Introduction

      by Barbara Kingsolver

      The Awakening was published in 1899, on the cusp of a century that has already come and gone. I sometimes appraise the relevance of a classic, and amuse myself in the process, by imagining the updates that would be required in order to adapt this book to film for a modern audience. In the case of The Awakening, our screenwriter’s first task would be to rename the pretty young heroine: maybe she’ll be called Eden, or Eddye. Her name in the book, Edna, was common in its time but fell precipitously out of favour after 1941. Who knows why? The author couldn’t have predicted that trend, but because it happened, it’s hard for us now to picture an “Edna” as anything but a silver-haired matron, eighty if she’s a day, stalwart bosom like a ship’s prow . . . uh oh. Let’s erase that mental picture quickly, before it sinks in.

      Eddye, then, is an energetic twenty-something, blonde, brown-eyed, with two little boys, a husband and a captivating restlessness under her skin. In the story’s opening scene, her husband Mr. Pontellier sits on the porch in a wicker rocker perusing the stock market reports. He looks up from his newspaper barely long enough to chide his wife for going swimming in the ridiculous heat and getting sunburned. The setting of Grand Isle, a summer resort on the steamy coast of Louisiana, stands up across the decades as a perfect backdrop to a story of personal discovery and sexual intrigue. The guests relax in the deep shade of graceful old water-oaks and stroll through their long, lazy days carrying parasols, which we’ll have to replace with sunscreen. Their skirts will need to be shortened, and their bathing costumes radically abbreviated. We will obviously have to do something about the “quadroon nurse” who is looking after the children. But beyond that, the Pontelliers’ family arrangement is not unlike that of a certain class of modern city-dwellers: while the wife and boys take a summer sojourn away from the city, the husband spends his week working in the office, comes out to Grand Isle on the weekends to be with the family, and gets bored with them all so quickly he tends to duck out at dinnertime for cigars and poker with other men. Meanwhile, the Mrs. has settled into a languid routine among the dozen or so well-heeled resort guests. She gets along well enough with most of the other women, though some get on her nerves, and one in particular is an irritatingly perfect mother and wife.

      In the midst of all this, our heroine has accidentally attracted an admirer of the opposite sex. Robert Lebrun, the resort-owner’s son, a few years her junior, has attached himself to her like a barnacle. In the opening scene they’ve just come back together from the beach, and sit on the porch steps laughing at their private jokes. Mr. Pontellier watches his wife and Robert with benign disinterest. Utterly confident of his wife’s loyalty and his own place as master of his ménage, he can’t remotely conceive of Robert as a potential rival. Rather, he holds him in about the same regard one would have for a friendly stray dog that can be tolerated as long as it remains amusing.

      Already, in just a few pages, any superficial distractions of period detail or class privilege have begun to evaporate, because the heart of this tale is as timeless as marriage itself. The husband and wife who share a bed but inhabit different lives: these couples are still keeping marriage counsellors in business. And half the romantic comedies of any year seem to involve the man and woman who are constant companions and best friends, technically platonic, leaning against one another’s shoulder as they laugh, skating on a thin ice of innocence that seals underneath it an ocean of desire. From the first pages of The Awakening we are pulled into territory that feels utterly current and familiar, with an undercurrent more dangerous than romantic comedy. Mr. Pontellier scrutinizes his sunburned wife “as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.” This causes Edna to remember the rings she gave him for safekeeping before she went to 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. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers.” In a simple, wordless exchange, the parameters of a marriage reveal themselves, along with glints of the insurgencies soon to come.

      Before we meet her in the summer of her awakening, Edna Pontellier has resigned herself, like every woman she knows, to a certain kind of life, without knowledge that alternatives might exist: the pleasure of a companion, for example, with whom she could talk for hours without running out of things to say. The novelty of a man who actually listened to her opinions. She has a husband who smiles and ignores her, or else abruptly scolds her for imaginary infractions, sometimes ferociously. He seems to believe this is what wives require. In their social circles, that is the standard stuff of marital discourse. (With her trademark succinctness, the author lays out the circumstances that led to this marriage: “He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and an ardor which left nothing to be desired . . . She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken.”) In the years since then, Mr. Pontellier has come to disregard his wife but has not really abused her, he’s kind enough, he provides for her and the children. She knows she ought to be satisfied, and has no reasonable explanation for the tears that overtake her sometimes, violently and suddenly, “like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day.”

      Rare is the woman, even now, who would claim to be a total stranger to that brand of unnamed sadness. Though our expectations have shape-shifted drastically through the decades, certain constants connect every age. The keen disappointment Edna hides within her domestic tranquility is a touchstone. Sixty years after The Awakening, Betty Friedan famously called it “The Problem that Has No Name.” In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Friedan articulated the frustration of women whose lives gave them virtually no independence, creativity, or opportunity, and who were expected to feel grateful about it. Edna Pontellier’s affliction was still epidemic in the 1960s, when marriage had become, if anything, even more idealized than it had been in Edna’s time. Magazines and the advertising industry heralded dependency as a woman’s consummate state; having no trade or profession was presumed to be enviable. For the adult female intellect, the best-suited conversational colleagues were thought to be preschoolers, and as for her athletic potential – if such a thing could even be considered – it surely topped out at mopping floors to a high shine. Pot roast was a sacrament. A generation of housewives, thus steeped in putative bliss, had learned to dull their misery with alcohol and tranquilizers. When Friedan broke open their secret, The Feminine Mystique sent them in droves to discussion groups, coffee klatches and consciousness-raising