The present article aims at analyzing and measuring the undergraduate students‘ capacity
to apply some of the main concepts in psychoanalytical and feminist criticism during the
process of reading closely Kate Chopin‘s ‗The Awakening‘, as part of the American
Literature Course Syllable. The analysis and measuring have been done by means of
assessing students‘ seminar portfolio, containing their written papers on topics such as:
pleasure and death drives (Eros and Thanatos), double, schizoid personality, daydreams
and their connection to the unconscious (within the psychoanalytical frame of thinking),
as well as feminine writing (l‘écriture féminine) and the female body, a Creole woman‘s
novel as a subversive critique of patriarchal power in the 19th American society (within
the feminist frame of thinking).
The results of the analysis have shown that most students demonstrated a better
understanding and handling of the psychoanalytical concepts, mainly because they had
previously been trained in this type of critical approach to literature, already having a
strong theoretical support. Feminist criticism to them was roughly confined to the
critique of the patriarchal power. The application of such theoretical frames to the
analysis of literature in general and not only clearly contributes to students‘ and
instructors‘ continuous shaping and reshaping of their critical thinking.
Key words: theoretical approach, close reading, psychoanalysis, feminism
From the very beginning we would like to mention that the teaching method
consisted of the course instructor‘s selection of several critical essays from the fields of
psychoanalysis and feminism. Drawing on the reading and classroom discussions of
several influential essays on literature written by Freud, such as The Relation of the Poet
to Daydreaming (1908), The Uncanny (1919), a provocative psychoanalytic reading of
E. T. A. Hoffman‘s supernatural tale ‗‘The Sandman‘‘, as well as on Freud‘s seminal
work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which he revises his theory on the
pleasure principle, the papers written by the students from the 3rd year English branch
focused in their analyses on topics such as pleasure and death drives (Eros and
Thanatos), double/schizoid personality of the main character, daydreams and their
connection to the human unconscious in Kate Chopin‘s The Awakening.
During our preliminary discussions, the students were already aware of the fact
that the psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests on Freud‘s theories, but it
may even be said to have begun with Freud, who was particularly interested in writers,
especially those who relied heavily on symbols. This is why students were ready to face
the challenge according to which writers choose to cloak or mystify ideas in figures that
make sense only when interpreted, much as the unconscious mind of a neurotic disguises
secret thoughts in dream stories or bizarre actions that need to be interpreted by an
analyst.
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While dealing with the first two topics: pleasure and death drives, from the very
beginning, most of the students provided arguments and examples from the novel
supporting ideas ranging from Edna Pontellier‘s split personality to her psychic
disintegration, stating that ‗‘in some sense there are two Ednas‘‘: one of them is public,
conventional, a social construct, for the most part, whereas the other one, by contrast, is a
passionate one, prone to fantasies and daydreams. According to most of the students, the
actions of the public, conventional Edna are meant to keep her passionate, fantasizing
self hidden. The main argument supporting this idea is Edna‘s marriage to Leonce, a man
chosen by her outward self, a prosaic and unperceptive man who seems not to suspect
the existence of Edna‘s hidden self and its fantasy life. And this is how the argument
develops itself around the idea that Edna‘s hidden, fantasizing self gradually takes
control of her personality, exactly the way in which instincts take control of the whole
human psyche unless they are repressed. In other words, Edna‘s deserting her husband
and children, her affair to Alcée Arobin, as well as her infatuation with Robert Lebrun
are interpreted as her unconscious pursuit of the pleasure principle. Nevertheless, within
this interpretation frame, Edna‘s final suicide appears incomprehensible, paradoxical,
shocking as most of the students admit.
Only after we had read and discussed the famous fort-da game interpreted by
Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, did they begin to look upon this act as Edna‘s
attempt to become reunited to a primordial state of being, to an original lost object – the
mother‘s body- ‗‘which drives forward the narrative of our lives, impelling us to pursue
substitutes for this lost paradise in the endless metonymic movement of desire. For
Freud, it is a desire to scramble back to a place where we cannot be harmed, the
inorganic existence which precedes all conscious life, which keeps us struggling
forward: our restless attachments (Eros) are in thrall to the death drive (Thanatos).‘‘
(Terry Eagleton 1983: 185). So, using Freud‘s revision of his theory on the pleasure
principle as a starting point, students‘ analyses have now managed to come up with an
answer, to solve the enigma of the suicide by discussing in detail Edna‘s final image, as a
child, as an infant again (‗‘and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open
air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.
‘‘Chopin 136) going and deliberately drowning into the sea, focusing on the complex
symbolism of the sea in this respect (the sea standing for the mother‘s womb, the
amniotic fluid etc.). Enlarging their analysis from this perspective, some of the students
paid special attention to Edna‘s relationship with Adele Ratignolle and Mademoiselle
Reisz, who initiates her into the world of art. They have highlighted that, in some
respects, the motherless Edna seeks a mother surrogate in Adele and looks to her for
nurturance. Adele is indeed the one who provides maternal encouragement for Edna‘s
painting and tells her that ‗‘her talent is immense‘‘ (75; chapter 18) According to their
conclusions, Adele becomes a surrogate for Edna‘s dead mother and the intimate friend
she never had as a girl, the main arguments being that Adele is the one who initiates her
into the world of values and laws of the Creole community, whereas Mademoiselle Reisz
appears to play a totally different role: she is the opposite-the renegade, the
nonconformist whose music has a very strange effect on Edna; it seems to set her free
from repressions.
