Download Bird Symbolism in Kate Chopin`s Fiction: Birds as

Bird Symbolism in Kate Chopin’s Fiction:
Birds as Representatives of Women and Freedom
Jenni Endén
University of Tampere
School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies
English Philology
Pro Gradu Thesis
June 2010
Tampereen yliopisto
Englantilainen filologia
Kieli- ja käännöstieteiden laitos
Jenni Endén: Bird Symbolism in Kate Chopin‟s Fiction: Birds as Representatives of Women and
Freedom
Pro gradu –tutkielma, 105 sivua
Kevät 2010
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tutkielmani tarkoituksena on analysoida yhdysvaltalaisen Kate Chopinin romaaneissa ja novelleissa
esiintyviä lintukuvia ja niiden symboliikkaa. Kuten työssäni osoitan, linnut symboloivat Chopinin
tuotannossa erityisesti naisia. Lintukuvien kautta usein myös kritisoidaan epäsuorasti naisen asemaa
1800-luvun loppupuolen Yhdysvalloissa, ja erityisesti maan eteläosien kreoliyhteisöissä, joiden
kulttuurin ja elämäntapojen kuvaamiseen Chopinin tuotanto keskittyy. Koska naisen aseman kritiikin
ymmärtämiseksi on tarpeen ymmärtää ajan yhteiskuntaa, kuvaan tutkielmassani lyhyesti myös
Chopinin teosten historiallista ja yhteiskunnallista taustaa.
Tutkielmani keskeinen teoreettinen viitekehys on feministinen kirjallisuudentutkimus.
Keskeisimpiä teoreettisia käsitteitä joiden kautta lähestyn lintusymboliikkaa ja erityisesti siihen
sisältyvää naisen aseman kritiikkiä ovat Gayle Rubinin kehittämä sex/gender –järjestelmä ja
sukupuolen käsite, sekä binääriset oppositiot, eli toisensa poissulkevina vastakohtina nähdyt käsiteparit.
Binääristen oppositioiden osalta hyödynnän erityisesti Hélène Cixous‟n ajattelua. Chopinin tuotannon
lintusymboliikan kannalta keskeisiä ovat erityisesti dikotomiat mies/nainen ja kulttuuri/luonto, mutta
näiden lisäksi ja näihin liittyen myös esimerkiksi sellaiset käsiteparit kuin ääni/hiljaisuus,
aktiivisuus/passiivisuus ja sielu/ruumis. Binäärinen ajattelu rakentuu sukupuolen ympärille, ja kaikissa
pareissa toinen käsite liittyykin naisellisuuteen, toinen miehisyyteen. Näin binäärisen ajattelun kautta
luodaan myös kuva naiseudesta ja miehisyydestä. Naiseen liitetään perinteisesti yllä mainittujen
käsiteparien jälkimmäinen käsite: luonto, hiljaisuus, passiivisuus ja ruumis. Binääriset oppositiot siis
luovat ja vahvistavat essentialistista naiskuvaa ja luonnollistavat eroja. On kuitenkin huomattava, että
niin binäärisen parin käsitteiden vastakohtaisuus ja toisensa poissulkevuus kuin parien välille luodut
yhteydetkin ovat keinotekoisia. Siksi ne on myös mahdollista kyseenalaistaa, kuten Chopin tekee.
Jotta olisi mahdollista ymmärtää miten lintusymboliikka soveltuu binäärisen logiikan
kyseenalaistamiseen, on tärkeää ymmärtää miten lintuja on aiemmin käytetty symboleina ja millaisia
merkityksiä niihin liittyy. Tarjoan siis työssäni myös katsauksen lintusymboliikan aiempiin
merkityksiin erityisesti siltä osin kuin ne ovat relevantteja Chopinin teoksissa ilmenevien lintujen
analyysissä. Analyysissäni osoitan että Chopinin tuotannossa lintusymboliikalla ilmaistaan yhtäältä
naisen elämän rajoittuneisuutta ja toisaalta naisten vapaudenkaipuuta ja pyrkimyksiä saavuttaa
itsenäisempi ja vapaampi elämä. Vankeutta symboloivat Chopin tuotannossa erityisesti häkkeihin
vangitut tai ketjuin kahlitut linnut sekä kesyt kanalinnut. Lintu naisen symbolina vaikuttaa
ensisilmäyksellä perinteiseltä ratkaisulta, joka tukee binääristä ajattelua yhdistämällä naiset luontoon.
Toisaalta linnun käyttö naisen symbolina myös kyseenalaistaa dikotomioille perustuvan ajattelun ja
erityisesti eri käsiteparien välille rakennetut yhteydet: vaikka linnut toki ovat osa luontoa, on niiden
symbolisessa merkityksessä vielä luontoakin keskeisempää ajatus vapaudesta ja yhteys sieluun. Näin
ollen Chopinin lintusymboliikka rikkoo binäärisen ajattelun rajoja yhdistämällä naiset vapauteen ja
sieluun, sen sijaan että naiseus nähtäisiin ensisijaisesti ruumiillisena ja lisääntymisen välineenä.
Lisäksi Chopinin linnut, edes häkein ja ketjuin vangitut papukaijat ja matkijalinnut, eivät useinkaan
ole passiivisia ja pysy vaiti. Lintusymboliikan avulla kyseenalaistetaan siis myös naisten perinteinen
yhteys hiljaisuuteen ja passiivisuuteen. Lintukuvissa ääni ilmentääkin usein naisten kapinaa – samoin
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kuin teosten naishahmot, äänekkäät linnut kapinoivat rajoituksia vastaan sen sijaan että hyväksyisivät
hiljaa kohtalonsa. Kuten lintujen äänet, ovat kapinan muodotkin erilaisia: naisen kapina voi ilmentyä
esimerkiksi aviomiehen toiveiden vastustamisena tai pakoyrityksenä. Eräs keskeinen kapinan muoto on
lisäksi taide. Chopin lintusymboliikka ottaakin kantaa paitsi naisen asemaan yleisesti, myös erityisesti
naistaiteilijoiden asemaan.
Asiasanat: Chopin, Kate, feministinen kirjallisuudentutkimus, lintusymboliikka, naiset : Yhdysvallat :
1800-luku
Contents
1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1
2. Theoretical Framework ...................................................................................................................... 8
2.1 The Sex/Gender System and Women‟s Position in the Victorian Society ..................................... 8
2.2 Binary Oppositions and Bird Symbolism ..................................................................................... 20
3. Birds and the Representation of Female Containment ................................................................. 32
3.1 Caged and Chained Birds: Women Confined ............................................................................... 32
3.2 Domesticated Birds: A Symbol of Women as Property ............................................................... 47
4. Escaping the Cage: Women’s Rebellion and Self-Expression ...................................................... 63
4.1 Attempts at Self-Ownership .......................................................................................................... 64
4.2 Refusing to Remain Silent: Women and Art ................................................................................ 73
4.3 Dream Birds Taking Flight: Imagining Freedom ......................................................................... 85
5. Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................... 98
Works Cited ......................................................................................................................................... 103
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1. Introduction
Kate Chopin (née O‟Flaherty) was born in St. Louis in 1851. Her father was Irish and her mother a
descendant of early French pioneers. Chopin married into a prominent Louisiana Creole family in
1870. She lived in New Orleans and northwest Louisiana until her husband‟s death in 1882, after which
she returned with her six children to St. Louis, where she started writing and offering her short stories
for publication. Gradually, she gained literary repute for her short stories, many of which were initially
published in magazines and later collected into the collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in
Acadie (1897). Chopin was regarded as a local colorist in her own lifetime, because the regional Creole
culture of Louisiana was a central element in much of her writing, especially in her early work. Along
with the short stories she published two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), the latter
of which is her best known work today. At the time of its publication, The Awakening was considered
scandalous and condemned because of its frank and nonjudgmental treatment of female sexuality and
marital infidelity. Chopin‟s health started to decline at the turn of the century, and this, together with
the extremely negative reception of The Awakening, which she had perceived to be her masterpiece – a
view which is nowadays commonly shared by scholars – caused her literary productivity to decrease
drastically. She wrote only few more stories and sketches before her death in 1904.
Kate Chopin‟s work, which consists of novels, short fiction, drama, poetry and essays, has received
a great amount of scholarly attention during the last few decades. While much has been written about
her production, and especially the novel The Awakening, which is Chopin‟s most famous work, there
remain aspects of her writing that have not yet been explored to the full. One of these aspects is her use
of symbolism and more precisely, her use of birds as symbols for many of the key thematic elements
that recur in her writing, such as freedom and the aspiration for it, an individual‟s rebellion against
social norms and the spiritual as opposed to the material. In the limited space of this thesis, I cannot
analyze in detail all of Chopin‟s stories or all of her bird symbolism. Therefore I have had to make a
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selection: I will focus especially on At Fault, The Awakening and the short stories “Athénaïse” (1894),
“Lilacs” (1896) and “Charlie” (1900), and refer only briefly to Chopin‟s other stories.
While bird symbolism in Chopin‟s work has not been studied very thoroughly, some birds in The
Awakening have been rather commonly referred to by scholars – mainly the parrot which appears in the
opening scene of the novel and the wounded bird at the end of the novel. Some references to birds in
The Awakening appear in many articles, such as Marion Muirhead‟s (2000) conversational analysis of
the novel and Patricia L. Bradley‟s (2005) reading of intertextualities in The Awakening. Even those
analyses in which birds are more central, the scope of the analysis is often very limited. Little attention
has been given to other birds than the two most famous ones even in The Awakening. Far less yet has
been given to those that appear in Chopin‟s other works – these birds are rarely even mentioned in
passing. Birds in Chopin‟s fiction have not yet been analyzed sufficiently, then, even though some
articles on them have appeared. These include one by Max Despain and Thomas Bonner Jr. (2005),
who trace the origins of Chopin‟s bird imagery, another one by Stephen Heath (1994), who reads The
Awakening as a rewriting of Gustave Flaubert‟s Madame Bovary (1856) and analyzes some of
Chopin‟s parrot imagery and one by Elizabeth Elz (2003), whose reading of birds in The Awakening I
find less than convincing and intend to contest in this thesis. One of the more recent studies that
includes some analysis of Chopin‟s birds is an article by Zoila Clark, “The Bird that Came out of the
Cage: A Foucauldian Feminist Approach to Kate Chopin‟s The Awakening” (2008). While providing
some interesting insights on the nature of the societal cage, for example, this analysis is insufficient in
that it completely ignores all but the two most famous bird scenes in The Awakening and fails to
recognize several important aspects of even those scenes which are analyzed.
Chopin‟s stories are mainly stories of women, and even when the point of view is that of a man, as
it sometimes is, the direction of the gaze is nevertheless often directed at women and the relationships
between women and men. This is not to say the stories would not have anything to say about men, their
inner lives and development: as Peggy Skaggs aptly points out, some stories do tell the tale of boys or
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men as well (270-271), and as Donald Ringe, too, has noted, awakenings of different kinds do happen
to men as well as women in Chopin‟s production (580-581). It is nonetheless justified to say that
women are at the center of most of Chopin‟s stories, and that her fiction in general is mainly concerned
with the lives and situations of women.
It is my intention to connect these two in this thesis: bird symbolism and women. I will argue that
birds in Chopin‟s work symbolize the thematic elements mentioned above – freedom and the aspiration
for it, frictions in the relationship between an individual and the society, and the relationship between
the spiritual and the material – especially in connection to women‟s situations and experiences. While
there are countless birds in Chopin‟s production and their significance is greatly varied, I believe that
the connection of the birds to women is a central, recurring symbolic value that most, if not all, birds in
her works have in common. A great many birds are there in Chopin‟s works to reflect and represent
women, and especially their desire for freedom: their quest for physical, emotional, sexual, financial,
artistic and intellectual independence. In this thesis I shall concentrate on examining bird imagery in
Chopin‟s work, especially from the point of view of how women and their situations are reflected in
bird images. For this reason, I will need to afford some space in the thesis for an analysis of female
characters, their lives and relationship with the surrounding society, as well as the bird scenes
themselves. I will, then, also look at women‟s position in general, both in the reality of 19th-century
United States and in Chopin‟s work.
Chopin‟s bird symbolism relates to and in some instances challenges dichotomies which have been
– and to an extent still are – central in Western thinking, such as culture/nature, activity/passivity and
soul/body. These dichotomies are all tied to the dichotomy man/woman, and their relationship to this
concept pair in particular is addressed by bird symbolism in Chopin‟s work. Even though Chopin‟s
work does not entirely deconstruct binary thinking, the connections between different concepts within
the framework, as well as their hierarchy, is questioned. I will show, for example, that inconveniently
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noisy birds symbolize women‟s rebellion, and thus question the traditional connection of women to
silence and passivity, which is created through binary oppositions.
Because I intend to analyze the bird symbolism in Chopin‟s fiction as a representation of women
and a commentary on their position, my theoretical framework consists of the work of several feminist
scholars. I will refer to the classic analysis of female containment by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan
Gubar. However, my most central theoretical background consists of poststructuralist feminist scholars
such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. While there are differences between these
scholars, of course, they all offer valuable insights into an examination of issues related to sex and
gender. In Cixous‟ work I am most interested in the feminist application of the idea of binary
oppositions, and Irigaray has aptly analyzed the images of women created for example by the male
dominated scientific discourses of the past. Butler‟s criticism of the sex gender division, on the other
hand, offers a new point of view to the sex-gender system that was first introduced to feminist thinking
by Gayle Rubin.
The central concepts in this thesis are binary oppositions and the sex gender system, which I will
discuss in more detail in chapter 2. In chapter 2 I will also discuss bird symbolism in general: how birds
have been used as a symbol before and how their general symbolism makes birds a symbol that is well
suited for critiquing women‟s position. My main source with bird symbolism is a study by Beryl
Rowland, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (1978). Along with a theoretical
framework for my thesis, I intend to give a social background to Chopin‟s texts in chapter 2. I will,
then, discuss women‟s position in 19th-century United States: this includes issues such as women‟s
position in marriage, legal and citizenship status, possibilities for education and rights with regard to
property.
Bird images are recurrently present in Chopin‟s work. Nature in general is quite central in her
fiction: birds are only one of the many nature-related motifs that recur in her writing. Many of her
stories, which were originally viewed essentially as local color writing, are situated in the rural Creole
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society in late 19th-century Louisiana, particularly the Cane River area in the Natchitoches parish.
Cultivated landscapes are often depicted, then, as well as forests and wildlife. Furthermore, Chopin
often contrasts wild nature with tamed nature and life in the city with life in the countryside. Therefore,
her work can definitely be said to participate in the debate between culture and nature that was going
on during the late 19th century. It also takes part in the discussion and re-evaluation of the Victorian
values and ideals that were still dominant at the time, and is linked to and comments on such literary
styles as realism, naturalism and genteel writing, as well as local color, romanticism, modernism and
fin de siècle writing.
Chopin‟s work has been labeled as belonging to early American realism, and she was strongly
influenced by Guy de Maupassant and Gustave Flaubert. She was, nevertheless, critical of both realism
and naturalism and is known to have ridiculed such naturalists as Émile Zola in her fiction (Heath, 11).
In “Lilacs”, the main character, Adrienne, threatens to use a volume of Zola as a weapon, to which
purpose it is well suited because “… the weightiness, the heaviness of Mons. Zola are such that they
cannot fail to prostrate you; thankful you may be if they leave you with energy to regain your feet”
(362). While Chopin did appreciate Zola‟s realism, she found his writing and especially its focus on
detailed description of the material world clumsy and boring and did not assign it great artistic value
(Seyersted, 23-24). Furthermore, she objected to the idea of literature being used for didactic purposes
(Seyersted, 24). Chopin did aim for the ideal of direct representation of life, but she preferred a rather
more impressionistic style, and a focus on the inner life rather than on external details. These views are
in accordance with her admiration for the works of Maupassant, whose psychological realism she
valued greatly (Seyersted, 24).
Chopin‟s writing tends to center around upper middle-class people, and due to this, as well as some
of her stylistic and linguistic choices, her name has been attached to the genteel style as well. This is
particularly the case for her early works, which did indeed please the genteel audiences of the time.
However, she did not completely adhere to the rules of the genteel either, and her treatment of the topic
6
of an adulterous woman in The Awakening is certainly far removed from that style. In The Awakening
there are clearly present elements from a variety of literary styles, and accordingly, it has been labeled
quite varyingly by different scholars: Donald Ringe calls it “a powerful romantic novel” (587). Indeed,
Edna‟s search of an individual, genuine identity, her “real me”, as well as her wish to fulfill her
individual needs without interference from the society is in accordance with the Romantic ideal. In this
sense, Chopin could even be viewed as walking in the footsteps of Walt Whitman – although with a
difference, as the individual on a quest for self is a woman. To George Spangler, on the other hand, The
Awakening is “a complex, psychological novel” apart for its ending which to him falls rather into the
category of “a conventional sentimental novel” (255). The Awakening has also been connected with the
fin de siècle aesthetic of decadence (Haddox, 82-85).
Most of Chopin‟s stories are situated in Louisiana and they depict the Creole society of the area
accurately and in great detail. These stories have often been labeled mainly as local color writing. In
this sense, Chopin could be viewed as following in the footsteps of such local colorists as Mary
Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett, whom she is known to have admired, and with whose work
Chopin‟s style could be said to have much in common. Jewett and Chopin, for example, both share a
rich depiction of local habits and people, and especially a lively and realistic representation of local
speech patterns, as well as evocative nature imagery. Furthermore, all three writers use bird imagery,
and have, significantly, a special focus on women‟s lives and experiences. While the local color aspects
of Chopin‟s stories are not, by any means, my main focus, the Creole society does form a central
background to Chopin‟s description of the human condition in general and of women‟s position in
particular. Therefore it is important to understand this particular culture that she so often describes.
Creoles were an ethnic group in the South of the United States. They were white descendants of the
early French or Spanish colonists of Louisiana and the Gulf States, and immensely proud of their noble
ancestors, whose characteristic speech and culture they preserved. The Creole society was francophone
and greatly influenced by French customs and Catholic faith. The Cajuns or Acadians, on the other
7
hand, who feature in Chopin‟s fiction along with the Creoles, were the less wealthy descendants of the
French settlers who were expelled from Nova Scotia in the 18th century (Seyersted, 22). Of course there
were other groups in the South as well, who were a part of the Creole social system in one way or
another, such as free black people and slaves, “Americans” from the North of the United States, Native
Americans, foreigners and more recent immigrants from Europe. These people all feature in Chopin‟s
writing in some way, but the stories located in the South tend to center around the Creoles.
In focusing on birds as representatives of women‟s desire for freedom I have had to ignore, to a
great extent, many other, important issues visible in Chopin‟s work, due to the fact that I simply cannot
give them proper attention in the space of this thesis. Among these are issues of race and ethnicity.
Race and ethnicity are undeniably important when discussing themes such as freedom and women‟s
position – or, indeed, the very concept of “woman”. However, birds in particular are used primarily as
representatives of white women in Chopin‟s works. Similarly, because the question of sexual
orientation is not primarily relevant in an analysis of Chopin‟s bird symbolism, it will not be addressed
with any depth in the limited space of this thesis, even though it is obviously relevant to an examination
of sex and gender. For brevity‟s sake I will not repeat all the qualifiers every time, but it must be
emphasized that when referring to women, femininity and women‟s experiences in this thesis, I in fact
refer to a certain, limited group of women: wealthy, middle and upper middle-class, white, heterosexual
Anglo-Saxon and Creole women, most of whom live in the United States. Fortunately, issues of race
and ethnicity, for example, have not been ignored in the scholarly writing on Chopin, but have been
addressed by many scholars, such as David Russell in his article “A Vision of Reunion: Kate Chopin‟s
At Fault” (2008). Issues of sexual orientation have also been addressed: Thomas F. Haddox examines
the question of homosexuality in relation to religion in particular in his book Fears and Fascinations:
Representing Catholicism in the American South (2005), where he analyzes Chopin‟s fiction, among
several other writers. I will, then, focus especially on the types of women and femininity that are
recurrently represented by birds in Chopin‟s fiction.
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2. Theoretical Framework
In this chapter I will present my central background theories and concepts. Birds are in my view used
in Chopin‟s fiction to describe and criticize women‟s position. Therefore, I will use feminist theories in
analyzing birds in Chopin‟s fiction. I will begin in 2.1 by discussing gender in general; first, I will
introduce one of the central concepts for this thesis, the sex/gender system. I will continue by providing
a sense of the late Victorian society and values and the cultural contexts for Chopin‟s writing inasmuch
as they are essential for an understanding of why she would address the issue of women‟s containment.
I intend to place her writing in the context of women‟s criticism of their position and their attempts to
gain more independence and recognition as fully capable individuals in the United States in the 19th
century. This includes issues like women‟s position in marriage, legal and citizenship status,
possibilities for education and rights with regard to property.
In 2.2 I will move on to discuss binary oppositions and their hierarchical structures. For me, binary
opposition is a theoretical concept that can be used for an analysis of both Kate Chopin‟s works and the
society of her time. Some of the most important dichotomies for this thesis are the pairs man/woman
and culture/nature. These are particularly important for me, because they link directly to my analysis of
the bird symbolism in Chopin‟s work. In 2.2 I will also give an outline of birds as a symbol in Western
culture, focusing especially on those aspects of their symbolic meaning that occur and are used in the
texts I will analyze in chapters 3 and 4.
2.1 The Sex/Gender System and Women’s Position in the Victorian Society
The tendency to see men and women as categorically different from each other, and even as opposites
of each other, has been very common in Western thinking. Many cultural assumptions have been
connected with the biological differences between the sexes and assumed as stemming from them. This
9
is why it is central in feminism to attempt at distinguishing between biological and cultural factors in
relation to definitions of what it is to be a woman, and attempts have been made towards that end for
decades. Biological determinism – the assumption that the biological makeup of a person
predetermines every aspect of their being – was opposed, for example, by Virginia Woolf as early as in
the 1920‟s. Similarly, the separation of biological and social factors, and an envisioning of the
constructed nature of gender, is evident in Simone de Beauvoir‟s famous notion that “[o]ne is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman” (295).
In 1975, American anthropologist Gayle Rubin created her well known and influential theory of the
sex/gender system, in order to point out that women‟s oppression is not inevitable but a culturally
bound phenomenon (Rubin, 158-159). Rubin created her theory as a part of the current discussion
around theories of patriarchy. These theories were criticized for assuming that women‟s oppression is
universal and thus failing to take into account historical and social variations, and differences in
women‟s situations caused by race and class, for example. The sex/gender system was intended as a
more flexible theory, which would take cultural variables into account. Sex, in Rubin‟s system, refers
to the biological need and ability to reproduce, and gender, on the other hand, is the product of the
social organization of this biological sexuality (Rubin, 159). According to Rubin, all societies have a
sex/gender system by which they organize biological sexuality (165). Even though Rubin‟s theory was
not completely without contradictions, as Marianne Liljeström points out in her article (113), it has
been an influential starting point in attempting to differentiate between biological and social factors.
The idea of separating biological and cultural aspects of sexual difference has become widespread
and could be said to color all scholarly thinking around sex. Toril Moi, too, has presented a view close
to the sex/gender system (206-210). She refers to two separate but interlinked terms, female and
feminine, which are widely used by feminist scholars to separate between biological and cultural
factors. In this view, female represents the “purely biological aspects of sexual difference” (209).
Feminine, on the other hand, is viewed by Moi as representing the social construct, that is, “patterns of
10
sexuality and behavior imposed by cultural and social norms” (209). Thus femaleness refers to
biological sex and femininity to the characteristics that people of the female sex are expected or
supposed to have. In patriarchal thinking these two are merged and confused with each other, so that
femaleness is necessarily characterized by femininity and femininity always follows from femaleness.
As Moi states:
…patriarchal oppression consists of imposing certain social standards of femininity on all
biological women, in order precisely to make us believe that the chosen standards for
„femininity‟ are natural. Thus a woman who refuses to conform can be labeled both
unfeminine and unnatural (209, italics in the original).
To Moi, then, it is an important goal in feminism to disentangle these two and to counteract “[t]he
patriarchal strategy of collapsing the feminine into the female” (217).
With this way of thinking as well, there is a danger of falling into the traditional binary logic of
male/female, masculine/feminine, as Moi states (210). In fact, the idea of sex/gender or
female/feminine is itself an example of binary thinking – allowing only two alternatives that are
mutually exclusive – and it relates closely to the traditional culture/nature dichotomy (compare Bock,
7-8; Liljeström, 115). Assuming that a clear-cut separation between nature and culture in gender
identities can be made is in itself suspect, as it is very difficult to determine what exactly is nature or
biological and what is cultural.
It is, in fact, dangerous to assume that anything, even sex or femaleness is purely or absolutely
biological. It can be argued that there is no such thing as pure biology, as poststructuralist critic Judith
Butler effectively does in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999), pointing
out that the very act of identifying and naming the sexes and creating two distinct categories is already
a markedly cultural act (11). According to Butler, then, both sex and gender are, in fact, cultural
constructs (Butler, 10-11). One of them is, perhaps, merely more openly cultural than the other. If such
a view is adopted, the division between sex and gender begins to lose its usefulness.
