Romantic Movements in Kate Chopins and Walt Whitmans works - Research Paper Example

Representation of Realist and Romantic Movements in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself Introduction The nineteenth century was characterized by a shift towards realism and romanticism in stories. Romanticism concerns itself with an idealized conception of the way things should be. Realism, on the other hand, concerns itself with a conception of how things seem to be. A look into some of the literary works of the 19th century reveals the elements of both romanticism and realism. Since then, the mingling of romanticism and realism has never stopped. Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening represent the respective romantic and realist movements that were becoming popular in the 19th century. Romanticism as portrayed in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening Kate Chopin is celebrated as one of the nineteenth-century post-Civil War writers who promoted realism through their works. Through her works, she appeared to break from the plantation-romance tradition. Hers is southern realism which is intelligible only in terms of the large general literary movement that swept America and Europe and strived to reflect the actual conditions of life and fidelity to precise details. Contrary to romanticism, realism avoids the subjective nature. Realism was the reaction against the formal prohibitions of the nineteenth century (Hytonen 20) and the early twentieth century Genteel Traditions. Realists such as Kate Chopin and Walt Whitman attempt to persuade readers that the created world mirrors the objective, inhabited world. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is one of the widely read works of the 19th century. Currently, Chopin’s The Awakening is widely appreciated and enjoyed across the scholarly field. There is a heavy usage of imagery and symbolism in the story making it a fertile ground for literary studies. Both Kate Chopin and Walt Whitman were romantic and realist writers who brought with them both the mood and the mode of the romantic and realist movement. The Awakening deals with Edna Pontellier’s process of reaching maturity as a woman in both her personal and her professional life. Chopin openly discusses women’s sexuality in a period when the topic was considered a taboo. However, she hides her portrayal of a frustrated woman behind an apparently simple plotline. Chopin appears to sympathize with the fate of her protagonist instead of condemning Edna’s immoral behavior. Edna Pontellier declines to hold her visiting hours on Tuesdays and finally divests herself of home, husband, and children to pursue her art and her passions (Chopin 96). The life of the southern woman was characterized by slavery, submissiveness, and oppression. The southern woman was a symbol of rationalization due to her peculiar race and gender. The southern woman had to be submissive and loyal to her husband or master, and this made her a symbol of morality and devotion. Her main duty was to please her husband and manage the house (Chopin 96). This duty barred her from involving herself in any other intellectual pursuit. The image of the southern woman was an impediment to her development, and many writers’ call is that this image should be smashed. Southern ladies needed not to be submissive and dependent. However, The Awakening is about the strong individualities of women. Chopin portrays Edna as a human being who has a soul and who should not obey anyone but the universe. Chopin appears to portray Edna’s disappearance in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to be a victory. There is implied suicide, but Edna may have begun to live at another level of existence. From a realist point of view, Edna’s plight is that of a woman who finally begins to realize that the position she is occupying is not her own and sets herself on a new direction (Martin 110). Although her spiritual and social quest is not represented as successful, it is regarded as attesting to the new woman’s awareness of her right to be herself and even, when necessary to take her own life as the ultimate statement of self-assertion. At the turn of the 19th century, romantic love in the United States seemed to function in two ways. First, the purpose of the woman was to love, and secondly, as a woman loves, she did not need any other fulfillment in her life. As a result, love in marriage was institutionalized, and it appeared as a powerful tool that bound women in their role a wife and mother. The language of love in The Awakening is something that nobody appears to understand (Hytonen 20). Although numerous praise was heaped on The Awakening, many critics argued that it was not fit for publication because it was written in a language that was unfit for that time. The protagonist of the story, Edna Pontellier refuses to conform to “the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood” (20). There is a wide incorporation of major romantic and realist movements of the 19th century. Chopin not only experiments with these movements but also demonstrates their limitations. She expresses herself through The Awakening by looking into the social and cultural conflicts between nature and culture in the contemporary American society. Edna’s protagonist is the reinterpretation of the notions of womanhood and love. The Awakening does not conform to the popular traditions of the time and to a greater extent, Chopin appeared to respond to her critics by communicating in “a language which nobody understood” (Chopin 43). Edna is more of a challenger of the realism of the Victorian marriage. She holds on to her romantic idea of transcendent love and uses it to revolt against the naturalist view on women. Realism as portrayed in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening Realism in the 19th-century literature in America developed as “a reaction against Romanticism” (Hytonen 21). Realism displayed life as it is. This fact is evident in The Awakening because, Chopin uses it to praise commonplace details. She praises ordinary events rather than dramatic ones. The popular realist writers of that century such as Mark Twain and Dean Howells considered life-likeness as a marking value in literature. Critics often argue that Chopin has exaggerated the way in which she treats passion in love. However, the realist would argue that Pontellier’s behavior is romantic and unnatural. In The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s short, enigmatic novel published in 1899, the narrator presents the world of a woman of privilege living in a Creole society which is judged to have behaved rather badly. Edna Pontellier is clearly ambivalent about the role of wife and mother being imposed upon her, and critics such as Per Seyersted and Joan Zlotnick have long assumed that her behavior represents an act of protest against her gendered position in American society at the turn of the twentieth century. Edna enters into a series of whimsical love affairs, leaves her marital domicile, strikes out on her own while abandoning her small children, and at the novel’s end wanders into the sea, an action that has vexed critics ever since. In both Chopin’s life and the life of her heroine Edna, the same romantic and lyrical impulses present seemingly insurmountable challenges that they both manage to overcome. Chopin’s work remains largely in circulation; Edna is a classic heroine whose narrative continually insists upon profoundly important and creative interpretations. The many influences of art within this romance has been thoroughly explored and analyzed by critics for decades. In her discussion of Edna’s search for self-fulfillment through the production of art, Lynda Boren points out that the protagonist’s behavior and the ending of the novel are linked to Edna’s quest for an understanding of her artistic nature. “Edna’s search for fulfillment is bound to her desire for creative achievement, her evolution as an artist,” according to Boren, who goes on to argue that Chopin’s artistic desires are intertwined with the narrative, so much so that Chopin “uses the ostensible heroine of her romance” to show how easily a woman artist could fall “victim to her own unlimited and unlimiting desire” (235). In Boren’s reading of the end of the romance, suicide is the only possibility: “Chopin sacrifices her heroine to make a point: Romantic art is an expression of the self, a struggle for dominance. The woman artist achieves liberation only when she assumes the authority of her own voice.” If the ending of the novel is read as doing just this, Edna assumes authority over her “voice” by narrating her intentions at the end of the text: “But do you know, I have an idea of going down to the beach and taking a good wash and even a little swim before dinner?” (112). When stereo voices from Victor and Mariequita tell her this is not advisable, “‘The water is too cold!’ they both exclaimed. ‘Don’t think of it’” (112), Edna challenges their advice in keeping with her behavior throughout the course of the romance. This seemingly minor decision signals Edna’s determination to exert her will, even if her willfulness carries her out into the cold sea. The Awakening does not simply pay homage to the idea of artistry on the part of the writer that is manifest in the creation of the text; rather, the work becomes the canvas upon which the American romance is painted through Edna Pontellier’s negotiation of the same type of impulses, lyrical in nature, as are presented to her. Significantly different than the way other heroines in American romances have internalized these moments of crisis, Edna’s actions at the end of the novel signal a movement toward transcending the limitations her life has imposed upon her. When she sheds her clothing on the beach, she stands in full control, like a confident nude model posing for a portrait, one that has both knowledge and understanding of her physical beauty (Chopin 113). The narrator uses moments of emotional intimacy between Edna and Adele Ratignolle to provide readers with glimpses into the protagonist’s internal dialog and the suggestion they convey of the romantic spirit that is alive within her. During such moments, we learn that every chance for early romance in Edna’s youth was thwarted by the fact that she chose totally unavailable men. Her imagined yet unrealistic prospects for a relationship included a young man engaged to another and a famous stage actor, neither of whom afforded her an opportunity for of any kind lasting union. Such evidence allows readers to see in Edna’s history of fanciful thinking her vivid and romantic imagination at work, the ways in which she is prone to indulge in passionate feelings, and her insistence on embracing those feelings. “Musical strains…. evoking pictures in her mind” (Chopin 26) is how the narrator describes Edna’s state as she listens to the sound of piano being played by Mademoiselle Reisz (27). These images are romanticized descriptions. Repeatedly throughout the novel, Edna is portrayed in scenes described in a highly sensuous. Chopin’s depiction of Edna’s pose while napping is much