spoiler visualizarGabi Miragaia 27/09/2016
Resenha do livro The Awakening por Gabriela Lubascher Miragaia
Que tipo de sociedade é esta, em que se encontra a mais profunda solidão no seio de tantos milhões; em que se pode ser tomado por um desejo implacável de matar a si mesmo, sem que ninguém possa prevê-lo? Tal sociedade não é uma sociedade; ela é como diz Rousseau, uma selva, habitada por feras selvagens (MARX, 2006. p. 28).
According to the sociologist Émile Durkhein suicide is not explained only by the individual and psychological aspects, but it results in the social environment. However, there are those who condemn the suicidal act by taxing it of cowardice or a crime against the law, the society and against the honor.
The suicide reveals the fragility of human relationships; it exposes how ignorant we are about the human being . It throws in ours faces the superficiality of human relations in an increasingly individualistic society. In certain way, we are also responsible for the suicidal, we die a little with him, his death hits us directly and we are never the same again, as Marx says a classificação das diferentes causas do suicídio deveria ser a classificação dos próprios defeitos da nossa sociedade (MARX, 2006. p. 44).
The authoress Kate Chopin approaches this theme in her novel “The Awakening” (1899). Edna Pontellier - who abandons the commitments as a mother and as a wife - emerges in a path of emancipation and love adventures. These attitudes, at first, lead the protagonist to the loss of illusions and the awareness of the immutability of her condition and, later, to the inevitable suicide, seen as the only reasonable scape to a woman considered advanced to the Victorian ethics.
She is driven to suicide by not assuming a behavior that is compatible with her position and by not being able to assume the feminine role she has been assigned to it is difficult for a modern reader, for example, to understand the extent to which Edna Pontellier flouts social convention on almost every page. But a glance at etiquette books of the period shows Edna consistently disregarding her ‘duties’ to her husband, her children, and her ‘station’ in life. She does not ‘manage’ the servants; she forms questionable cross-class friendships; she ignores her reception day to walk about the city alone; she attends public places of amusement (the races) with a ‘gentleman’ other than her husband and without a chaperone; she hosts an elaborate dinner party in her husband’s absence; she rents and moves into a small house of her own; she has taken a lover (CULLEY, 1994, p. 121-122).
In the past, owing to the large number of suicides, it was believed that through penalties and infamy it would be possible to reduce this numbers of deaths. O que dizer da indignidade de um estigma lançado a pessoas que não estão mais aqui para advogar suas causas? [...] se o suicídio culpa alguém, é antes de tudo as pessoas que ficam, já que, de toda essa grande massa de pessoas, nem sequer um indivíduo foi merecedor de que se permanecesse vivo por ele (MARX, 2006. p. 27). Edna had a husband, two children, two lovers and a few friends, but none of them was enough to keep her alive.
Since the beginning, we can notice the strange relationship between Edna and her husband, Léonce. He is cold and always absent, she is indifferent to him and does not care about her wife and mother obligations. Already in Chapter VII, we have the information that the wedding between than both was arranged. Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate (CHOPIN, 2008. p. 22).
The relationship between Edna and her children becomes increasingly distant as far as her awakening process happens. The protagonist used to live for her family and home but in her growing awareness of herself, and her individual needs, Edna states she would give her life for the children if necessary however, she would not deny herself for them.
In contrast to the patriarchal system, “The Awakening” brings a woman, who through reflection and awareness abandons her attitude of woman that only obeys her husband’s orders and who only lives for the housework and for the children and starts to act at her own, without carrying about others opinion. She recognizes that only existed as a wife and as a mother, but by discovering her subjectivity and the desires of her own, Edna suffers, in several aspects of her life, a deep process of awakening.
It is after a dinner at Madame Ratignolle, that Edna realized that she was totally unrelated to the creole society in which she was inserted to, the narrator throughout the history points out that "Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui"(CHOPIN, 2008. p. 61).
This fact makes clear that Edna tries to unlink herself from the patriarchal system model that sees woman as a slave. As she did not accept her submission condition, she begins to question the role of women in American society and she is seen by the other women of the romance, and even by her own husband, as the transgressor of the moral values of the time. She was even considered weird by Mr. Pontellier since "she has abandoned her Tuesdays at home, has thrown over all her acquaintances, and goes tramping about by herself, moping in the street-cars, getting in after dark. I tell you she’s peculiar" (CHOPIN, 2008. p. 71).
The patriarchal authority, founded on tradition, it is revealed as the cause of misfortunes, sufferings and aches, which at the extreme, leads to suicide . As pessoas mais covardes tornam-se intolerantes assim que podem lançar mão de sua autoridade absoluta de pessoas mais velhas. O mau uso dessa autoridade é igualmente uma compensação grosseira para o servilismo e a subordinação aos quais essas pessoas estão submetidas, de bom ou de mau grado, na sociedade burguesa (MARX, 2006. p. 32).
On the one hand, her suicide can be seen as a scape of the society’s punishment because of the negligent acts that she has taken: to discover herself as a woman who has desires and emotions and to find her subjectivity and transcend the rules of the patriarchal system by taking her own decisions.
Edna was tired of her life, her husband, her children, she crave a new start. She wished to be loved for herself and accepted by society as herself. Léonce represses her repeatedly by being inattentive and negligent with their children and he matters what people will think about the way she was behaving. When she is drowning, she thinks about them but they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul . The suicide seems to be the only alternative for her as she realizes that her lovers (Robert and Arobin ) will be as oppressor as Léonce.
Robert and Léonce believe in the same society, Robert does not allow Edna to be unfaithful because society does not accept this behavior. Therefore, Edna is just choosing a young version of the same man (her husband). If she chose Robert instead of Léonce, it would be not a solution because she would live the same life.
On the other hand, it can be seen as the punishment itself because she cannot get away with it. She must be punished because of what she did; because of her attitudes (adultery, denial of the motherhood, insubordination to her husband).
The suicide of the protagonist is quite emblematic, as occurs in the sea: after being at a banquet where the narrators compared her with the Roman goddess Venus, Edna goes to the beach, takes her clothes off and enters in the sea, in broad daylight. As she swims away from the coast, childhood memories and voices are heard in her mind and due to tiredness, she no longer returns, thus committing suicide indolent and almost unconsciously, by drowning . On Peuchet table (pages 51 and 52), we have the information that occurred 2.808 suicides from 1817 to 1824 and of these 115 were by volunteer drowning.
- Are you going bathing?” asked Robert of Mrs. Pontellier […]
Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined […] The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace (CHOPIN, 2008. p. 17-18).
In this scene, the sea reflects the status and condition of Edna Pontellier, in other words, it reflects the very moment of the awakening - awakening to the female subjectivity. Nadia Julien, in her book “Dicionário dos símbolos”, says that “water” is a symbol of the unconscious . According to Freud o reprimido é, para nós, o protótipo do inconsciente (1996. p. 28) . Therefore, the sea symbolizes the awakening space of the protagonist.
We can also see this in the scene where Robert knowing that Edna cannot swim encourages her to dive and when she succeeds, she realizes that she is capable of acting and thinking by herself. Even so, a quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her senses. But by an effort she rallied her staggering faculties and managed to regain the land (CHOPIN, 2008. p. 32).
This feeling of death that accompanies her was nothing more than the representation of the fear of losing the economic and social "comfort" that she had and trying to find it by herself. However, she knows the importance of walking with her own legs. She initiates the discovery of herself and she realizes that her subjectivity depends on her understanding of herself in the world as an individual and especially it depends on her understanding of her desires and feelings and her ability to dare and to lose the fear of realizing them.
The suicide reveals our impotence – we are impotent for not been able to prevent the other’s suicide and we are impotent because we are not able to find a solution for our problems , which leads to suicide – however it question us about the mysteries of life and death. The individual lives in society, he is a social being. Even if we take into account the individual psychological factors, the motivations for suicide are not only inside the individual . We must think about in which proportion society collaborates with it. Marx says that o suicídio não é mais do que um entre os mil e um sintomas da luta social geral (2006. p. 29).
The fundamentals of suicidal behavior are in society, or more precisely, in the dialectical complexity of the individual-society relationship (OZAÍ DA SILVA, 2012. p. 127). Above all, we must try to understand, as Marx says não é com insultos aos mortos que se enfrenta uma questão tão controversa.