11
While Butler‟s criticism of the sex-gender division is to the point and the considerations voiced by
her should definitely be borne in mind while examining sex and gender, the sex/gender division
remains useful. Even if labels such as woman and man may not be “natural” or “purely biological”, I
would argue that there does remain nature that is free of culture, and something that is purely biological
even in human beings. This being said, it must be noted that it may never be possible to attain this
“pure” nature or biology in human thinking, which is always necessarily permeated by language and
therefore by culture. As Butler points out, all categorizations and conceptualizations of natural or
biological phenomena are inevitably cultural (11-12).
It must be accepted that all labels and classifications are cultural constructs, but this does not
necessarily mean that all classifications are evil. It may, for example, make sense to divide humankind
into two with respect to reproductive functions1 in the context of reproduction. What is highly
problematic is if the division based on reproductive functions is extended to cover any other areas of
life than reproduction, or if the importance of reproduction is exaggerated. Obviously, it is also highly
questionable to use reproductive functions or reproduction as a justification for discrimination of any
kind. The classification based on reproductive functions has most certainly been used wrongly, and
serves as an example of why it is necessary to be careful with and critical of classifications. There is,
1
By reproductive function I refer solely to the ability/potential for producing sperm or ova, and related to the ability to
produce ova, the capacity to sustain the life of the fetus until it is developed enough to live outside the womb. At the
moment these cells cannot, to my knowledge, be produced artificially, nor do I know of people who could fully perform
both the reproductive functions as defined above. Thus a division into two based on reproductive functions may in some
situations be justifiable, so long as it is restricted to the context of reproduction. Reproductive function, as I use the term,
has nothing to do with sexual orientations, sexuality in general, or intercourse. Reproduction is not the sole or even the most
important incentive for most sexual relationships today in the Western world, regardless of the gender of the participants –
in many relationships it is an undesirable outcome. Indeed, with modern technology, reproduction and sexuality need not be
related at all: while the two types of cells need to be in interaction in order for reproduction to occur, the people who
produce them do not, and with contraceptives, on the other hand, heterosexual intercourse need not result in reproduction.
To avoid misunderstanding, I would like to point out that in my view reproduction and parenting are not, and should
not be, limited only to couples who can produce offspring together without assistance. With techniques like artificial
insemination and surrogate mothers, as well as adoption, homosexual couples, single parents and heterosexual couples who
for one reason or other cannot have children together, can become parents, and there is nothing morally questionable in that.
Furthermore, while reproduction of some kind is admittedly necessary if the existence of the human species is to be
continued, its significance should not be overly emphasized, at the cost of other, important aspects of human life. This is
especially true today, as the world is already rather over-populated. I view reproduction a privilege rather than a duty –
people who want children should be able to have them regardless of nationality, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation or
relationship status, and on the other hand, people who do not want to have children should not feel any pressure to have
them, whatever their reason for this choice is.
12
for example, little sense in assuming that humankind can be divided into two with respect to their level
of activity, for example, and far less sense in assuming that such characteristics are somehow a result of
the individuals‟ reproductive functions. Furthermore, it is dangerous to assume that social behaviors
such as nurturing or parenting arise automatically out of a given reproductive function. Male parents
are capable of taking care of children – and according to Rubin, in some cultures men have traditionally
performed child-care tasks (178). Similarly, women who are biologically not able to have children can
make excellent mothers. In fact, in some cultures, biological motherhood has not led to being the
primary caretaker of the children. This is true, for example, of the ancient Roman culture, where the
biological mother was a distant figure, more a teacher and discipliner of the children than a nurturer,
which was a role reserved for nursemaids, whenever one could be afforded (Salisbury and Kersten, 25).
Irigaray, too, sharply criticizes the assumption that a maternal role automatically arises out of a given
sex or sexual function. For example, in her analysis of Freud‟s views of sexual difference Irigaray
makes the following statement:
Moreover, zoology casts doubt on the idea that “rearing and caring for the young” are
specifically female functions. “In quite high species we find that the sexes share the task
of caring for the young between them or even that the male alone devotes himself to it” (p.
115). Is the necessary conclusion, then, that such animals are more able than you, than we,
to distinguish bet[w]een the sexual function and the parental function? And notably that
they at least notice the distinction between female and maternal, between female sexuality
and mothering, a distinction that “culture” might perhaps have effaced? (16, italics in the
original)
It is for the reasons mentioned above that I find the sex/gender system to be relevant even after
Butler‟s apt criticism of it. The effects of culture are present in all human thinking around that which is
called natural or biological, but those effects can and should be critically analyzed; even though, or
perhaps because, biology and cultural assumptions cannot be entirely separated, the connections and
interaction between them require examination. The sex/gender system can be used as an effective tool
13
for such examination. Even if it is not a perfect tool and it is important to be aware of its limitations,
there are, after all, no concepts or theories to replace it which would be entirely free of culture.
Butler has also criticized the traditional sex/gender division for assuming that there are only two of
both sexes and genders and that the connection between sex and gender is clear and linear, so that the
same gender always arises from a given sex (11-12). There is, then, no real option of creating a
masculine gender from a female sex or vice versa. If the sex/gender division is used and understood in
this way, it is indeed of no real use either in determining between cultural and biological factors or in
disentangling between female and feminine, which is what Moi calls for. This danger of reflecting sex
straightforwardly in gender is definitely a real one; however, in my view, it can be avoided. There is no
necessity for assuming that there are only two genders. Gender has at least a potential for being viewed
as a more flexible and inclusive concept than sex. This flexibility seems to be recognized in Rubin‟s
thinking as well, at least to some extent, for example in her considerations of sexual division of labor
(178). Rubin argues that division of labor is a key element in creating gender. As she points out, what is
viewed as women‟s work and men‟s work varies greatly from one culture to another. Gender is not
universal then, and even though Rubin does seem to assume that in each culture there are only two
mutually exclusive genders, her thinking allows for the existence of other alternatives. Gender is indeed
built on sex in her thinking, but it does not “naturally” or automatically arise out of it.
The sex/gender division can be used fruitfully in examining the society and people‟s status and
functions in it, as can the idea of binary oppositions, which I will examine in more detail in 2.2. The
assumption that a person‟s sex defines their capacities and can be used legitimately to define their
proper place in society was dominant in the 19th century. According to several scholars, women‟s
capacity for motherhood was viewed as their central feature, which dominated their social functions,
and women‟s lives were strongly restricted to the private sphere (see for example, Bell and Offen, 137139).
14
One of the factors contributing to the creation of strictly separate spheres for men and women in the
19th century was certainly the change in men‟s working conditions, as noted in several sources
(Salisbury and Kersten, 28; Hall, 150-151; Dolgin, 25; Hellerstein et al., 118). In the industrial, urban
setting, men‟s work often took them away from home for most of the day, unlike in the agrarian society
of the past. This resulted in a starker contrast between home and work – at least for men – and in the
home becoming an increasingly female front.
Indeed, Susan Bell and Karen Offen state that the idea of separate spheres for the sexes was used in
Enlightenment thinking as a justification for not extending the rights that were viewed as unalienable
for men, to women (18). Along with a focus on reason and the importance of knowledge,
Enlightenment ideas included individual rights, independent thinking and decision making as opposed
to yielding to the established order and autocratic and arbitrary government. These ideas colored
political thinking in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States as well as in Europe, but
only in connection to men – which exclusion the women‟s rights movement resisted (Bell and Offen,
18). Women‟s rights movements resisted such an exclusion of women, with growing force, but the
dominant view was still one that limited women to the domestic sphere: outside the political life,
without many individual rights or much possibility for independent decision-making.
The right to vote was central to the idea of people‟s independent decision-making, as it represented
people choosing their government as opposed to blindly yielding to one. Women were, however,
actively excluded from political life (Bell and Offen, 20). Not only were they not allowed to vote in the
United States in the 19th century,2 but any political activity by women was reproved as unfeminine.
One such activity was public performance: according to Robyn Warhol, women were not, for example,
2
With the exception of a few states, where women were allowed to vote even in the 19th century. This was not without
restrictions, however. Suffrage could be limited to only some elections (for example municipal suffrage) or a certain amount
of property could be required as a prerequisite. It usually concerned only white, unmarried or widowed women.
Furthermore, before 1920, women‟s suffrage could be, and in some cases was, discontinued even in the states that had
previously allowed it. In Louisiana and Missouri, which are the states most central both in Chopin‟s life and in her fiction,
women did not have full suffrage before 1920.
15
supposed to speak publicly in front of mixed audiences in United States in the 19th century (159).3
Doing so endangered a woman‟s feminine reputation and would most likely result in her being harshly
criticized and even publicly ridiculed, for example in cartoons (Warhol, 159-164). Furthermore, she
would likely be presented as masculine and unattractive. In 2.2 I will discuss binary oppositions and the
normative images of proper gender performances that are created through them. The situation described
by Warhol is a perfect example of how such images function: as a result of claiming a politically active
position that was reserved solely for men, a woman would be viewed as ceasing to be a woman. It is
clear, then, that the possibilities of women‟s active and direct participation in the public sphere and
politics were limited in the 19th century.
Women‟s legal status, in general, was poor in the United States in the 19th century, especially if
they were married. According to the institution of coverture, a woman ceased to be a separate
individual when she married, in many ways: she could not own property, enter into contract and sue or
be sued. In short, she was no longer a legal person of her own. Her identity was subsumed into that of
her husband (Hall, 35). The principle of coverture, although in a somewhat attenuated form, was
dominant in the early 19th century, and it was against this that the later developments should be
considered. A key improvement in women‟s position achieved in the United States in the 19th century
was property protection in the form of the Married Women‟s Property Acts (Hall, 159-160). These acts
gave women some financial security in marriage, essentially protection against their husbands‟ debts.
The third wave of Married Women‟s Property Acts in the latter half of the 19th century even gave
protection to women‟s earnings that were acquired during marriage and allowed her control over these
assets. This, however, did not mean equality between husband and wife. While some of the
improvements to women‟s position made in the 19th century did interfere with coverture, the basic
3
With the exception of Quaker women who were allowed to be present and speak in religious gatherings and in some cases
even act as religious leaders (Flexner, 71-72). Even Quaker women were not, however, spared from public reproof when
they attempted to extend this practice and, for example, actively participate in the anti-slavery movement (Bell and Offen,
135; Flexner, 71).
16
assumption of men as both the defining and the controlling party in a marriage remained (Hall, 159160). Furthermore, according to Kermit Hall, “[women‟s] new position depended almost entirely on
social assumptions that were translated into a special legal status rather than on any underlying belief
that as a matter of human right they should be equal before the law with men” (167).
There were also great differences in the legal status of women from state to state. Women‟s
position did improve considerably in many states during the 19th century, but this was not the case
everywhere. According to Eleanor Flexner, who describes the situation at the beginning of the 20th
century, “[i]n general the area of greatest backwardness continued to be in the South, where economic
recovery from the Civil War had been slow and proportionately fewer women were working for their
own living” (229-230). Flexner states that in Louisiana married women‟s property rights remained
minimal: “the discriminatory provisions of French dominion were still in full force: a married woman
did not even have legal title to the clothes she wore” (230). In analyzing Chopin‟s fiction it is the
situation in the South and especially in the state of Louisiana that is of interest, as these are the areas
where she lived and where most of her stories are situated.
Women‟s legal position did improve in the 19th century, for example through the Married Women‟s
Property Acts. Nevertheless, women continued to be both viewed and positioned as second rate citizens
– if considered citizens at all. Women‟s exclusion from political decision-making remained implicit
until the late 1860‟s: according to Bell and Offen, the belief that maleness was a prerequisite for
national citizenship was formally asserted at law in 1869 in the United States (365). On the one hand,
this was a clear sign of women‟s lower position and status, but on the other hand, it was beneficial to
the women‟s rights movement: the previously implicit assumption was now made explicit and thus
became easier to campaign against (Bell and Offen, 365-366).
Women‟s right to work and gain material independence became an issue in the 1830‟s, for the first
time in the United States (Bell and Offen, 135). The number of women working outside the home
increased considerably during the century (Flexner, 230). This threatened the economic foundation of
17
male authority in marriage and the separation of the sexual spheres (Bell and Offen, 135). In this
discussion, material independence was often linked to sexual behavior. Advocates for the former were
commonly accused of promoting sexual promiscuity, which was perceived as a direct result of
women‟s financial independence. Thus, the connection between women‟s freedom in general and
sexual freedom became a central issue as well in the 19th century women‟s rights debate. It became
necessary for advocates of women‟s emancipation to address the issue of female sexuality, and varying
opinions on the topic were voiced: some women insisted on their own “respectability”, some demanded
for a single standard for both sexes and some claimed sexual freedom was entirely unrelated to their
agenda (Bell and Offen, 135-136). The discussion on women‟s financial and sexual freedom is related
to Chopin‟s work, and she could even be perceived as addressing the issue: Edna Pontellier, the
protagonist of Chopin‟s best known novel, The Awakening, does not settle for only some aspects of
freedom but tries to achieve complete freedom, including sexual freedom.
Another issue that was raised by many participants in the growing women‟s rights movement in the
19th century was women‟s education. Initially, the need for it was often justified by women‟s maternal
duties: even though they were not supposed to be politically active citizens themselves, they were
expected to raise ones, and this, as the argument ran, required some degree of learning (Bell and Offen,
137). Women were also increasingly involved in work outside the home, not only in the growing
industry, but as teachers and governesses as well (Flexner, 24). These new duties outside the woman‟s
proper sphere required that women, too, be educated more broadly than before (Flexner, 23-24; Bell
and Offen, 138). Women‟s education was promoted strongly by several individual women who
founded institutions aimed at providing girls with better education. One of these was Emma Willard‟s
Troy Female Seminary, which opened in 1821 and was radical enough to include physiology in its
course of study. Women‟s education was, however, far from being comparable to that available for
men (Flexner, 26). There were only few institutions that provided teaching beyond elementary level,
and their quality varied greatly. The schools were often run by self-educated women, who had to study
18
while teaching and work hard to find financial support for their efforts (Flexner, 28-29). Even if
sufficient funding could be raised, the schools were very vulnerable, as their operation usually
depended upon private supporters, whose death or loss of interest in the cause would lead to the schools
being closed (Flexner, 32).
Toward the turn of the century arguments were increasingly made that women had potential and
right for intellectual development similarly as men, and higher education should be available to women
as well (Flexner, 232). This idea was linked to women demanding access to the professions, such as
medicine (Bell and Offen, 364). Flexner mentions two institutions that paved the way for women‟s
colleges in the early 19th century, Oberlin and Mount Holyoke (29-36). Several colleges for women
were founded during the latter half of the century, such as Vassar, Wellesley, Smith and Bryn Mawr
(Flexner, 31). Bryn Mawr is mentioned by Flexner to have been of particularly good academic quality,
and it was the first to offer resident fellowships to women who wanted to pursue graduate studies and
carry on higher research work (234). In the late 19th century women were also allowed to participate, at
least to some extent, in studies organized by some colleges traditionally reserved for men, such as
Harvard – even though this created heated opposition, much more so than the colleges intended only
for women (Flexner, 233; Bell and Offen, 361).
All across the United States, the level of a girl‟s education was greatly dependent on the wealth and
open-mindedness of her parents. However, there were noticeable regional differences in the education
of girls and women. According to Flexner, “education among women was still largely confined to the
school level…” in the South even at the beginning of the 20th century (229-230). There were only few
institutions that provided any education more advanced than that in the South and Flexner states that
even these were not of high quality (94). Furthermore, in the South, people‟s attitudes were more
conservative than elsewhere in the United States, and parents were less interested in their daughters‟
education (Flexner, 94-95). In any case, women‟s possibilities and right for intellectual self-fulfillment
certainly became a topic of debate in the 19th century.
19
Women‟s position in both the society at large and in the family was decidedly subordinate in the
United States in the 19th century. Criticizing the situation had negative repercussions and changing it
was not easy, since it meant challenging views that were deeply rooted, ratified by law and intertwined
with religious beliefs. This does not mean, however, that all women remained silent or played by the
rules. Even in the late 18th century, equality between the sexes was demanded by Judith Sargent
Murray, who wrote essays, plays, poetry and letters. Similarly, Abigail Adams‟ letters testify of her
decisive efforts to convince the political decision-makers to improve especially married women‟s
position. Women were not merely victims, but many women advocated their cause actively and
eloquently even before the 19th century. This resistance to the patriarchal order increased considerably
in the 19th century, despite the possible consequences. Women‟s suffrage in the United States, for
example, was argued for in the United States since 1848 by many women writers and speakers, such as
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Jenks Bloomer – to mention only few of the
numerous women who participated in the women‟s suffrage movement and had to endure both physical
and psychological hardships for it. Essentialist views of women, presented by Rousseau, for example,
were also strongly objected to (Bell and Offen, 19-20). Women‟s position was clearly not a self-evident
matter, as it continued to be a central topic of public dispute in the 19th century. Therefore, it is not
surprising that such a radical work as The Awakening could be written. It is important to note that
women are not mere passive victims in Chopin‟s work, as they were not mere passive victims in the
society of her time. While there are restrictions to the female characters‟ existence and self-expression,
they nonetheless do try to change their environment and are active in their own lives – like the birds in
Chopin‟s fiction, these characters do make noise, instead of remaining contentedly in their cages.
20
2.2 Binary Oppositions and Bird Symbolism
Along with the sex/gender system, another key concept in my analysis of bird symbolism in Chopin‟s
work is binary oppositions. I will utilize especially Hélène Cixous‟ feminist ideas on binary
oppositions, which are based on the thinking of Jacques Derrida. This is useful in an analysis of
Chopin‟s birds because the dichotomies of male/female and culture/nature are central to many images
of birds, especially those of the caged birds, as are other dichotomies that are linked to these two, such
as soul/body, voice/silence and activity/passivity.
The bird images are used in Chopin‟s work to comment on the traditional thinking around the
dichotomies that connects women with, for example, nature, the body, silence and passivity, as
opposed to culture, the soul, sound and activity which are connected with men. Chopin breaks some of
the connections between different dichotomies, especially their underlying relation to the man/woman
opposition. Using birds as a symbol for women is central in this respect. While birds are linked to
nature, and hence, as a symbol of women, uphold the traditional connection between women and
nature, they are also strongly connected with the soul. Thus the use of birds as a symbol for women
breaks the traditional connection between women and the body. Even more importantly, however,
Chopin challenges the hierarchy that is behind these concepts and their binary organization.
The French poststructuralist feminist scholar, Hélène Cixous, has applied the idea of binary
oppositions to feminist thinking in a book she wrote with Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman
(1986). According to Cixous, “thought has always worked through … dual, hierarchical oppositions”
(63-64). This hierarchical, dual logic can be seen everywhere in Western culture: as Cixous argues, it is
visible in myths, legends, philosophical systems, literature and criticism (63-64). Some of the binary
oppositions recognized by Cixous are:
Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
21
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Palpable
Logos/Pathos
Speaking/Writing
Parole/Écriture
High/Low (63)
According to Cixous, all the binary pairs that can be identified, including the ones she mentions and
that I quoted above, can be connected to the underlying dichotomy man/woman (64). Accordingly, the
binary pairs she mentions in her text are situated under the heading “Where is she?” (63) – suggesting
that the pairs should be examined in connection to the sexes. As the title implies, femininity is always
linked with one of the concepts in each pair, and by locating femininity in each pair, a certain pattern
emerges. Indeed, Cixous states that “[l]ogocentrism subjects thought – all concepts, codes and values –
to a binary system, related to „the‟ couple, man/woman” (Cixous, 64). The term logocentrism was
introduced by Derrida in De la Grammatologie (1967), and it refers to the idea that all words, writings
and systems of thought are fixed and validated by something external, an authority, or centre, whose
meaning they convey. Logocentrism is, then, focused on the origin of meaning; the origin is often
perceived as divine (theologocentrism) and/or male (phallogocentrism). This is why questioning and
contesting logocentrism is of interest to feminists.
Along with pointing out other binary pairs‟ connection to the dichotomy man/woman, Cixous‟
statement which I quoted above implies that the connections between different concept pairs are not
random, but form a coherent system (64). In this system consisting of pairs of concepts that are all
linked to sex, an image of femininity is produced. It is created from the binary opposition man/woman
and other pairs, such as activity/passivity, culture/nature and soul/body. All the other pairs are
connected to man/woman, as one half in each pair is connected to femininity and the other to
22
masculinity. Thus the concepts can be rearranged as a chain in order to show how they function to
create an image of femininity and masculinity: woman-passive-nature-body and man-active-culturesoul. Through the connections between different pairs, this system links women, for example, strongly
with passivity, then, and is normative. Indeed, according to Cixous, sexual difference is most strongly
coupled with the opposition activity/passivity, so that passivity becomes a key concept in defining
femininity: “[e]ither a woman is passive, or she does not exist” (64). According to Cixous the strong
connection between women and passivity can be detected, for example, throughout the history of
philosophy (64). It is also normative, to the extent that a woman‟s failure to be passive leads to her
being viewed as not really a woman at all – and since she cannot be a man either, she effectively
becomes nothing, if she does not conform to this definition of femininity (64).
The tendency to link passivity to women is recognized by Luce Irigaray, as well. In her analysis
and criticism of Sigmund Freud‟s thinking in Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), Irigaray traces the
age-old connection between activity/passivity and man/woman and finds that it stems from ideas of the
behavior of the sexual organisms, sperm and ovum. This idea has then been used to describe male and
female individuals‟ behavior during intercourse and further extended from that to several other areas of
everyday life and human psychology (15-16). This kind of thinking is crippling for both sexes, as it not
only assimilates femininity with passivity and lack of desire, but also connects masculinity with
aggression (Irigaray, 15).
The activity/passivity pair has indeed been central in defining sexual difference. However, the
pattern presented by Cixous, a pattern where normative image of femininity is created through a
connection between two sets of binary opposites can be detected in several other concept pairs as well,
pairs which are connected to the couple man/woman. Cixous focuses especially on the connection
between femininity and passivity, but other, similar connections can be found as well. As Gisela Bock
argues, the same rule applies to the pair rational/emotional, for example, and she, too, acknowledges
the normative nature of binary oppositions:
23
When, for instance, gender is constructed on a model of mutually exclusive, binary
opposites, if men are defined as rational, then women are defined by an absence of
rationality. In this construction, for the woman to take on rationality is for her to begin to
assimilate to the male norm and thus begin to cease to be a woman. (6)
The binary relationship, however, is recognized by Bock as an artificial construction. According to her,
most of the dichotomies are not real. Within the binary framework the concepts in each pair are viewed
and constructed as mutually exclusive opposites, but in fact, the concepts may coexist with each other
(6). Emotional involvement in or responses to situations do not rule out rational behavior, for example,
even though binary logic does not recognize such a possibility. Furthermore, the dichotomies even
allow for third concepts, that is, alternatives to the dichotomous attributions (Bock, 6). The
oppositeness of the concepts in each pair is also, in most cases, illusory: for instance, women and men
have more in common with each other than with anything else. While the physical differences between
the sexes have often been highlighted, for example, there are, in fact, no animals or plants on Earth that
would physically resemble human females more closely than human males. Binary thinking is not
necessarily based on natural or real differences, then. Instead, the differences, the oppositeness and the
mutual exclusiveness are constructed, created, within this framework of thought, for its purposes.
However, even if the binary oppositions are artificial, they still tend to guide human thinking, and
have contributed much to the image of women as, for example, emotional rather than rational, natural
rather than cultural and bodily rather than intellectual or spiritual. This idea presented by both Cixous
and Bock, that a normative image of women, a feminine ideal, is created through a series of binary
oppositions and that this image must be met by women if they wish to be viewed as feminine or proper
women by society is clearly present in Chopin‟s production. I will discuss the idea in more detail in my
analysis of The Awakening and women artists in the novel in 4.2.
It is significant that all of the binary oppositions mentioned by Cixous, Bock and Irigaray are
related to sex/gender and thus function to form an image of ideal femininity and masculinity.
24
Furthermore, it is important to notice that the concepts in each pair are not equal,4 but one of them
always tends to be subjected to the other. There exists a continuous battle within the pair, and it is
through this battle that the hierarchical relationship of the concepts is created (Cixous, 64). Each pair is
a battlefield of sorts, a site of a “struggle for signifying supremacy” as Toril Moi aptly describes it
(211). Under patriarchy,5 the concept that wins this battle and is deemed better is always the one that is
connected with masculinity (Cixous, 64). All of the pairs are, then, related to the pair superior/inferior,
and there exists a clear valuing of one as the better in each pair (Cixous, 63-64). This feature is
recognized by Bock, too, who states that “[t]he underlying assumption of mutually exclusive
superiority and inferiority seems to be another common feature of such gender-linked dichotomies [like
culture/nature]” (4). Thus, the logic of binary oppositions is not only dualistic and related to
sex/gender, but hierarchical as well.
