Female Self-Sacrifice in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: Conflict and Context

THE opening chapter of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening offers the novel’s first—and possibly only—instance of successful, positive communication between protagonist Edna Pontellier and her husband Leonce. Significantly, the moment is one of non-verbal communication. After a day at the beach—and following Leonce’s upbraiding of her for getting sunburned—Edna examines her hands. ‘Looking at them reminded her of her rings’, notes the narrator, ‘which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm’ (45).¹ Interestingly, the novel’s first paragraph offers a complementary moment on the difficulties of verbal communication with the mention of the parrot who ‘could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody...