The Ring That Will Not Dent
A woman stamps her heel on her wedding ring, and the ring does not even dent. That is chapter seventeen of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and it is the whole book in one small, silent image.
Here is the plan. I counted two men’s names in this novel, chapter by chapter, Robert and Alcée Arobin. The count shows where the story puts its attention, and it is not where you would guess. One warning first: this summary spoils everything, ending included.
I read the novel in the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred sixty, which also holds Chopin’s short stories. I am covering only the novel, thirty-nine short chapters.
Grand Isle
The book opens on a summer Sunday at Grand Isle, a Gulf island resort run by Madame Lebrun. A green and yellow parrot is shrieking in French, and Léonce Pontellier, forty, wearing eye-glasses, can’t read his newspaper. His wife Edna comes up from the beach with Robert Lebrun, the landlady’s son. Léonce looks at her sunburn the way a man looks at a valuable piece of personal property that has been damaged. That is the narrator’s line, not mine.
Edna is twenty-eight, with two small sons, Raoul and Etienne. That first night Léonce wakes her, scolds her for neglecting the boys, and falls asleep. Edna goes out to the porch and cries, and the book says she could not have told why. It calls the feeling a mood.
That summer Robert becomes her constant companion. Now the first count. In the first sixteen chapters, Robert’s name appears one hundred sixteen times. Alcée Arobin appears three times, and only because Robert tells a story about him. These are my counts of the name in the Gutenberg text, possessives included.
The Swim
Two women hold up mirrors to Edna that summer. Adèle Ratignolle is what the narrator calls a mother-woman, always sewing for her children. Mademoiselle Reisz is a prickly pianist, and the party agrees that no one plays Chopin like her.
Then comes the night swim. All summer Edna has tried to learn and failed, and Robert has given her lessons almost daily. After Mademoiselle Reisz plays, the whole party goes down to the water. This time Edna swims. The book says she felt exultation, as if some power had been given her to control her own body and soul. She swims out farther than she should, and a quick vision of death hits her. She makes it back.
Edna also tells Adèle something she does not quite understand herself. She would give up the unessential, even her life for her children, but she would not give herself. Adèle can’t follow it. A few days later, Edna leaves mass on the Chênière Caminada, Robert follows her out, and after dark they cross the bay home together in a boat with a red sail.
Robert Leaves
Then, in chapter fifteen, Robert’s name appears eighteen times, more than in any other chapter, and the chapter is about his leaving. At dinner, people tell Edna that Robert is going to Mexico. Tonight. He spent the whole morning reading to her and never mentioned it.
Edna spends the rest of the summer swimming and missing him. Back in New Orleans, the house on Esplanade Street has soft carpets, good paintings and cut glass, the envy of other wives. Then comes the ring scene. She stamps on the ring, throws a glass vase on the hearth, and a maid picks up the pieces and finds the ring under a chair. Edna takes it back and slips it on.
After that she stops receiving callers on Tuesdays, stops running the house, and goes walking alone. Her husband asks his old friend Doctor Mandelet what is wrong with her. The Doctor says to leave her alone. The mood will pass, he says. He would like to ask whether there is a man in the case, but he does not.
The Silent Stretch
Here is the second count. From chapter seventeen to chapter thirty-two, sixteen chapters, Robert’s name appears nine times in total. That is fewer than a tenth of the first stretch’s count, and fewer than in chapter fifteen alone. He is in Mexico and the book barely says his name.
But he is not gone from Edna. She goes to find Mademoiselle Reisz, who lives up under a roof with a view of the river, and whose piano takes up the room. Mademoiselle Reisz has a letter from Robert, written to her from the City of Mexico, and by her account it is nothing but Mrs. Pontellier from beginning to end. She makes Edna wait, then lets her read it, and Edna weeps over it. On a later visit, Mademoiselle asks her straight out whether she loves Robert. Edna says yes, the first time she has said it.
