Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening': Screenplay as Interpretation. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Heather Kirk Thomas

Marilyn Hoder-Salmon's cinematic adaptation of Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening (1899), is not aimed at production but as an innovative hermeneutic tool with which "to |enter the text' in order to unmask its mysteries." She wrote the three-act closet screenplay, titled "Edna," because she admired the novel and had been frustrated by past cinematographers' inadequate adaptations of feminist fiction as film.

Hoder-Salmon's book uses a tripartite structure. The central screenplay is preceded by an essay outlining Chopin's biography, her literary significance (including brief mention of her short fiction), and the novel's critical reception. An essay interpreting and justifying the volume's cinematic adaptation follows. A characteristic problem in both all-inclusive essays is that their reach exceeds their grasp. Allegedly scholarly, they inconsistently identify sources and contain various regrettable errors - for example, misquoting Chopin's novel and a short-story title. Misinformation and misguided inferences are unfortunately, typical. For example, Chopin, despite her supportive circle of St. Louis literary friends and editors, is reported to have "worked in isolation, removed from a community of like-minded associates," and the novel's Mademoiselle Reisz is said to have been "portrayed [by Chopin] out of anger as a comic stereotype of the unmarried woman with a profession, as, for example, Henry James's individualistic female characters are portrayed out of hostility." The volume's excellent selected bibliography would also be more functional if it were subdivided by categories for Chopin and film studies.

"Edna," Hoder-Salmon's screenplay adaptation, embodies the most interesting division of the study, summoning the "duality" of the title character's cultural constraints and experimenting freely with the novel's narrative chronology. Act One commences with a scene of Dr. Mandelet receiving official notice of Edna's death; Act Three concludes, like the novel, when she swims naked into Grand Isle's chilly waters. By, means of closeups contrasted to scenic panoramas, Hoder-Salmon honors Sergei Eisenstein's methodology. This "cinematic dialectic" contrasts Grand Isle's fecundity with the resident mother-women's domestic chatter of pregnancies and children's pajamas, Edna's opulent Esplanade Street mansion with a closeup of her wedding ring circling a single, long-stemmed rose. Adapting the novel's impressionism, Hoder-Salmon works in images derived from its symbols and leitmotifs: Edna's sunshade, the woman in black, the young lovers, the ubiquitous boxes of bonbons, the men's cigars, and the shrieking caged birds. She also successfully combines new ingredients: allusions to 1890s New Orleans politics; scenes in railroad trains; and Edna's memories, evoked in flashbacks, of her mother's death, her father's militant Presbyterianism, her female siblings, and her experience as a solitary child striking out through a field of waist-high, waving grass. The stereoscope, a central symbol in the screenplay but not in the book, seems less effective, insinuating that Edna's escape lies in travel. But the screenplay's major weakness is its failure to address Edna's "awakening" sexuality, seen in her refusal to tolerate her husband Leonce's physical demands her developing attraction for Robert Lebrun, her adultery with gigolo Alcee Aerobin, and, with Robert's return, her plans to consummate their love in the "pigeon house." After Adele's delivery, Edna discovers that Robert has abandoned her. During this dark night of the soul, she must confront her sexually promiscuous past and equivocal future. Indisputably, this night's intellectual "awakening" accelerates Edna's suicide. By contrast, Hoder-Salmon's cinematic adaptation interprets Chopin's novel as primarily "about accommodation, about compromise." As a result, her Edna seems more like a bored, affluent dilettante who requires, as my students say, another "lifestyle." I also wish that Chopin's silenced women of color had been given voices in this postmodern adaptation.

Who exactly is the audience for Hoder-Salmon's book? She hopes that her cinematic adaptation will acquaint new readers with Chopin, but it would be impossible to follow the screenplay without knowing the novel. Perhaps, as Hoder-Salmon discovered in her own Women's Studies classes, the most rewarding use of the screenplay as adaptation technique is as a challenging pedagogical activity for "students saturated with term papers."