As implied by the idea of battle, the relationship of the concepts that are placed as opposites of each
other is not static. Furthermore, the meanings of the concepts are in a constant state of flux. Within the
binary system, it is only through each other that the two concepts in each pair acquire meaning. When
they are set up as opposites of each other, they are defined through each other – especially so that the
concept that is viewed as inferior is defined as lacking the features of the superior concept.6 However,
it does work both ways: neither of the concepts would exist in the same form without the other concept.
As Bock states, referring to the culture/nature dichotomy: “no such nature without such culture, and no
such culture without such nature” (2). The dichotomies are not universal and the meanings and
relationships of the concepts are not fixed, but dynamic and open to change.
4
I use the term equal to refer to concepts or individuals that are attributed the same value, rather than to concepts and
individuals deemed as the same or treated in exactly the same way. In my use, equality allows for difference: equal
treatment refers to similarly appreciative and fair treatment to all, rather than to the same treatment for all regardless of their
individual needs. I appreciate the problems that arise from the mathematical and abstract use of equal meaning „the same‟,
which have been recognized by many feminist scholars. However, since there seems to be no better word to replace it in the
meaning „of same value‟, I shall nevertheless use it.
5
In current feminist criticism and gender studies, the term hegemonic masculinity is often preferred, but for practical
reasons I shall use the older term patriarchy in this thesis.
6
The idea of femininity having been defined as lack is discussed further by Cixous in The Newly Born Woman and Irigaray
in her discussion on Freud in Speculum of the Other Woman.
25
One of the most important concept pairs for this thesis is culture/nature. The relation of culture and
nature in human development as well as in art was a relevant topic in Chopin‟s time, and the
culture/nature dichotomy is clearly present in Chopin‟s texts as well. It is especially visible when tame
or cultivated nature is contrasted with wild nature. This is the case for example when characters‟
reactions and behavior vary in different surroundings ranging from cities and the indoors in houses, to
porches, where some natural elements intrude, and further, to the tame nature of fields or gardens and
eventually to completely wild forests or swamps. Such passages often question the absoluteness of the
dichotomy, and the position of human beings in it. It is, however, the bird scenes in Chopin‟s fiction
that are of particular interest for a feminist reading. They, too, discuss the binary pair culture/nature,
but unlike many other images, they also clearly address the connection of this binary pair to the pair
man/woman. I shall elaborate on exactly how and to what effect this is done in Chopin‟s work in my
analysis chapters, especially in 3.1.
To understand why Chopin would want to address and criticize the issue of women‟s assimilation
with nature, it is important to understand what kind of an effect it had on the image and lives of women
in the 19th century. The tendency to connect women to nature is age-old and can be detected even in
ancient mythologies, where most deities related to nature are female, especially those related to
fertility. Women‟s connection with nature is strongly linked to their being viewed as essentially bodily.
It arises out of, and strengthens ideas of reproduction as the main function of women in society.
Women‟s connection with nature and the body has resulted in strong images of femininity as
essentially related to sexuality, pregnancy, motherhood, nursing and caring (Bock, 2). Bock is by no
means the first to point out and criticize the tendency to link women to the body and the repercussions
of doing so. Women‟s definition through their bodies and the resulting over-sexualization in society
was criticized heavily by Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18th century. According to her, the male
dominated society actively forms women into frivolous beings by assuming that their only function in
society is to attract and please men, to be objects of desire (98). One of the philosophers that
26
Wollstonecraft accuses of this kind of thinking is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom she states performs
“the philosophy of lasciviousness” with respect to analyzing sexual difference, as he assumes that
women‟s only function in society is sex (52). Wollstonecraft herself does strongly emphasize women‟s
maternal role, and is not radical in this sense. However, she does not perceive motherhood as
essentially biological and instead highlights its cultural significance. It is nonetheless significant that
she challenges the social discourses in which women are connected (only) with nature and the body.
Women‟s assimilation with nature has been a clear source for inequality. It has been one of the
justifications for leaving women out of political decision-making and is strongly related to the creation
and attempts to maintain the idea of a separate sphere for women. It has also led to women being
invisible in many ways. This invisibility is described by Bock as follows:
Men and their activities [have been] seen as culture and of cultural value, whereas women
and their activities [have been] seen as natural, outside of history and society, always the
same and therefore not worthy of scholarly, political or theoretical interest and inquiry. (2)
Bock‟s statement of women‟s invisibility, which is based on their relation to nature, relates clearly to
another feature in Chopin‟s bird imagery, one that again addresses another binary pair of opposites:
voice/silence. In Chopin‟s work it is clearly significant whether the birds are silent or noisy, and here as
well she clearly questions the validity of the image created of women through the series of binary
oppositions – in this case, their connection with silence, along with passivity. I will discuss this in more
detail in chapter 4.2.
Criticism of women‟s connection to nature is still relevant today, as the invisibility described by
Bock is not only a matter of the past. Although ameliorated, there still remains a tendency to ignore
women, for example in history writing, unless it is in works that are specifically focused on women –
and state so, often in the very name of the book or article. A quick search in basically any library
database can be used to exemplify this: in both public and scientific libraries one is likely, even today,
to find many times more results by the search word women than by the search word men. Since this is
27
hardly representative of no books having been written on men and their activities, one is left with only
one possible explanation to this: people write about people and about women. That is, when writers
focus on men, they are far less likely to say this out loud, but instead often claim to write about
humanity in general7. D. A. Leslie, who has studied modern images of women, is in agreement with
Bock: she states in her article that “„[w]oman‟, like „nature‟, stands for the eternal and unchanging”
(310) – and hence is not of historical value. According to her, the ties between women and nature have
remained intact well into the 20th century and can still be detected in advertisements, for example (310311).
Women‟s connection with nature and the body is, in my view, one of the most central issues that
are addressed in Chopin‟s fiction through bird imagery. The very choice of birds as a symbol for
women functions to criticize such a view of women. To understand how this is achieved and how
Chopin utilizes the established meanings of birds as a symbol to question such dichotomies and the
assumptions of women that arise from them, one must examine how birds have been used in literature
before and what symbolic meanings are typically attributed to them. Here, my main source is Beryl
Rowland, who examines the use of birds in different times and cultures across the world, ranging from
ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome to China and Japan along with English speaking countries. She
analyzes the various symbolic meanings of birds in her book Birds with Human Souls (1978). It
becomes evident in Rowland‟s study into the subject that bird symbolism is culture related and
historical. Like all other symbolic elements, birds can have different meanings even within one culture
and at the same time. Their symbolism most certainly varies considerably from one culture to another
7
A perfect example of this is Taimo Iisalo‟s book Kouluopetuksen vaiheita: keskiajan katedraalikoulusta nykyisiin
kouluihin, (1991; loosely translated: “The development of school education: from medieval cathedral schools to modern
schools”). Iisalo never makes explicit in any way, let alone justifies, his strong emphasis on men: while the book does deal
thoroughly with both informal and formal education of boys and men, any kind of education for girls and women is
mentioned only a handful of times and even then very briefly. Despite this highly limited point of view, the book claims to
be a general history of Finnish education, and was indeed used as obligatory reading material, to give an overview of
education in Finland, on an educational sciences course in Tampere University in spring 2007. In the Tampere University
Library database, the only topical search word for this book is “kasvatushistoria” (“history of education”), with no
indication of it being in any way gender specific.
28
as well as in different times. There are, however, certain elements of meaning which seem to recur
more than others, and some central ideas related to birds are shared across cultures and time. Some of
these are so common that they could even cautiously be called universal. Among the most recurring
symbolic meanings for birds are freedom, the soul, love and sexuality, ownership and suffering in
captivity.
One of the most important symbolic meanings of birds is the connection of birds with freedom and
aspiration for it. As Rowland states, this is one of the most recurring meanings that are related to birds.
An essential thing with birds, according to Rowland, is that they are intuitively understood as
something that should be free (vii). This view seems to be widely shared, and Dictionary of Symbols
and Imagery, too, recognizes birds as important symbols of freedom and aspiration (47). Caged birds in
particular are mentioned to be symbolic of longing for freedom (Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery,
49).
Linked to the idea of freedom, there is also an element of spirituality that is often related to birds
(Rowland, xiii). This is perhaps due to their ability to fly and thus their perceived ability to exceed
earthly, material limitations. Because of this connection with spirituality, birds are a common feature in
religious imagery, which, in turn, has strengthened this symbolic aspect. According to Max Despain
and Thomas Bonner Jr., Catholic religious imagery is a central source for Chopin‟s winged imagery,
and therefore the idea of transcendence is strongly present in Chopin‟s bird symbolism (49-51). Some
of the most recurring general symbolic meanings recognized for birds are indeed spiritualization and
the soul (Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, 47). Rowland identifies this aspect of symbolic meaning
as well, and points out that it is not only Christian religious imagery that connects birds with the soul
and spirituality, but several other belief systems as well: Egyptians, for example, used a bird as a sign
for the soul, several native peoples in South America believe that when exiting the body, soul appears
in the shape of a bird, and Shamans in Siberia wear birds‟ costumes as a symbol of transcendence
29
(Rowland, xiii-xiv). Indeed, Rowland argues that “[t]he idea that the bird represented the soul as
opposed to the body, the spiritual in contrast to the earthly, seems to have been universal” (xiv).
According to Rowland, there exists a common link between birds and reproduction. This is partly
related to birds‟ connection with the soul: as representatives of the soul, birds also signify the divine
breath of life (xiv). Rowland continues that it is not uncommon for birds to represent sexuality (xiv).
Birds often symbolize love and lovers, and “amorous yearnings” (Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery,
47). According to Rowland, the connection of birds to reproduction is often religiously colored and
connected with spirituality, as mentioned above, but it may be worldly and corporeal as well. In some
cases birds can even take on bawdy significance: according to Rowland this is especially true of fowls,
such as chicken (78), pheasant (134) and goose (68), particularly when they are referred to as food.
All domestic birds share the idea of ownership, but it must be noted that the significance of poultry
is especially interesting in this regard, as poultry is controlled by people, unlike wild birds. Poultry is
tame, fully domesticated and dependent on people, and therefore it is rarely a symbol of any resistance,
or even longing for freedom. It is caged birds that most strongly signify wrongful imprisonment. As
Rowland states, the caged bird is one of the strongest symbols of human suffering (100). While
originally a more general symbol, it has later been taken on by women‟s rights advocates. Using the
image of a caged bird to represent and criticize women‟s social position is by no means new in
Chopin‟s work. It was utilized by Wollstonecraft to describe the position of upper-class women in the
18th century:
Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume
themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch. It is true they are provided
with food and raiment, for which they neither toil nor spin; but health, liberty, and virtue
are given in exchange. (60)
When related to women, the caged bird seems to be an image that is used mainly to refer to upper and
middle-class women and their situations: the symbolic cage is most often a golden one. According to
30
Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, when women are symbolized by caged birds, this symbolic image
is used especially in connection to marriage (49).
It is important to analyze the symbol used, because some of the meanings of the symbol are always
transferred to that entity being symbolized – even though their meanings are separate, they must share
some area of meaning. In Chopin‟s use of birds as a symbol of women, it is, in my view, essentially
those cultural meanings of birds described above that are transferred to women. Linking love and
sexuality to women may not be a groundbreaking innovation, but it is definitely significant that
freedom, aspiration for it, spirituality and the soul are connected with women, instead of and together
with nature and confinement in the form of cages. Thus, by using birds as a symbol of women, Chopin
challenges the traditional binary thinking around sexual difference.
Using birds as a key symbol for women and cultural artifacts such as the cage to imply patriarchal
society and its institutions at first appears to comply with the traditional dichotomies that connect
women with nature and men with culture. It is significant, however, that in Chopin‟s work the
traditional valuing of the concepts is questioned, as is their connection to other binary oppositions like
the soul/body pair. While connected with nature through the birds, women are also connected with the
soul, instead of, or perhaps as well as, the body. In images such as the caged bird, Chopin does not
present culture as more interesting or more valuable than nature, or women as inherently inferior to
men. Birds are intuitively understood as something that should be free, and this idea is transferred to
what they symbolize in these images in Chopin‟s work, that is, women.
