Achieving Humanity through Animality: A Study of the Birds in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

ABSTRACT

Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening explores the interconnection between animality and humanity by means of various bird metaphors. In the novel, Edna Pontellier’s ‘evolutionary’ self-perception of birds, namely, ‘the caged parrot’, ‘the pigeon’ and ‘the flying bird’, not only signifies the unshackling of her animality through the arousal of innate animal instinct, but also embodies the establishing of her subjectivity as a human being. Illuminated by animality studies, this article argues that Edna’s awakened animality is essentially her realisation of humanity, which not only breaks through the human-animal dichotomy underlying anthropocentric ideology, but also disrupts the man-woman dichotomy underlying patriarchal ideology. Thus, Edna’s multi-dimensional awakening is conducive to promoting gender equality in the current post-human context.

KEYWORDS:

• The Awakening
• Kate Chopin
• animality
• humanity
• hierarchal dichotomy
• anthropocentrism
• androcentrism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Emily Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 222.

2 Elaine Showalter, “Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book,” In New Essays on The Awakening, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34.

3 Per Seyersted, “Introduction,” In The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 28.

4 Emily Toth, “The Independent Woman and ‘Free’ Love,” The Massachusetts Review 16.4 (1975): 656.

5 Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Kate Chopin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007), 2.

6 Ann Heilmann, “The Awakening and New Woman Fiction,” In The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, ed. Janet Beer (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 87.

7 Bert Bender, The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 220.

8 Donald Pizer, “A Note on Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ as Naturalistic Fiction,” The Southern Literary Journal 33.2 (2001): 12.

9 Michael Lundblad and Marianne DeKoven, “Introduction: Animality and Advocacy,” In Species Matters: Human Advocacy and Cultural Theory, ed. Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3.

10 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 15.

11 Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 38.

12 Angus Taylor, Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2013), 36.

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 54.

14 Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Luise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 31.

15 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late. Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 10.

16 Michael Lundblad, “Introduction: The End of the Animal – Literary and Cultural Animalities,” In Animality: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 3, 9.

17 Michael Lundblad, The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4.

18 Bert Bender, “Kate Chopin’s Quarrel with Darwin before ‘The Awakening’ Journal of American Studies 26.2 (1992): 185.

19 Kate Chopin, “The Awakening,” In The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 881–82.

20 Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1983), 5.

21 Kate Chopin, “Emancipation: A Life Fable,” In The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 37–38.

22 Christal G. Pollock, “Companion Birds in Early America,” Journal of Avian Medicine and Surgery 27.2 (2013): 148.

23 In the following, citations from Kate Chopin are all from The Awakening thus only indicated by the author and page number.

24 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966): 171.

25 Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 138.

26 Catherine A. Toft and Timothy F. Wright, Parrot of the Wild: A Natural History of the World’s Most Captivating Birds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 113.

27 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 397–98.

28 Michael Lundblad, “From Animal to Animality Studies,” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124.2 (2009): 498.

29 James Giles, “A Theory of Love and Sexual Desire,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 24.4 (1994): 348, 344.

30 Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us (New York: Doubleday, 2017), 12–13.

31 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 2001), 35–36.

32 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 15.

33 Rebecca J. Hannagan, “Gendered Political Behavior: A Darwinian Feminist Approach,” Sex Roles 59 (2008): 466.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by The National Science Foundation of China (grant number 20FWWB013) and The Innovative Research Team of Shanghai International Studies University (grant number 41004216).