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

College Literature, Fall 1998 by Harmon, Charles

To gloss Lacan: Edna refuses to continue the game of desire because, as she recognizes on the beach, "There was no one thing in the world that she desired" (Chopin 1969, 625). Edna intuits that the game of desire will always end with her being transformed for the benefit of the male gaze into some selfalienating symbol of Love or Nature. She views such games with contempt, and therefore withdraws herself from such "sheeplike conglomerations" by drowning herself

But Lacan's theorization of suicide, like Vogue's representations of the role of the beautiful woman, does not stop there. Lacan goes beyond the moment of satisfyingly total rebellion inherent in such an act in order to note that suicide does not necessarily change the oppressive nature of the masculinist symbolic order. He notes that "at the last" the suicide "affirms" the "Eros of the symbol" "in an unspoken curse."

Indeed, because Edna's final act is still routinely read as an act of bona fide rebellion, it might be worth our while to read beyond Chopin's ending and try to imagine what could happen after Edna's momentary gesture of absolute, suicidal refusal. Chances are her "long, clean and symmetrical" (1969, 894) body would wash up on the shore; having acted out her culture's intermittent contempt for the naturalizing role of the beautiful woman as portrayed in "Fillies on View" (Figure 5), Edna's drowned body will inevitably reinforce her culture's habit of pretending that women are not agents, but symbols. If anything, because Edna will be both naked and absolutely deprived of subjectivity, she will fulfill that role with a perfection she formerly failed to achieve. Whereas beforehand she could only serve as the mediator of the male gaze, joining a masculinist capitalism with some vaguely feminized concept of nature, after she is dead she can actually embody that concept of nature.

By juxtaposing The Awakening to Vogue, it is possible to demonstrate that American culture during Chopin's era communicated a mixed yet finally overwhelmingly violent message to its women. This message was that although beautiful, well-dressed women were socially valuable insofar as they linked a growing consumerism to an elusive sense of nature, such a role did not obviate the looming sense that the most valuable woman of all was a dead woman. The visual conventions of Vogue magazine encoded this mixed message by interspersing idealizing images of fashionable women with images that viewed the same kind of women with great disgust, and such enormous swings in tone were mimicked by the narrative strategies of Chopin's final novel. There was a key difference between Chopin and Vogue, however, and that difference was that Chopin took Vogue's split view of women to its logical conclusion. If a woman's job was to identify herself with nature, and if nature was defined as a wholly extra-cultural nostalgia to wander in "abysses of solitude," then if a woman wanted to act naturally, the best thing she could do was to kill herself.