Looking into binary oppositions and their logic is interesting and important, but it could be asked
whether it is realistic or even desirable to attempt at undoing binary logic. Several scholars have called
for deconstruction of binary thinking, including Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Kristeva states that in the
third phase of feminism, which she strongly advocates, women reject the dichotomy between
masculinity and femininity: “the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival
entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics” (209, italics in the original). The oppositeness
31
of men and women is indeed quite an artificial idea, as men and women are far more similar to each
other than to anything else. Many of the other dichotomies are illusory as well, as Bock has pointed
out. Still, while there are clear and eminent dangers in creating binary oppositions, it is also, as many
scholars have noticed, a strong tendency in human thinking, in much the same way as othering is. In
fact, creating pairs of opposites that define and are defined through each other is interlinked with
othering, the tendency to construct meaning through what the phenomenon that is being defined is not.
Both of them seem to be key aspects of the construction of meanings, and it could be argued that it is
not possible to completely abandon them.
Hence, as many deconstructionists, including Derrida, I recognize the inherent dilemma in wishing
to deconstruct logocentrism and binary oppositions: attempts at it tend to produce more binary pairs
and concepts with a fixed, authoritative meaning. This is why I do not find Chopin‟s work as somehow
failed due to the fact that binary oppositions are not necessarily always torn apart or completely
deconstructed in her work. Rather, the connections between different pairs and the valuing of the
concepts within the pairs are questioned. There are dangers involved in taking binary logic and other
cultural assumptions for granted and accepting the essentialist views created by them as well as their
tendency to naturalize difference. While accepting that binary logic may never be entirely undone,
then, I would argue that it is nevertheless crucial to be aware of and to think critically about it, and to
resist the unequal power balance that it tends to create in society – which is what Chopin, in my view,
does in her fiction.
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3. Birds and the Representation of Female Containment
In chapter 3 I intend to show how birds are used in Kate Chopin‟s fiction to express the limitations that
the 19th-century society in the United States had for women. In subchapter 3.1 I will focus on caged
and chained birds as a symbol of women‟s containment. I intend to show that the caged bird is, in fact,
the strongest and most central symbol of confinement in Chopin‟s work, and for this purpose I will
look at the symbolism of the cage in subchapter 3.1 as well. In 3.2 I will focus on domestic birds and
their symbolism, which relates essentially to issues of ownership, control and sexuality. I will connect
poultry mainly to marriage and how this institution limits women‟s existence, whether they are actually
married or not.
In chapter 3 my main focus is on pointing out how the birds symbolize women‟s captivity. In
chapter 4, however, I will move on to an equally important part of Chopin‟s bird symbolism: longing
for freedom and attempts at gaining it. It is crucially important to bear in mind even when examining
the caged and confined birds that the significance of the image does not end with the limitations
represented by cages and chains. It is not captivity that is the central thing with Chopin‟s birds. What
matters most is the existence of something within the cage that longs and deserves to be free. This
symbolic element is particularly strong in the image of a caged bird.
3.1 Caged and Chained Birds: Women Confined
The limitations to women‟s existence are recurrently pointed out in Chopin‟s texts: both the
confinement of women generally and the specific limitations to the freedom of female artists. In her
treatment of women‟s imprisonment Chopin could be viewed as belonging to a tradition of women
writers. The physical and mental limitations to women‟s freedom were expressed in many ways by
women writers in the 19th century. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar analyze the significance of
33
houses and other confined spaces in 19th-century women writers‟ production in their already classic
book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination (1979).8 According to Gilbert and Gubar, there is a clear trend that can be detected in
women‟s writing in that time: spatial imagery and claustrophobia or agoraphobia are often used to
express “…feelings of social confinement and … yearning for spiritual escape” (86). They state that
19th-century women writers were not only figuratively locked into male texts and literary forms, but
also literally prisoners of their homes, often their fathers‟ houses, like other women in their time:
“…almost all nineteenth century women were in some sense imprisoned in men‟s houses” (83). They
continue that “[i]t is not surprising, then, that spatial imagery of enclosure and escape … characterizes
much of [women‟s] writing” in the 19th century (83). According to Gilbert and Gubar, the house is a
primary symbol of female imprisonment and the idea of „woman‟s place‟ (85).
Gilbert and Gubar point out the recurrence and significance of houses and enclosed rooms as a
symbol of women‟s anxieties about their roles and the limitations set to their existence by society in the
19th century. Such tendencies can be detected in the writing of authors such as Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, a contemporary of Chopin‟s. Being confined to a room with bars in windows is a central
aspect of Gilman‟s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Chopin, too, could be viewed as exhibiting
tendencies similar to this tradition that Gilbert and Gubar recognize (85). “[D]ramatizations of
imprisonment and escape”, which Gilbert and Gubar mention as a characteristic feature of such writing
by women (85), are indeed present in Chopin‟s writing as well. While houses and various rooms are
present in her writing and they could well be read as a symbol for women‟s containment, I will argue
8
A great deal has been written on women and space since Gilbert and Gubar published their book, such as Kerstin W.
Shands‟ Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse (1999) and Margaret R. Higonnet and Joan
Templeton‟s Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space (1994). However, my main focus in this
subchapter is not women and space in general. Therefore I do not wish to cover it very extensively. Gilbert and Gubar‟s
work is well suited for my purposes, as it can be used to offer a background to my analysis of those bird images in Chopin‟s
work which include spatial limitations, and particularly to the image of the bird-cage. While Gilbert and Gubar do not
analyze Chopin‟s texts, they nevertheless offer significant insights into women‟s writing in the 19th century, and they point
out tendencies which can be detected in Chopin‟s bird symbolism as well.
34
that it is, in fact, the bird cage that is the most powerful symbol for both physical imprisonment and the
social and psychological restrictions created by social institutions and norms in Chopin‟s fiction.
As discussed in 2.2, birds have been used widely as a symbol for freedom. They are intuitively
understood as something that ought to be free, and therefore caged birds are strongly representative of
wrongful imprisonment. In Chopin‟s work, caged birds are connected especially to women and their
position in society and its institutions, such as marriage. Caged and chained parrots and mockingbirds
in particular appear in several of her short stories: in “Lilacs” a dumb parrot resides in a gilded cage, in
“Athénaïse” a caged mockingbird is accompanied by a foul-mouthed pet parrot next door, in “Tante
Cat‟rinette” (1896) the central character threatens to „secure‟ a wild mockingbird and put it in a cage, in
“At Chênière Caminada” (1894) there is a mockingbird singing in a cage and there is a reference to a
birdcage in “A Sentimental Soul” (1895) as well. Most notably and significantly caged birds are
present in The Awakening (1899). While the various symbolic aspects of the caged bird are employed
in a more premeditated and refined way in The Awakening, the pet birds in the short stories are
significant as well, and should not be overlooked entirely. I shall, therefore, briefly analyze one of
Chopin‟s short stories, “Athénaïse”, before moving on to an analysis of caged birds in The Awakening.
In this subchapter I mainly study the aspects of the cage, and look at the caged birds as a symbol of
containment and particularly wrongful imprisonment. For this reason, I will begin by discussing the
cage and the caged bird generally before analyzing the individual bird scenes.
There are many other elements in Chopin‟s stories that share a similar symbolic meaning to that of
cages and chains, such as fences, walls, bars in windows, and rings, as several scholars have
demonstrated. Per Seyersted, for example, has argued that spurs symbolize patriarchal power in several
of Chopin‟s texts, including “Athénaïse” (27). Caged birds are, however, a recurring image, and by far
the strongest to suggest wrongful imprisonment, in particular. The innate complexity of this image
makes it the most interesting of all the symbols for captivity, and particularly articulate as a
representation of women‟s situation in the 19th century.
35
The significance of caged birds never ends in the captivity symbolized by the cage. The cage in
itself is interesting, and I shall examine how it differs from other symbols of imprisonment in the
following paragraph. The most important thing in these images is never the cage in itself, however. It is
through answering the question of what is being caged and chained, why, and by whom that the cage or
chain acquires meaning in each case. Before looking at the cage, then, one must look at the bird and its
symbolism. Elizabeth Elz suggests in her article on bird symbolism in The Awakening that birds are the
symbolic representation of women entrapped (14). This is true, to some extent. It is significant,
however, that as the main character‟s process of awakening to realize her own self and will progresses,
the images of birds become those of wild birds; equally important it is to note that even those birds in
The Awakening that are caged refuse to be passive. Although female characters may initially be
confined in the novel, and in many of Chopin‟s short stories, this captivity is not the essence of what is
conveyed, but the desire for freedom and the existence of something that desires and deserves to be free
– as birds should be free. Because of their ability to fly, birds could be viewed as being the freest of all
creatures. This freedom is also suggested by the connection between birds and the soul. Thus, by the
use of birds as symbols of women it is suggested that entrapment is not the right, original state for
women – no more than it is for birds.
The bird-cage is a particularly strong symbol, because the captivity implied by it is rather more
absolute than that implied by any of the other symbols of captivity. There is no escape for the bird, and
not even a momentary release from the captivity. Unlike spurs used on horses or wedding rings, the
cage is there all the time. It surrounds the bird from every direction and is therefore far more
comprehensive as a symbol of imprisonment than bars in windows, for example. It limits movement
drastically, so that the bird is not even able to spread its wings, let alone move as it would in freedom.
Thus the only thing the bird can do freely in the cage is to make noise. Because of the strong
symbolism of birds and their intuitively understood right to freedom, the cage becomes a powerful and
unique symbol of suffering and wrongful imprisonment. This image, more strongly than any of the
36
others, implies reprehensible and continuing activity, someone wrongfully taking the freedom of
another and keeping them in captivity against their will, rather than describing a neutral, static situation
of which no one in particular is responsible for. Furthermore, the idea of birds in freedom is so
common and strong that it is almost inevitably present whenever a caged bird is mentioned, and forms
a stark contrast to this symbol of captivity. This is why the image of a caged bird appears to me to be
the strongest and most central symbol of women‟s captivity and desire for freedom in Chopin‟s
production.
There are several caged birds in Chopin‟s production, as noted above. Two of these appear in the
short story “Athénaïse”. As elsewhere in Chopin‟s work, these caged birds are a symbol of female
containment. In “Athénaïse”, the physical and mental limitedness of woman‟s sphere becomes evident,
and can be exemplified by what happens to the eponymous character. Athénaïse, who visits her parents
a few months after her marriage, is criticized heavily by a servant for this “…unchristianlike
behavior…” (427). The place of a married woman was, then, at home at all times. Even a daytime visit
is reproachable, and when the visit is prolonged, it becomes necessary for the husband to “…[bring] his
wife back to a sense of her duty…” (428). He fetches her back home against her will, after which she
retreats to her room. Her return home is by no means happy: “…and there she was, crying again” (433).
Indeed, in “Athénaïse”, there is a strong sense of the society‟s need to break the spirit of a woman if
she is too independent and inclined to rebel against “distasteful conditions” instead of accepting them
“with patient resignation” (433). This is, at least, the pronounced view of Athénaïse‟s parents, who feel
the goal will be best accomplished by marriage: “[m]arriage they knew to be a wonderful and powerful
agent in the development and formation of a woman‟s character” (434). Choosing the right husband is
essential as well: as Athénaïse‟s father states, “Cazeau is the one! It takes just such a steady hand to
guide a disposition like Athénaïse‟s, a master hand that compels obedience”. While marriage is not
always presented as a negative thing, not even in “Athénaïse”, it is evident that the marriages of the
time did include an unequal power balance and a possibility for the husband to control the wife. This
37
control is not only accepted, but even expected, by the society around the married couple. Even though
some husbands choose not to use this power – as Cazeau does in the end – it nonetheless severely
limits a woman‟s freedom in marriage.
Athénaïse‟s second attempt to escape from her husband and her duties as a housewife takes her to
New Orleans. She manages to travel and stay there with the assistance and financial support of her
brother Montéclin. It is in New Orleans that the caged birds appear. By this time, Athénaïse is growing
more and more homesick in a city where she hardly knows anyone, and is unsure of her situation. She
has trouble finding an income: “…with the exception of two little girls who had promised to take piano
lessons at a price that would be embarrassing to mention, [her] attempts [at finding employment] had
been fruitless” (451). She tries to focus her attention to other things, such as gardening, a cat, and the
birds, “…a mockingbird that hung in a cage outside the kitchen door, and a disreputable parrot that
belonged to the cook next door, and swore hoarsely all day long in bad French” (451). The appearance
of these birds marks a turning point in the story: it directly precedes Athénaïse‟s realization that she is
pregnant and her following decision to return home.
