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\auteurcourant={ANNE FOATA}
\titrecourant={APHRODITE REDUX}
\null
\vglue 3cm


\centerline{\bf Aphrodite Redux: Edna Pontellier's Dilemma}
\vskip 5pt
\centerline{\bf in {\it The Awakening} by Kate Chopin}
\vskip 2.8mm
\centerline{\sevenrm BY}
\vskip 2.8mm
\centerline{{\petcap Anne}
FOATA}
\vskip 1.1cm
It must be a shared experience in our response to a 
work of art to privilege one single vision above all others and to
remain bound by it amidst a crowd of possible interpretations.
Dots, colors, and shapes in an abstract painting may suddenly 
coalesce into a human face or a lunar landscape, wild geese fly out
of a drawing, a monster stare at us from out the scrolls and
patterns of a persian rug, and remain with us for ever.

Such a (literally) enthralling experience can likewise result from
one's encounter with a piece of fiction. This is notably so when the
work has been the object of the multifarious scrutiny of academic
exegesis over a relatively short span of time, which allows for the
comprehensive yet comparative view. Interesting and enriching as
all its interpretations may eventually prove to be, one of them
mysteriously ravishes our imagination, never to set it free again.

Rising to the surface of the rich lode of commentary mined over
the past thirty years or so since the novel's revival, one such
interpretation casts its spell over the figure of Edna Pontellier in
Kate Chopin's {\it The Awakening}. Indeed, since Sandra M. Gilbert's
flamboyant essay in {\it The Kenyon Review},{$^1$} Edna in the scanty
garb of Aphrodite is for ever swimming back to Cyprus or Cythera
in the full glory of immortality\dots\ at least for the author of
the present article who confesses to a susceptibility to
mythology.

It can appear supererogatory to add yet another piece of exegesis
to ``one of the most persistently analyzed American novels," to
quote Gilbert's own words. Yet Aphrodite beckons, and how could
one resist her summons when gods and mortals alike, if the
Homeric hymns are to be believed, were once powerless to do so?

This essay will take for granted the various stages of Edna
Pontellier's awakening and their discussion by the critics, all well
known by now. What has been overlooked, however, is the emblematic
nature of the event that befalls Edna during her fateful summer on
Grand Isle.  Edna actually experiences an {\it epiphany}, of the kind
that from time immemorial has changed the lives of a happy (or
unhappy) few: semi-celestials, mystics, artists, common men and
women. She is granted an awareness of ``her position in the universe as
a human being;"{$^2$} she is led to question the ``realities" of her world, which
sets her on a quest for ``the abiding truth" (27). Edna, indeed, is made
aware that ``the realities pressing into her soul" (32) have nothing to do
with ``the deeper undercurrents of life" (93) and with what she
perceives to be her ``real" self. The ``real" woman within her clamors to
be heard, recognized and fulfilled. During the following months of what
can aptly be called the winter of her discontent, back in New Orleans,
she keeps shedding her various societal personae like so many
``pricking" garments. Our final glimpse of her finds Edna ``free" at last
and naked in the sun of the Grand Isle spring, about to swim back into
her element and complete her rebirth as the triumphant goddess of love
of Gilbert's {\it Kenyon Review} article.

\bigskip
\bigskip
In dwelling upon the compelling figure of Aphrodite one should not
forget that she is not one but two, a fact Gilbert failed to emphasize.
And dual also is the ``erotic" longing she fosters in the  bodies and souls
of men and women. Edna falls prey to the goddess of lustful love when
she experiences the ``first-felt throbbings of desire" (31) for Robert
Lebrun, when her senses flame up under Alc�e Arobin's kiss (83), or 
when she proclaims herself a free woman, ready to ``give [herself] where
[she] choose[s]" (107). Edna, however, perceives the trap set by the
senses and sensuality: a mere device engineered by Nature for the
perpetuation of mankind, the illusion of the
world.{$^3$} The abiding truth of
which she is given a glimpse by Mademoiselle Reisz' music must
lie elsewhere, ``beyond," in a state of freedom which is harmony
between herself and the universe, in the communion of her soul
with the essence of life. Edna Pontellier, without ever so naming it
(save to mention the ``unattainable," the ``unlimited in which to lose
herself\/"), is a seeker of the Absolute, absolute Love, absolute
Beauty and Truth, which is the only Reality apt to fulfill the
initiate who has been freed from the ``mist," the ``life-long stupid
dream" (107) of mortal existence.

In other words, by awaking to the flesh, Edna sacrifices to the
demands of Aphrodite Pandemos, the ``common" or ``popular"
goddess of carnal desire, but her true yearning is for the blessings
of Aphrodite Urania, the goddess of higher love which is also the
all-inclusive Eros of Socrates' encomium in Plato's {\it
Symposium}.{$^4$} The Pandemos and the Urania, the ``common" and the
``celestial," refer to the two Aphrodites of Pausanias' speech in the
selfsame work.{$^5$}

To be sure, Pausanias' eulogy of love must be taken with a grain of
Attic salt; after all, he is a Sophist, a member of a crew much
derided by both Socrates and Plato for twisting reality for the
sake of argument. His distinction between the two Aphrodites may
not rest upon historical or mythological evidence; it may even be
alien to Plato's philosophy proper; it has nevertheless become part
and parcel of our Western conception of love. As such, in their
dichotomy between a higher and a lower form of love, the two
Aphrodites epitomize Edna's quest for the ``significance of life"
(83), which is also a search for her rightful position in the
universe.

\bigskip
\bigskip
Edna's assets in this respect are double, threefold even. The first
is the common prerequisite, the {\it sine qua non} of any such
endeavors: a penchant for inner contemplation and questioning,
which enables her to set the illusion of her ``actual" life against
the demands of ``real" life. The other two were recommended by
Socrates and the wise woman of Mantinea who, he states in the
{\it Symposium}, instructed him in the ways of Love. Like the
seeker in Socrates' lecture, Edna is not interested in securing
immortality through the accumulation of generations. She may
well be a hearty eater and drinker, a voluptuous sleeper and
sensual lover, in a word, a splendid ``animal," she is also convinced,
against the tide of accepted mores, that Fate has not fitted her to
be a mother (20). Unwilling Pandemos, she is reluctant to contribute to
the ``grotesque pandemonium" (58) of life, to add to the procession of
humanity ``struggling blindly [like worms] towards inevitable
annihilation" ({\it ibid\/}). Weddings to her are among the ``most
lamentable spectacles on earth" (66). Her ultimate recoil from mere
carnal love is triggered as much by her newly acquired awareness of the
insatiability of desire as by a loathing for its ineluctable procreative
consequences. Children eventually appear as ``antagonists" in an alien
world. All this is clear evidence that although she too
occasionally sacrifices a goat to Aphrodite Pandemos, her secret
longing is for the kind of love that makes men and women fecund
according to the spirit and spells a higher form of self-fulfillment.

It is right that Edna should set off on her journey toward the
ultimate truth of life endowed with that particular ``susceptibility
to beauty" (15) which is her third asset and the one that, according
to Diotima, the Mantinean woman, is the first rung of the ``ladder
of love" leading to the ``final revelation." Chopin has Edna literally
bathe in an atmosphere of beauty and sensuality, in which we see
her ``unfold[ing] like a torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom"
(103).{$^6$}
Much as it certainly owes to the well-known {\it fin de si�cle}
thrill to which Chopin was certainly not immune, it is
nevertheless the right atmosphere for an awakening to the higher
spheres of Love, the ones transcending carnality, for as Diotima
instructed Socrates who himself tells the revelers :


 {\medskip
\eightpoint
\narrower\narrower\noindent
This is the way, the only way [to] the sanctuary of love. Starting
from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find
him [the quester] ever mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from
rung to rung \dots\ to the special lore that pertains to nothing but
the beautiful itself.\dots\ {\it  And remember, she said, that it is
when he looks upon beauty's visible presentment, and only then,}
that a man will be quickened with the true, not the seeming virtue
\dots\ And when he has brought forth and reared this perfect
virtue, he shall be called the friend of God, and if ever it is given to
man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him
({\it my emphasis\/}).{$^7$}
 
\medskip

}

\noindent
Immortal, ``unsullied, unalloyed, and freed from the mortal taint
that haunts the frailer loveliness of flesh and
blood,"{$^8$} such finally appears
Aphrodite Urania, the winsome goddess of both life-force and
universal wisdom Edna has been seeking through her mortal
endeavors. And in her ``handsomeness" and perfection of
limb,{$^9$}
such as Praxiteles once exalted them in the marble, also stands Edna
Pontellier at the end of her trials in this our mortal world. She is
about to yield once again to the ``soft, close embrace" of the sea
and, Aphrodite Anadyomene, to give herself back to the element out
of which she was born. She is forever sailing back to Cythera.

\bigskip
\noindent
Universit� Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France.

