"Abysses of solitude": Acting naturally in Vogue and The Awakening

College Literature, Fall 1998 by Harmon, Charles

It is possible to hypothesize that the woman in this picture is performing a social function, specialized upon well-to-do women, that (if we judge from the duality of the narrative voice in The Awakening) Kate Chopin could neither accept nor wholeheartedly criticize. This function was to help American society naturalize itself by associating the products of capitalism with such allegedly extra-cultural entities as the voice of the sea. By sitting on the grass and looking toward the ocean, the woman in the Vogue picture identifies herself with nature. Yet by arraying herself in the best clothing and accessories that can be bought, she also allows herself to be used as the Veblenesque advertisement for the prosperity of some unseen male admirer, whose economic exploits are doubtless dedicated to the relentless disenchantment of the natural world. In this mundane illustration, as in Chopin's split narrative point of view in The Awakening, two modes of self-definition are therefore skillfully condensed. Is the woman defined by the commodities with which she surrounds herself, or is she defined by her self-identification with nature? The magical answer, of course, is that she is defined in both ways-hence, the realm of the commodity is suturd to the realm of nature through the mediation of the social form of the beautiful woman.

In other illustrations from Vogue, it is even plainer that a key social function of the beautiful woman in Chopin's era was to suture nature to consumerism. A common feature of the magazine was paintings which illustrated a well-dressed woman communing with nature while a man appreciatively looked on, all unbeknownst to her. In an illustration from 1893, for instance, a woman in a forest stares at a rose petal while in the distance a man in a straw boater gazes at her back (figure 2).

The picture is captioned with the following verse: My "Rose" by any other name would be as sweet, But still, somehow, I much admire the plan, Her parents used to find a name so neat, Instead of Polly Jane or Mary Ann. The woman's abstracted gaze toward the flower in her hand suggests a sense of alienation from the rich clothes with which she is arrayed. Indeed, it is the woman's alienation from her appearance and her preference for the unconscious beauty of the rose that excites the man's admiration. For although the man in the background is not at home in the lush woods-he is positioned close to a clearing-as long as he keeps watching a woman who, in turn, keeps watching nature, he can reassure himself that he is still in touch with what he, as a well-to-do man in a patriarchal capitalism, spends most of his time exploiting.

To put it another way, in this highly typical illustration, the man's "Rose" is a rose, period. There is no further semiotic displacement beyond the beautiful, idle, nature-loving woman. The male gaze travels from the man, through the woman, to the rose, and there it stops. As a result, the fruits of masculine economic exploit-the woman's hat, dress, and parasol, etc.-are made to seem as natural as the flower that the woman admires.