So the book stays on Edna, who sketches, paints, goes to the races with her father, and refuses to attend her sister Janet’s wedding. Léonce goes along with Doctor Mandelet’s advice and leaves her alone. In my reading, that quiet is the most radical part of the book. Chopin spends all those chapters on a woman deciding what she wants, with Robert only a name in a drawer.
The Other Name
And now the name that fills the gap. Alcée Arobin first turns up in person through chapter twenty-three, when Doctor Mandelet mutters, I hope to heaven it isn’t Alcée Arobin. Then, in chapter twenty-five, he meets Edna at the races, and his name appears eighteen times in that one chapter.
From chapter seventeen to chapter thirty-two, Arobin’s name appears fifty times, against nine for Robert. He is a familiar face at the race course, the opera and the clubs, with a perpetual smile in his eyes. The book’s own description is blunt: not overburdened with depth of thought or feeling. He kisses her hand. In chapter twenty-seven he kisses her mouth, and the narrator says it is the first kiss of her life to which her nature really responded.
Edna’s response is to move. She takes a small house around the block, the pigeon house, paying for it from her own resources. She throws a dinner for ten, and Arobin stays when the guests leave. Léonce writes from away, worried about what people will say, and handles it by announcing a summer trip abroad while the house is remodeled. Edna admires the skill of that maneuver.
Robert Comes Back
In chapter thirty-three, the count turns again. Early in it, Adèle drags herself over to warn Edna that Arobin’s attentions alone can ruin a woman’s name. Edna squints at her canvas and asks if he boasts. Edna waits in Mademoiselle Reisz’s empty rooms, and Robert walks in, back from Mexico. They have a stiff dinner at the pigeon house, and he spots the photograph of Arobin on her table. In these four chapters, thirty-three to thirty-six, Robert’s name appears thirty-two times and Arobin’s sixteen. The two names fight over the same pages.
Then, in chapter thirty-six, she finds Robert by accident at a garden café, and the book lets them talk. Edna kisses him. He confesses he went to Mexico because she was not free, and dreamed of a wild impossible idea, that her husband might set her free. Edna tells him the idea is foolish. She says she is no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of, and she gives herself where she chooses.
Then a servant knocks. Adèle’s baby is coming. Edna promises Robert to be back, kisses him, and goes.
Think of the Children
The birth is brutal, and the book does not look away. Edna sees it, and it brings back her own labor, the chloroform, the waking. As she leaves, Adèle whispers, think of the children, remember them.
Doctor Mandelet walks her home and speaks of youth and illusions, and offers to listen. She refuses. She wants nothing but her own way, she says, though she shouldn’t want to trample on the little lives.
Edna arrives home to Robert’s note. I love you. Good-by, because I love you. He has left. She does not sleep, and she is still awake when Celestine comes in to light the fire.
The Last Swim
In the last chapter, Edna takes a lugger to Grand Isle, alone. Victor Lebrun is patching a gallery and Mariequita is passing him the nails. Edna says she only wants to rest, and goes to the beach for a swim.
She had already settled it on the sofa that night. Today it is Arobin, tomorrow someone else. The children, she thinks, are like antagonists who have overpowered her. She takes off her bathing suit and stands naked in the open air. The book says it is delicious. She swims out, farther than ever, and does not look back.
In the water she thinks of Léonce and the boys, of Mademoiselle Reisz, of Robert. Then her father’s voice, her sister Margaret’s, the barking of a dog, the hum of bees, and pinks in the air. The book ends on that.
The text never states what comes after those memories. In my reading, she drowns, and the count explains why. Robert fills the pages when she wants to be loved, Arobin fills them when she wants to feel something, and in the end neither one is with her. The longest stretch of the book, sixteen chapters, belongs to Edna alone, and the ending keeps her there. Add it up: one hundred sixty-one for Robert, seventy for Arobin, and a sea that is the last place she goes.
My question for you: was the last swim a defeat or a choice? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and like this video if the tally helped.