\bigskip\bigskip\bigskip
\centerline{NOTES}
\bigskip
\item{$^1$} {``The
Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire,"
{\it The Kenyon Review}, V (1983), 42--56.}

\bigskip
\item{$^2$} {p. 14--15 in the Norton Critical Edition,
ed. by Margaret Culley (New York: W.W. Norton \& Co., 1976). The pages of
further quotations will hereafter appear parenthetically in the text of
this article.}

\bigskip
\item{$^3$} {She also discovers that lust isn't love, after
Alc�e Arobin's first kiss. His kiss is a ``flaming torch that kindled
desire," but she feels a ``dull pang of regret because it was not the
kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which
had held this cup of life to her lips" (83).}

\bigskip
\item{$^4$} {{\it The Collected
Dialogues of Plato}, Bollingen Series LXXI (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1961).}

\bigskip
\item{$^5$} {A few words on the two goddesses'
background may answer the questions some readers must be raising at
this point. Pausanias in his speech on Love during the banquet
which is the motif of the {\it Symposium} mentions Aphrodite
Urania as the older goddess, the one whose birth from the foam
surrounding the castrated genitals of Uranus is described in
Hesiod's {\it Theogony}, whereas Aphrodite Pandemos is the
daughter of Zeus and Dione, one of the three thousand Oceanids.
Both Aphrodites have in truth co-existed from time immemorial
and were not, originally at least, judgmentally opposed as the
goddesses of higher and lower forms of Love as they appear in
Pausanias' speech. According to another Pausanias,
the second century A.D. author of a  {\it Description of Greece}, it
was Aegeus, the legendary king of Athens, who introduced the cult
of Aphrodite Urania to his city, on the model of the great oriental
goddesses of the sky, the Sumerian Inanna or the Syrian Ishtar
whom the Greeks renamed Astarte. Aegeus' son, Theseus,
then introduced the cult of Aphrodite Pandemos, ``common"
to all the Greeks, or at least to the peoples of the newly
federated state of Attica. ``Pandemos," it is to be noted, had no ethical
meaning originally; it was a purely political or geographical
determinative (Robert Graves in {\it The Greek Myths} translates
``pandemos" by ``federal," making of Aphrodite Pandemos ``Federal
Aphrodite"). Both Aphrodites refer to older forms of deity, to the great
mother-goddesses, the mistresses of life and death; the lovely,
frolicsome ``golden" Aphrodite is an invention of the poets, Hesiod,
Homer and others, followed by the sculptors and later the painters, who
made her into the ideal of feminity and love, of the sexual urge whch
spares neither gods, mortals or animals. (Robert Graves, {\it The Greek
Myths}, Penguin Revised edition (Harmondsworth, 1960), see the index in
vol.~II, p.~380--81 for the multiple references to Aphrodite. My other
source, besides Plato's {\it Symposium} and Hesiod's {\it Theogony} (in
Penguin Classics, translated and edited by Dorothea Wender 
(Harmondsworth, 1973), lines
189--210) was Erika Simon : {\it Die G\"otter der Griechen} (Munich,
Hirmerverlag, 1969), p.~229--254; 329--330).}

\bigskip
\item{$^6$} {or to shift the simile to the animal world,
like ``some beautiful sleek animal waking up in the sun," ``palpitant
with the forces of life" (70), as she appears to old Dr Mandelet. ``A
subtle current of desire passed through her body," (58) Chopin
writes, when Edna thinks of Robert Lebrun; the touch of Victor
Lebrun's lips upon her palm during the farewell dinner of
chapter~30 is ``like a pleasing sting on her hand" (90). Alc�e
Arobin's experienced caresses make her ``supple to his gentle
seductive entreaties" (93); his kiss is ``a flaming torch that
kindled desire" (83). We see Edna also respond to the ``soft
physical contact," the ``excessive physical charm" of the sensuous
Creole Madonna, Ad�le Ratignolle (15--16), and submit to Mademoiselle
Reisz' ambiguous kiss (on her bare shoulder) and banter (``{\it Bonne
nuit, ma reine: soyez sage\/}" (88)) on her leaving the farewell
banquet. It is Mademoiselle Reisz' playing Chopin's Impromptus and
Wagner's {\it Liebestod} that gives Edna her ``first impress of
the abiding truth" (27). Edna's first swim in the Gulf, with her body
enclosed in the ``soft, close embrace" (15) of the sea and the
``quick vision of death [smiting] her soul" (29) rings an
unmistakably orgiastic or orgasmic note. And last but not least, to
add to the sensuousness of the whole atmosphere of the novel,
there is the lush landscape of sub-tropical Southern Louisiana
with its sun and breeze, its citrus trees and flowers, its odors and
colors.}

\bigskip
\item{$^7$} {translated by Michael Joyce
for {\it The Collected Dialogues of Plato} in the Bollingen series
and quoted by Joseph Campbell: {\it The Masks of God: Occidental
Mythology} (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), reprinted
by Penguin Books (Harmondsworth, 1976), p.~231--232.}

\bigskip
\item{$^8$}{{\it Ibid}, p. 232.}

\bigskip
\item{$^9$} {\cf. her portrait in chapters II (5) and VII (16).}


\bye
