: Madame Ratignolle, the mother-woman who is sensual in aspect and touch; Robert Lebrun, a serial acolyte of older women who refuses to deliver on his sexual promise despite beguiling her on the refulgent isle of La Chenière Caminada; and Mademoiselle Reisz, a spinster artiste, whose way with Frédéric Chopin’s nocturnes is her way with Edna, soul and (implicitly) body. Thus The Awakening is American’s first major portrayal of the Protestant-adrift-among-Catholics, and it is only as such that it becomes our proto-feminist exploration of a wife’s quest for sexual and aesthetic autonomy. Whereas Frederic’s Theron Ware is one of talkiest books ever, The Awakening delineates temptations to Catholicism that are more show then tell, capturing the fault lines of full social incorporation in Edna’s fatal sea-swim, which can be understood both as a capitulation, in resurgent Protestant self-immolation, and as a visionary sacrifice.