The birds represent Athénaïse‟s situation: even in New Orleans, she is still bound by the institution
of marriage, as the birds‟ existence is limited by their cages. The only thing Athénaïse has been
educated for is the role of a wealthy, middle-class housewife, and this has hardly equipped her for
independence: she is unable to earn her living any other way than through men, either her husband, her
brother or her friend and would-be-lover in New Orleans, Mr. Gouvernail. She has been handicapped
by traditional ideas of women and their place, which are reflected in how she has been brought up. This
handicap still remains even though she is seemingly free. Furthermore, while she does live alone for the
moment, she is still married, and the only reason why she is able to stay in New Orleans is her
husband‟s decision not to fetch her back this time. Cazeau is not pleased with having retrieved her
against her will before and making her feel like a prisoner, and does not wish to “…again undergo the
humiliating sensation of baseness…” which it created in him (438). Though Cazeau does not use his
38
power over her this time, he clearly has such an option: nobody and nothing aside from his own
conscience objected to him using his power the previous time, and presumably this would be the case
this time as well. Their marriage clearly allows Cazeau the possibility to control Athénaïse, and it is
only his personal choice not to “…[force] his commands upon her…” (439).
Furthermore, it is evident that Athénaïse‟s marriage still affects her in one other way as well: she
learns she is pregnant to her husband. This further limits her options: if her situation as a lonely woman
in a foreign city is already difficult, both emotionally and financially, it would become even harder if
she were to have a child without the presence and support of a husband. Children are indeed depicted
as a central aspect in marriages that limits women‟s freedom in Chopin‟s fiction. It becomes evident in
The Awakening as well, that once married with children, it is very difficult for a woman to attain any
freedom. Even if she is willing to resist her husband and face the hardships and social consequences of
separation or even divorce, she may not be able to accept the consequences to her children and to her
relationship with them. In “Athénaïse”, it is the discovery of her pregnancy which changes Athénaïse‟s
mind and causes her to return home. Although this is presented as her own, freely made choice, in
reality she does not have much choice. As the situation rather depresses her already, she could hardly
survive if she gave birth to an apparently illegitimate child in New Orleans: her social isolation, which
so far has been mainly the result of her own choices, would be increased, and she would be ostracized.
Her financial difficulties would also multiply. She is, then, hardly free of her marriage even though she
resides away from her husband for a while. The institution of marriage in general and her actual
marriage still affect her life and limit her freedom in many ways. It is fitting that her situation is
juxtaposed to that of the caged birds, who, while making some noise, are still captives, as she is still a
captive in her marriage despite her attempts at gaining freedom.
The suspicion towards “woman‟s place” and the recognition of marriage as unequal is not
something that is limited only to Chopin, of course. It is evident in the works of many other women
writers in the 19th century as well. As Gilbert and Gubar point out in their analysis of Charlotte
39
Brontë‟s Jane Eyre (1847), for example, Jane is doubtful whether any affection or passion will be able
to overcome the traditional inequality of spouses in that sacred institution: “[i]n her world … even the
equality of love between true minds leads to the inequalities and minor despotisms of marriage”
(Gilbert and Gubar, 356). Significantly, bird symbolism is present in Jane Eyre, too, as well as rather
powerful spatial imagery. Charlotte Perkins Gilman‟s poem “In Duty Bound” (1884), on the other
hand, addresses the limitedness of women‟s sphere and the anxieties such confinement creates. Indeed,
the freedom of married women was limited in many ways: physically, intellectually, professionally,
financially, emotionally and, of course, sexually. These limitations are, in my view, symbolically
represented by bird cages in “Athénaïse” and elsewhere in Chopin‟s stories. Such a symbolic
significance can be seen in the images of caged birds in The Awakening as well.
The Awakening is a novel that describes the process of a married woman with children, Edna
Pontellier, discovering her individuality and desire for more independence. At the beginning of the
novel she is relatively content in her marriage and with playing the roles of a proper Creole woman, a
wife and a mother – or at least she is unconscious of any dissatisfaction. As she spends a summer in the
sensuous surroundings of a holiday resort at Grand Isle she begins to desire something more and
discovers that there is something within herself that she would not sacrifice even for her children. She
begins to object to the demands made to her by her husband and their society, and attempts to gain
freedom: economically, intellectually, artistically, emotionally and sexually. She falls in love with a
young Creole man, Robert Lebrun, and when he is unavailable, has an affair with another man, Alcée
Arobin. She also moves away from her husband‟s house and starts to paint. After its publication in
1899, The Awakening was reproved for its open and non-judgmental treatment of female sexuality and
marital infidelity, as well as its critical view towards marriage and women‟s position.
The novel‟s criticism of marriage begins rather noticeably on the very first page, where it is
expressed through bird symbolism. The opening scene of The Awakening, which features a caged
parrot and a chained mockingbird, could be viewed as the most compelling and most obviously
40
significant bird scene in Chopin‟s production. This is so the bird scene that has been mentioned most
often in studies of Chopin‟s works (see Despain and Bonner 54-55; Heath 19-20; Elz 13-27; Bradley
55-56). It seems to have been linked, almost invariably, to female captivity. However, the scene has
been misinterpreted in some cases and overall, the complicated image has not been analyzed as
thoroughly as it deserves: it is not sufficient to state merely that the caged parrot represents Edna, who
is viewed as a possession by her husband and feels caged in her marriage. There still remains much that
can and should be said about it. It is not only Edna who is held captive by social conventions, but other
women as well, such as the seemingly independent spinster, Mademoiselle Reisz. Furthermore, the
aspects of the cage have not been studied to the full as yet. These are the things that I will focus on
here. There is more to be said about the birds themselves, too. Previously, most symbolism in The
Awakening has been interpreted mainly as representation of Edna‟s awakening sexuality. This is
definitely an important aspect of the work, but it is not only sexual freedom that Edna wishes to gain,
but economic, intellectual, emotional and artistic freedom as well. The lack of and desire for these is
central in the first bird scene in The Awakening as well, and the different aspects of freedom in
Chopin‟s work will be discussed more thoroughly in chapter 4.
In the opening scene of The Awakening there are two birds that are held in captivity: a parrot in a
cage and a mockingbird chained to its perch:
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and
over:
“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That‟s all right!”
He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless
it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes
out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.
Mr. Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, arose with an
expression and an exclamation of disgust … The parrot and the mocking-bird were the
property of Madame Lebrun, and they had the right to make all the noise they wished. Mr.
Pontellier had the privilege of quitting their society when they ceased to be entertaining.
(1)
41
The captivity implied by this image is obvious and striking, but there is also an idea of ownership
communicated in the scene and through this bird image, something significant is said about marriage,
gender and power-relations. Edna is indeed comparable to the parrot in a cage: in her marriage, she has
very little personal space or freedom to come, go, think or even feel as she pleases. This becomes
evident early on in the novel. Her husband views her as a “…piece of personal property…” (2) and
assumes she exists solely for him and their children. He has considerable control over her, which she
has only of late even thought of resisting. One night Edna stays out in the garden, and when Léonce
asks her to come in, they are both surprised that she does not do as he wishes immediately. This is
clearly exceptional: it is stated in the novel that “[a]nother time she would have gone in at his request.
She would, through habit, have yielded to his desire” (31). When she does not do so this time, Léonce
becomes irritated and demands her to come in less politely. Edna wonders “…if her husband had ever
spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she
remembered that she had…” (31). Edna, however, has no power to command Léonce, but only to ask.
This relative difference in power between the spouses is recognized by Marion Muirhead as well. In
her conversational analysis of the Pontelliers‟ discussion Muirhead states that “…Léonce‟s authority is
implicit in his role as a husband in nineteenth-century society” (44). According to Muirhead, this is
evident from the wordings used by the couple, such as Léonce‟s use of must in “[y]ou must come in the
house instantly” (The Awakening, 31) to signal obligation (Muirhead, 44).
The birds that are in captivity are not the only element that is of interest in the opening scene of the
novel, which communicates women‟s captivity. It is important to note what happens around the birds,
specifically the description of Mr. Pontellier‟s behavior. This highlights the significance of the cage as
a symbol of captivity, and the situation for the birds. Because both birds are the property of Madame
Lebrun, an elderly matron and the lady of the house, Mr. Pontellier is unable to do anything about them
but leave, no matter how they irritate him – yet, significantly, he can “[quit] their society when they
[cease] to be entertaining” (1). He is not tied as the birds are; institutions and conventions such as
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marriage do not limit a man as strongly or in the same way as they do a woman. A man is not defined
through his marital status the same way a woman is, nor is he as bound by marriage if he does choose
to marry. It becomes evident on several occasions in the novel that whereas Edna is expected to be
available to her husband at all times and do as he wishes, there are no such expectations for Léonce.
When Edna wants to know about her husband‟s plans for the evening, she must settle for a shrug:
“…perhaps he would return for the early dinner and perhaps he would not” (3). It all depends on what
he decides he wants to do, and Edna must accept his choice and accommodate his wishes.
The differences in how marriage affected men and women in the 19th century are evident in
Chopin‟s work and relevant to the first bird image in The Awakening as well. While marriage and
especially producing an heir was often expected of men, there were no similar negative connotations
related to the word bachelor as there were to spinster. A man‟s life could still be considered full and
satisfactory even without a wife and a family, and as Elaine Showalter points out in Sexual Anarchy:
Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1996), it was quite common in the 19th century for men to
remain bachelors of their own choice (25-26). There were plenty of occupations and interests available
for unmarried men to make their lives comfortable and interesting, such as various professional
opportunities, clubs and traveling. However, the situation was different for “odd women”, that is,
women who could not marry – and significantly, spinsterhood was not presented as the result of a free
choice in the same way as bachelorhood often was. It was, rather, viewed as a predicament that no
woman would or should choose if a prospect of marriage presented itself. The “odd women” were
pitied, scorned and viewed as leading a life that could not possibly be fulfilling for a woman, whose
true duties and only real interests were supposed to be wifehood and motherhood (Showalter, 1996,
19). There were far fewer activities available for unmarried women than there were for unmarried men.
The growing number of “odd women” was also considered a social problem to be solved, unlike the
presence of numerous unmarried men (Showalter, 1996, 25).
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Furthermore, men had far more freedom in a marriage if they did choose to marry, which is evident
in the marriages portrayed in Chopin‟s work, and reflected in the opening scene in The Awakening as
well. As Mr. Pontellier can leave the birds at will, a man can always leave the house for work, his club
or a business trip when he finds his wife or family life tedious – or a supper unsatisfactory, as in The
Awakening (51-52) – and take as much time for himself as he needs. This is a privilege married women
in the novels and short stories do not have. If they try to acquire some personal space or time, they are
quickly retrieved back as Athénaïse is from her parents‟ house, and/or scolded for neglecting their
sacred duties. Women might have some status and safety through their family relations, similarly as the
birds are untouchable through the fact that they are the possessions of a power-figure, but that does not
negate the fact that Mr. Pontellier can leave and the birds cannot. The protection, for these birds, comes
only through imprisonment, which is reminiscent of middle-class women‟s situation. These women
may have the privilege of a safe existence in their golden cages, sometimes even the right to make as
much noise as they wish, but no genuine freedom to come, go, think and feel as they please.
In analyzing this bird image, it is important to note that there are, in fact, two birds there. The birds
are of two different kinds, and while both are in captivity, they are held prisoners in different ways: the
parrot by a cage, and the mockingbird by a chain. This would imply, then, that the birds symbolize
different women in different confining situations. Indeed, it is not only married women like Edna who
are caged by social expectations. As mentioned above, the opportunities for self-fulfillment were fewer
for women than they were for men, irrespective of the women‟s marital status. This is evident in the
case of Mademoiselle Reisz, who has remained unmarried – whether by choice or as one of the
“surplus women” is not explicated in the novel – and pursued her artistic career instead. As pointed out
in chapter 2, the educational system favored men quite obviously, and even though the professions
were slowly opening to women in the late 19th century, women were far from being men‟s equals in the
job market. It was also much harder for a woman to be accepted as a public speaker or performer. Thus,
even though unmarried women like Mademoiselle Reisz in The Awakening had more freedom in many
44
ways than married women did, they were far from being free from the expectations society had for
women. Any professional, whether a doctor or an artist, was, and still is inevitably trapped in a societal
cage when it comes to clientele or audience. In Chopin‟s stories as well, it is impossible to escape the
normative images of femininity, even when remaining unmarried. One can make all the noise one
wants, as the parrot and the mockingbird can, but that does not necessarily mean one will be heard,
understood or able to make a difference. In this sense the cage exists not only for the married women in
the novel, but for the seemingly independent and self-sufficient spinster, Mademoiselle Reisz as well.
The image of the cage that is formed in The Awakening is not that of a simple construction. As
Jennifer Gray suggests in her article, the mechanisms of control and persuasion by the representatives
of the dominant ideology are subtle and complex (54). The societal cage consists of co-existing and cooperating institutions and ideologies, and thus is not a cage that one can simply live inside or outside
of. On the contrary, it is impossible to escape from it entirely, as it is impossible for Mademoiselle
Reisz to exist completely outside of society; even if society is a somewhat artificial construction, it is
nevertheless dynamic, and continues to have an effect even on a person who tries to refuse its values.