more in line with the long history of representations of sleeping women in romantic art. Although Edna does not suffer the humiliation of having anyone witness her nakedness on the beach, the implications of her nakedness as an act of literally throwing off the constraints of social convention and restriction as applied to a proper married woman are clear. Edna’s lack of shame at her nakedness suggests that she is simply a more liberated version of the tale, for she neither blames nor punishes anyone for her situation. Romanticism as portrayed in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself The nineteenth-century literature mostly paid their focus on imaginations, emotions, and idealized views on the world. Walt Whitman, in Song of Myself clearly explains the ideas and major themes of the period such as romanticism and realism. The reader of Son of Myself clearly sees characteristics such as describing the natural phenomena and capturing the sensuous nuance. In Song of Myself, Whitman says, “I loafe and invite my soul” (quoted in Lauter 2863). This portrays physical idling of the writer. However, Whitman is aware of the details of nature around him. He talks about “observing a spear of summer grass” (2863). Spiritually, he invites his soul to commune with him. Whitman’s romance appears to lean towards nature. He says, “I will go to the bank by the wood and become …. naked, I am mad to be in contact with it” (2864). He also talks about “rising from bed and meeting the sun” (2864). Song of Myself is characterized by physical invitations. The writer engages in a spiritual journey. This spiritual journey enables the reader to find and identify himself. In every journey, the traveler must arrive at a destination. In Song of Myself, the journey ends at the closing of the poem where Whitman concludes, “I stop somewhere waiting for you” (2914). Another aspect of Romanticism in Song of Myself is that of the poetic speaker who becomes less the persona and more the direct person of the poet. Whitman becomes the subject of his own poem. In the opening part Song of Myself, the reader knows that throughout the poem, the subject of the poem will be about Whitman himself. Whitman says, “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” (2863). The only way that Whitman can be in the reader’s mind is through his spirit. Through his poetic presentation, he opens up the concept of the self. He establishes a romantic bond between the body and the soul, the same way Edna establishes a romantic between her soul and the freedom of her body. Among the first of the early journal writings that became Song of Myself were the opening lines of section 21, “I am the poet of the Body and I am the Poet of the Soul” (Casale and Bloom 92). In the poem, Whitman simply joins body and soul with the conjunction “and”. He does not use a different conjunction, or an adverbial clause such as “but I am also”. The argument may be that Whitman equates body and soul so that one gains qualities normally associated with the other. The reason Whitman emphasizes the relation between body and soul is because of some religious implications. Whitman may have rejected Puritans notions of man’s inherent sinfulness by arguing for the body’s spiritual nature. As the poem progresses, Whitman talks about the people he has seen and expressed himself as a part of every one of them. “I am of old and young, of foolish as much as the wise, regardless of others....... maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,” (2875). The reader can clearly see that Whitman considers his ‘self’ to be connected and a part of everything and everyone he has come around. Whitman sees himself in all people. He feels the importance of combining his individual self with the people and things around him through the spirit. Rather than only understanding the plight of people he comes around, he becomes them. “I am the man….I suffered….I was there,” “All these I feel or am,” (2894) and “I take part….I see and hear the whole,” (2895). The American Romantic Movement of the 18th, 19th, and beyond encompassed what the world should be versus what it was. The Romantic Movement mainly concerned itself with imagination, creativity, and the overflow of feeling and emotions. These ideas are clear in Story of Myself. Realism as seen in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening Realistic poetry, is likely to describe normal situations and average characters in ordinary settings (Preminger, Warnke and Hardison 685). “r” is defined as an element in art which is concerned with giving a true impression of actuality as portrayed to the normal human consciousness (685). Walt Whitman, the man, doubtless lusted after what can be termed as the love of comrades, but Walt Whitman the poet persuades his readers rhetorically only when he lusts after himself. To be more precise, the self of Song of Myself lusts after “the real me” or “me myself” of Walt Whitman. The juxtaposition of realistic “self-metamorphoses” in a loose structure of almost free association gives the Song of Myself an incongruous diversity and undercuts the serious moral purpose. The self of Song of Myself is a character portrayed in a recognizable American way. It illustrates the fluid, unformed personality exulting alternately in its provisional attempts to define itself and its sense that it has no definition. A Romanist would praise Whitman for making sex a possible subject of American literature. There is nothing else in the nineteenth-century melodrama of love and death to compare with the delicate precision of Whitman’s elegiac ending of the Song of Myself. Also, in sections 8 and 15 of Song of Myself, Whitman develops a highly imagistic, reportorial style with little overt commentary when writing about people engaged in day-to-day affairs, whether in peace or war. Chopin’s protagonist, Edna, becomes, as it were, one of the roughs, an American when she allows herself to lust after her real me, her me myself. Edna, like Walt, falls in love with her own body, and her infatuation with the inadequate Robert is merely a screen for her overwhelming obsession, which is to nurse and mother herself. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was the continuation of Walt Whitman’s love for self. It was also a continuation of realism. The Awakening, far from being a departure from Chopin’s early stories, was the obvious continuation of themes of self-creation and self-discovery that had explicitly shaped her earliest works. Chopin seems to have awakened to the liberation in style and subject matter that European realism (the poison of Europe) offered her as an artist-material too strong, apparently, for her then rather sheltered American audience. The display of realism in The Awakening appears to have provided an alternative to the crippling sentimentalism of an idealized marriage, family, and female dependence (Bloom 120). The style in The Awakening lacks harsh pessimism and stark bleakness of other colorists. It is enriched with intense and varied symbolism, eroticism, and sensuality. Chopin’s narrative voice in The Awakening has its genius and originality precisely in a fusion of realism and irony while her style achieves a union of realism and lush, southern symbolism that gives it a unique flavor. By ironizing realism, Chopin paradoxically exposed it as itself a decadent and nonsensical concept. By her rich symbolism and use of complex imagery and extended metaphors, Chopin undercuts realism’s most central concept of language as transparent. The Awakening depicts the struggle to establish an individual woman’s right to her point of view in both life and art. As Bloom observes, The Awakening explores thematically, at a metaphorical level, the possibility of an art and language more congruent with women’s ways of seeing and living than are the styles, forms, and languages established by men (122). In The Awakening, no speeding up occurs as the novel progresses; rather, the speed keeps changing; a slow, emphatic, almost, stately, forward progression within each section, a sudden leap often to the next stage in the new section. This aspect of Chopin’s narrative technique creates a potent sense of the subjectivity of time. Conclusion The Romantic Movement mainly concerned itself with imagination, creativity, and the overflow of feeling and emotions. These ideas are clear in both Story of Myself and The Awakening. Chopin appears to display and suggest how women should live their lives. Through the portrayal of her characters, especially her protagonist, Edna, Chopin feels that women should live independent lives. The ideas on Romantic Movement such as imagination, creativity and overflow of feelings and emotions are highlighted in Song of Myself. These ideas are expressed in terms of notions of nature, travel, and the concept of self or individual as the major vehicles by which to commune with others and the Divine. As a character, Edna’s engagement and negotiation with the elements of romanticism in this work which have been described throughout as moments of lyrical impulse are clearly different than those of any other heroine in the body of work commonly studied as the American romance. She shares similarities with other heroines and heroes of American romances in that moment of lyrical impulse and the ways in which characters respond to them signal intellectual, emotional and spiritual awareness as well as the making of knowledge. However, Edna is the character whose response to this stimulus is the most active, perhaps as a way to signal the advent of novels whose characters’ actions are more reflective of emergent literary realism which coincides with the publication of The Awakening and also reflects the documented influence of the French realism on Chopin’s text. Both Edna and Chopin are making demands upon readers not necessarily in terms of demanding more romance, but rather, by demanding more life out of the romance than perhaps any other American author had given it to date. Edna epitomizes the quintessential American romance character whose fate was as uncertain and whose story ended ambiguously. Chopin highlights the highly romantic and epic nature of Edna’s situation. In so doing, Chopin takes what has long been read as a regional work to one of much greater scope and magnitude. Reading Edna’s awakening in the context of Ariadne’s physiological state of being awakened extends the ‘deeply romantic roots’ beyond some vague arguments. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Kate Chopin. New York: Infobase Publishing. 2007. Print. Casale, Frank and Bloom, Harold. Bloom's How to Write about Walt Whitman. New York: Infobase Publishing. 2010. Print. Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. (eds). Margaret Culley. New York: Norton, 1976. Print. Martin, Wendy. New Essays on The Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Print. Preminger, Alex., Warnke, Frank and Hardison, O. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Print. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Ed. Paul Lauter et.al. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002. 2863  – 2914. Print Read More