The theoretical discussion on psychoanalysis during seminars was extended to
the psychoanalytic philosopher J. Lacan and the importance of the linguistic turn
psychoanalysis takes, when he identifies human language with the unconscious.
Students‘ understanding of the relation between language and gender increased when
they read that the oedipal stage roughly coincides with the entry of the child (particularly
the male child) into the language (the symbolic order). For the linguistic order is
2 nd International Conference Education Across Border. ―Critical Thinking in Education‖
ISBN (print) 9789928146274 ISBN (on l ine) 9789928146212
2nd EduCbr-CTE 2014, Albania-Korçё. 43
essentially figurative or ‗‘symbolic‘‘; words are not the things but are substitutions of
those things. Hence boys, who in the most critical period of their development had to
submit to what Lacan calls the ‗‘Law of the Father‘‘-a law that prohibits direct desire for
and communicative intimacy with what has been the boy‘s whole world-enter more
easily into the realm of language and the Symbolic order than girls do, who have never
really had to renounce that which once seemed continuous with the self: the mother.
From here, we continued the discussion with the impact of Lacan‘s developments
and revisions of Freud‘s theories: first, his sexist-seeming association of maleness with
the Symbolic order, together with his claim that women cannot therefore enter easily into
this order, has prompted feminists not to reject this theory but, rather, to look more
closely at the relation between language and women‘s inequality. This is how we
touched upon the French feminists, who believe that language is associated with the
separation from the mother and that women can develop a feminine language and thus a
women‘s writing (l‘écriture feminine). In this context, Julia Kristeva‘s theory on
feminine language, which is derived from the pre-oedipal period of fusion between
mother and child, proved to be very helpful in the sense that students could more easily
understand why, according to Kristeva, feminine language is not only threatening to
culture, which is patriarchal, but also a medium through which women may be creative
in new ways. As a result, students started looking upon the literary text under discussion
as a proof of such type of writing which has as a main character a woman who undergoes
a deep change: at the beginning of the novel, in the middle of the bustling social world of
Grand Isle, Edna is caught in her domestic roles of wife and mother, whereas, by the end,
she turns out to be totally independent (including financially) and self-reliant, but alone.
Solitude appears thus to be a defiantly feminine characteristic and Edna‘s final plunging
into the sea‘s embrace is interpreted by most of the students as her triumphant embrace
of solitude.
Following our discussion on feminine language, students managed to look upon
Kate Chopin‘s The Awakening not so much as a subversive critique of patriarchal power
in the 19th American society, as they were tempted in their first analyses and discussions,
but rather as a woman‘s struggle for sexual freedom and personal emancipation. In
addition, students have enlarged even further their analyses by associating Edna
Pontellier‘s awakening in terms of the nineteenth-century women‘s culture, with Kate
Chopin‘s dissatisfaction with it. Thus, Edna‘s discontent with her life of money, fine
clothes and furnishings, her status as her husband‘s valuable possession, may be seen as
metaphors of the author‘s (also a woman) discontent with 19th century reality she lived
in. Nevertheless, some critics claim that interpreting the book ,, solely as a Victorian
woman‘s futile attempt to break society‘s bonds confines Chopin‘s book to the ‗problem
novel‘ she sought to transcend.‘‘, concluding that: ‘‘This is certainly a tale of women‘s
changing self-perception –Edna‘s husband attributes her vagaries to ‗some sort of notion
concerning the eternal rights of women‘‘. But in resolving ‗‘never again to belong to
another that herself‘‘ and casting off ‗‘that fictitious self which we assume like a garment
with which we appear before the world‘, Edna confronts the wider ambiguities of
Emersonian self-discovery. She is caught between self-realization and existential inner
solitude, between a sense of human divinity and regression. This is her tragedy and the
book‘s compelling mystery.‘‘ (Ruland. R& Bradbury M., 1991:233-234)
The results of the analysis have shown that most students demonstrated a better
understanding and handling of the psychoanalytical concepts, mainly because they had
previously been trained in this type of critical approach to literature, already detaining a
critical apparatus. On the other hand, by reading Freud‘s revision of the pleasure
principle, as well as Jacques Lacan‘s revisions and reinterpretation of the oedipal stage in
2 nd International Conference Education Across Border. ―Critical Thinking in Education‖
ISBN (print) 9789928146274 ISBN (on l ine) 9789928146212
2nd EduCbr-CTE 2014, Albania-Korçё. 44
the psychic development of the child, students revised and enhanced their critical and
theoretical background which enabled them to go deeper with their analyses of the
literary text and find answers, solutions to some issues raised by the literary text.
As far the feminist criticism is concerned, to them it was roughly confined to the
critique of the patriarchal power. By discussing Lacan and his contribution to both
psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, the students were able to make the connection
between the two critical approaches particularly because of the centrality of the
language.
The application of such theoretical frames to the analysis of literature in general
and not only clearly contributes to students‘ and instructors‘ continuous shaping and
reshaping of their critical thinking and to the instructors‘ shaping and reshaping of their
methods of introducing, filling in the gaps, strengthening and applying these critical
concepts to various kinds of literary texts within an interpretative
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