The Seating Chart
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening has a small cast, but nearly everyone wants something from one woman, and the way the book names her tells you a lot.
This is the Awakening characters guide. I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred sixty, novel only, thirty-nine short chapters. I will cover Edna, her husband, the two men, the two women who mirror her, the doctor, and the crowd around them. Light spoilers: nothing from the last five chapters, and no ending.
Every count is mine, from the exact names in the text, possessives included. Let’s start with the name that changes.
The Name That Changes
Open the book and the narrator calls the heroine Mrs. Pontellier. That is her husband’s name, the one she carries. The first time her own name shows up, it comes out of her husband’s mouth, as he leaves the porch.
Here is the count. Across the whole novel, Mrs. Pontellier appears ninety times, and Edna appears three hundred seventeen. But look at where. In the first ten chapters, Mrs. Pontellier appears fifty-four times and Edna twenty-nine. From chapter eleven on, Mrs. Pontellier appears thirty-six times, and Edna two hundred eighty-eight.
Chapter eleven is the same night as her first real swim. Her husband finds her outside in a hammock past one in the morning and orders her to come in, and she says no, she is staying out here. The book says her will blazed up, stubborn and resistant. After that, the count tilts hard toward Edna. In my reading, that is the awakening in one statistic.
Edna Pontellier
Edna is twenty-eight when we meet her, on holiday at Grand Isle with her two small sons, Raoul and Etienne. She grew up in Kentucky and Mississippi. Her mother died when she was young, and she has two sisters, Margaret, who is older and practical, and Janet, who is younger and quarrels with her.
Chopin tells us what Edna is not. She is not a mother-woman, one of the women at the resort who fuss over their children with spread wings and see it as a holy privilege to efface themselves. The book says she is fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She gathers them to her heart one minute and forgets them the next.
What she is, is someone who starts to notice she has a self. She learns to swim. She paints. She stops receiving callers on Tuesdays. She says she would give up the unessential, even her life for her children, but not herself. Her friend Adèle cannot follow that, and many readers have argued about it since. Is she brave, selfish, or both? The book does not settle it, and that is why she is a great character.
Léonce Pontellier
Next, her husband. Léonce Pontellier is forty, slender, a little stooped, with eye-glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. He works in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street, and joins the family on the island at weekends, with boxes of treats from the city.
He is not a monster, and I want to be fair about that. He is generous, he worries about his sons, and he is puzzled and hurt by his wife’s changing behavior. But in chapter one, the narrator describes him looking at his sunburned wife the way a man looks at a valuable piece of personal property that has suffered some damage. He thinks of her as the sole object of his existence, and cannot imagine that she might have a life he is not part of.
Notice his name too. The text calls him Mr. Pontellier sixty-eight times, against seventeen for Léonce. In the book’s eyes they are Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier, until she stops answering to it.
Robert Lebrun
Robert Lebrun is the landlady’s son, twenty-six, and he is the man who sets the story moving. He works as a clerk and correspondent in a New Orleans mercantile house, fluent in English, French and Spanish, and he spends every summer at his mother’s resort.
Here is the detail I love. Since he was fifteen, Robert has chosen a different woman each summer to be his devoted attendant, sometimes a girl, sometimes a widow, often a married woman. No one thinks anything of it. He is always talking about going to Mexico, where fortune awaits him, and never going. That summer, the woman is Edna, and it stops being a game.
Robert is the one who gives her swimming lessons, who reads to her, who follows her out of church on the Chênière Caminada. He is also, in my reading, a man who is afraid of what he wants. His name appears one hundred sixty-one times, more than any other character except Edna.
Alcée Arobin
Alcée Arobin is who fills the gap. He is first mentioned back on Grand Isle, as the subject of one of Robert’s stories, and he does not turn up in person until Edna’s life in New Orleans.
He is a fashionable man about town, a familiar face at the race course, the opera and the clubs, with a perpetual smile in his eyes. The book is blunt: his face is pleasing and not overburdened with depth of thought or feeling. Edna’s own doctor hopes it is not him.
By my count, his name appears seventy times, fifty of them between chapters seventeen and thirty-two. That is the stretch when Robert is away. Arobin is the opposite of Robert in one way: he asks nothing of her, and wants nothing complicated. That is what makes him useful, and, in my opinion, what makes him sad.
Adèle Ratignolle
Now the two women who act as mirrors. Adèle Ratignolle is the book’s picture of the perfect wife and mother. Golden hair, blue eyes, an ever-present sewing project, and a husband she adores. The narrator calls her the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm.
She is Edna’s closest friend on the island, and she is kind. She also keeps a warning in her pocket. She is the friend who cannot follow Edna’s argument about the unessential, and who later drags herself across town to warn Edna about her name. Adèle is not a villain in this book, and I think readers who treat her as one miss the point. She is the life Edna was supposed to have, done well.
Her name, as Adèle or Madame Ratignolle, appears seventy-two times.
Mademoiselle Reisz
The other mirror is the opposite. Mademoiselle Reisz is a pianist, no longer young, homely, with a small withered face, rusty black lace and artificial violets in her hair. The book says she has quarreled with almost everyone, and that she tramples on other people’s rights.
But when she plays, the room goes silent. Edna is deeply moved by her playing, and later goes looking for her in the city. Mademoiselle Reisz lives up under a roof, with a view of the river, and she gets a letter from Robert that Edna is desperate to read.
She is also the one who tells Edna what an artist needs. A courageous soul, she says, one that dares and defies. And that a bird that wants to soar above the plain of tradition needs strong wings. Her name appears forty-nine times, in just fourteen chapters. Keep that bird in mind.
The Doctor and the Colonel
Two older men stand at the edges. Doctor Mandelet is an old family friend, semi-retired, plump, with shaggy gray hair, known for wisdom more than skill. Léonce goes to him because Edna seems unwell. The Doctor tells him to leave her alone and let the mood pass. In my reading, he sees more than he says. His name appears only ten times, in six chapters.
And Edna’s father, the Colonel, who comes to New Orleans to buy a wedding gift for her sister Janet. He and Edna go to the races together, and Léonce, thinking of the fate of that blue-grass farm in Kentucky, disapproves. At the table the Doctor finds her excited, even radiant, talking horses with her father.
Everyone Else
Madame Lebrun runs the resort and is the mother of Robert and of Victor. Victor is nineteen, dark-browed and impetuous, a good-looking youngster who has ten times his mother’s energy. Mariequita is a round-faced girl from the Chênière with sly black eyes. Celestine is the Pontelliers’ servant in the city.
In New Orleans, you will meet Mrs. Highcamp, a tall, worldly blonde in her forties who uses her daughter as a pretext to meet young men. Miss Mayblunt looks at the world through lorgnettes and is suspected of writing under another name. Gouvernail is a quiet newspaperman.
Then there are the two sons. Raoul and Etienne are mostly offstage, and that is the point. They roll in and out of the book, in the glimpses we get, like their little express wagon.
The Leaderboard
Here is the full count of names, mine. Edna, three hundred seventeen. Robert, one hundred sixty-one. Léonce or Mr. Pontellier, eighty-five. Adèle, seventy-two. Arobin, seventy. Reisz, forty-nine. Victor, forty-two. Mandelet, ten.
Notice who is missing. Her sons barely register in the tally. And Edna’s own name takes about twice Robert’s share. I think that is Chopin’s argument, in numbers: this novel is about Edna, and everyone else is part of the weather.
Which character do you think Edna misjudges, and which does she read right? Tell me in the comments. If this helped, subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and watch the ending explained when you finish the book.