Even though Mademoiselle Reisz seems indifferent to the opinions of others, it is nevertheless true that
she is being viewed and evaluated by the society around her. Edna‟s lover, Alcée Arobin, voices the
general opinion of Mademoiselle Reisz in the novel: “„I‟ve heard she‟s partially demented‟… „I‟m told
she‟s extremely disagreeable and unpleasant‟” (83).
Furthermore, even though Mademoiselle Reisz is not married, she is, to some extent, still chained
even by the institution of marriage – the dominant ideology that values the married state as the state of
fulfillment and completeness and views any other lifestyle as deficient, particularly for women; the
binary logic related to it, which allows only two mutually exclusive alternatives, one of which is
assigned positive value and the other negative implications. Not even Mademoiselle Reisz can exist
without or outside of society, and while she continues to live even on the margins of the society, she
will still be measured by it, against its ideals. This becomes evident, when the narrator comments on
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Mademoiselle Reisz‟s behavior and attire: she is portrayed as a difficult, unpleasant person, who
quarrels with everyone, dresses poorly and is unimpressive in her looks (25). In fact, her behavior is
described as rather manly – she even makes “…an awkward, imperious little bow…” instead of a
curtsy (25). She is rather an odd bird, and, like the mockingbird in first scene of the novel, she keeps on
whistling her own tune “…with maddening persistence” (1). Her appearance and behavior create a
stark contrast to the ideal woman represented by Adèle Ratignolle, whose glorious beauty is only
rivaled by her angelic behavior, and of whom it is stated only a few paragraphs earlier that she is only
“…keeping up her music on account of the children… because she and her husband both [consider] it a
means of brightening the home and making it attractive” (24). Unlike Mademoiselle Reisz, Adèle
Ratignolle has no professional ambitions, and she remains strictly within the domestic sphere, focusing
on her children. As long as Mademoiselle Reisz continues to devote her life to her personal interests
and self-expression and pleasing herself rather than a husband and children – whistling her own tune
instead of that accepted by the society – and as long as the family-centered ideal of a woman is
prevalent, she remains a failure as a woman in the eyes of others, regardless of her accomplishments in
other areas of life.
It becomes impossible, then, to be both a true woman and a free individual who is able to realize
her potential intellectually, professionally or artistically. The roles of a true woman and an independent
subject are constructed so that they do not easily go together. One or the other must be compromised.
In the case of Mademoiselle Reisz, it is her womanhood that she sacrifices – at least womanhood as it
is defined by others. Edna‟s case is more problematic since her awakening to her selfhood happens
only after she has married and given birth to children, as Gray points out (54). The pressure of maternal
and familial roles is much stronger on her than on Mademoiselle Reisz. At first Edna accepts the role of
a wife and mother almost automatically, trying to adapt to the expectations around her, but as her selfdiscovery progresses she becomes aware of what exactly she is required to sacrifice. As the story
progresses, however, she discovers that there is something in her, her individuality, which she simply
46
cannot sacrifice even for her children, though she loves them in her own way – an idea which is
completely foreign to Adèle Ratignolle, the ideal woman. In the end, as Edna sees no way of
negotiating her individual desires and the roles provided for her by society, she chooses rather to take
her own life than to keep on compromising: “Her only escape from [patriarchal] ideology is death…”
(Gray, 53).
Choosing birds as the symbol for women and a cage for societal structures is in itself interesting. It
utilizes the traditional dichotomies that relate women to nature and men to culture, which I looked into
in chapter 2.2. It could be argued that it reinforces, rather than deconstructs, the traditional view of the
oppositeness of men and women and the traditional connections between the binary pairs man/woman
and culture/nature. However, Chopin‟s bird symbolism does not entirely comply with the traditional
binary thinking around these concepts. Their underlying hierarchy in particular is being questioned by
the choice of birds as a symbol for women. Chopin‟s use of bird symbolism clearly involves a shift in
the point of view from male dominance and the assumption of male values and point of view as the
right one to a more woman-centered position. After all, the symbolism of birds and other nature
imagery in The Awakening includes not only femininity, but with it, connected to it, things such as
freedom, inspiration and genuineness, whereas culture, patriarchal values, the traditional gender roles
and images of women are portrayed in a very negative light as a cage: a man-made form of
containment – even though it is not, of course, only men that uphold these traditions, but also women
who accept them, such as Adèle Ratignolle.
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3.2 Domesticated Birds: A Symbol of Women as Property
There are numerous fowls present in Chopin‟s production: chickens populate her fiction, along with
some turkeys and geese. These occurrences include live birds, references to birds by the characters in
the stories and the birds‟ meat, which is often mentioned to be a key ingredient in the dishes the
characters eat. At first glance, it may seem as though this is merely a part of the local color writing that
Chopin is so well known for, that is, her detailed description of the lifestyle and manners of Louisiana
people. However, it is not merely local color authenticity that is achieved by this frequent reference to
domesticated birds. The fowls are frequently described as if they were human. While other animals and
even trees are personified in Chopin‟s stories as well, personification would seem to happen most often
with birds. Sometimes domesticated birds form a key element in the plot of the stories, like the turkeys
in “A Turkey Hunt” (1892). Even more often, however, they are the topic of conversations, like in “A
Rude Awakening” (1893) and otherwise referred to as human-like as in “Charlie”. It would seem, then,
that the human-like fowls in Chopin‟s stories are not mere background ornaments, but have other
significance as well, and therefore warrant a closer examination than has before been performed.
As I mentioned in 2.2, domestic birds often have symbolic meanings that relate to ownership,
control, and sexuality; all these elements of meaning can be found in the fowl imagery in Chopin‟s
fiction. All three symbolic meanings are also relevant when examining 19th-century marriages. Many of
the domestic birds in Chopin‟s production can be linked to women‟s captivity in relation to marriage,
and, more broadly, to the social norms and practices that aim at restricting and controlling female
sexuality. All through Chopin‟s fiction, women are treated as objects and possessions by men, both
husbands and fathers. Some control is exercised by other women as well, women who accept and thus
reproduce patriarchal values. However, even though women may sometimes be the guardians to other
women, their own existence is as limited as those women‟s whose lives they form according to
accepted social standards. What Gilbert and Gubar write about Jane Eyre is fitting for many of
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Chopin‟s works as well: “[w]omen in Jane‟s world, acting as agents for men, may be the keepers of
other women. But both keepers and prisoners are bound by the same chains” (351).
It is significant, that unlike most of the women symbolized by caged birds in Chopin‟s production,
the women symbolized by domesticated birds do not rebel. Indeed, they often seem unaware of any
confinement. The limitations are there for these women as well, however. In her essay, “Oppression” in
The Politics of Reality, Marilyn Frye aptly describes the invisibility of control and limitation. Even
though she uses a bird-cage metaphor, I find her ideas more fitting to be referred to in an analysis of the
situation of those women in Chopin‟s fiction who are represented by domestic birds:
If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If
your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look
at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not
just fly around the wire… It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression
can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure
with great care… without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or
being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who
are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.
(Frye, 4-5)
Looking at Chopin‟s work and some of the female characters in it, I would say it is possible to be
limited by such a structure oneself and not be aware of it. This is the case with the mother-women and
the contented wives, who are indeed domestic like the birds that are used to represent them. Though
equally captives, women such as Edna Pontellier either are or become aware of the restraints society
has created for them and are thus able to try to fight them.
Marriage is a central limiting factor in women‟s lives in Chopin‟s fiction. In At Fault, Chopin‟s first
novel, marriage is a central theme. As Barbara C. Ewell points out, the novel has influences from the
domestic novel, which was very popular at the time, and accordingly, it deals with marriages (30).
There are two marriages in the novel. The first one is the wrong kind of a marriage, even if entered in
with the best of intentions: David Hosmer, a Northern businessman returns to his former wife Fanny,
whom he has divorced because of her drinking habits. He does this at the prompting of his dear friend
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and beloved, Thérèse Lafirme, a Catholic widow and a plantation owner in Louisiana. The renewed
marriage ends up failing, and after Fanny has tragically died in an accident, David and Thérèse find
each other again, and are married, thus giving the novel a traditional happy ending. There are also
younger people in the novel whose romantic interests and prospects of marriage are of interest,
especially to Thérèse.
In the course of the novel, chickens are present on several occasions, as they are elsewhere in
Chopin‟s production. Two of these occurrences are particularly interesting, as they include quite
notable personification of the fowls. In the first of these, the chickens are referred to as inhabitants of
the poultry yard almost as if they were human dwellers. They are introduced to the newcomer on the
plantation in much the same way as people might be: “[Fanny] had been to the poultry yard with
Thérèse, who had introduced her to its feathery tenants, making her acquainted with stately Brahmas
and sleek Plymouth-Rocks and hardy little „Creole chickens‟ – not much to look at, but very palatable
when converted into fricassée” (802). Chickens are often related to women, and particularly to mothers
and wives, because of their protectiveness towards their young (Rowland, 77-78). According to
Rowland, they are also related to religion and particularly to following norms, as well as leading others
to salvation (77). In modern language the word chicken is a rather negative one, but older chicken
symbolism actually awards chickens rather positive meanings: wisdom, leadership and protection.
Especially in Christian contexts chickens or hens are valued greatly and even aligned with God or the
Christ (Rowland, 77).
The three types of chickens in this scene, the Brahmas, the Plymouth Rocks and the Creole
chickens, could be interpreted as representing the different types of wives in the novel: Belle
Worthington, Mrs. Duplan and Thérèse Lafirme respectively. These women are all good Christians and
good wives, who do not rebel against the patriarchal norms of proper femininity, but, on the contrary,
even impose those same norms on other women and girls, thus leading them, as it were, to “salvation”.
The existence of all three women is limited to the woman‟s sphere and they are pointedly interested in
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domestic matters and household management. In this, as well, they resemble the chickens which
occupy the clearly restricted space of the poultry yard, but are apparently satisfied with it, and do not
cause disturbance to the society around them. If the women have any roles or duties outside the
traditional woman‟s sphere, this is played down and shown to have fallen on them without any
ambitions for such things on their part. Furthermore, they are willing to relinquish to men any such
powers and duties. In the following paragraphs I will show in more detail why it is fitting that each of
these three wives should be represented symbolically by one of the three types of chicken – how they,
even though different from each other as the chicken breeds are different, nevertheless all exhibit the
qualities that Rowland identifies as typical symbolic meanings of chicken: religious connection,
following norms and leading others to follow the same norms.
Belle Worthington, the wife of a Northern custom house official, is certainly described as stately
and impressive, as are the Brahma chickens: “… so splendid was Mrs. Worthington‟s erect and
imposing figure, so blonde her blonde hair, so bright her striking color and so comprehensive the sweep
of her blue and scintillating gown” (843). She is also described as a good wife. She is “…inclined to
take her husband seriously…” even though she does not always approve of his choices (839).
Furthermore, she is strongly of the opinion that women should take care of their husbands, which she
proceeds to do (839-840). Her views of proper household management are so strict as to frighten the
less capable Fanny: “[Fanny] continued to talk disjointedly of Belle Worthington and her well-known
tyrannical characteristics in regard to cleanliness; finishing by weeping mildly at the prospect of her
own inability to ever reach the high standard required by her exacting friend” (837). While Fanny‟s
behavior is hysterical and her fears exaggerated, partly due to her excessive consumption of alcohol,
she is not entirely wrong in her prediction. Mrs. Worthington does disapprove of anyone who, in her
view, fails to act as a proper woman should: keep the house neat and comfortable, take care of her
husband and raise children with a firm hand (839-840). She does disapprove of Fanny, and even states,
rather cruelly, that “[i]t‟s a blessing that boy of Fanny‟s died… she couldn‟t any more look after a
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youngster than she could after a baby elephant” (839). Mrs. Worthington herself, on the other hand,
makes sure she has trained her daughter Lucilla to be an exceedingly meek and obedient girl, who
“[obeys] her mother‟s order with the precision of a soldier, following the directions of his commander”,
and knows by heart what her mother wants her to do and what she perceives as bad habits (838).
Furthermore, Mrs. Worthington‟s attempts at training Lucilla into a proper young woman have not
gone to waste, but the results of her work are admired even by the most traditional woman in the novel:
“„[h]ow submissive and gentle your daughter is,‟ remarked Thérèse” (838). Furthermore, Belle, like the
other two wives who are symbolically represented by chickens, is mentioned to be “…a good
Catholic…” – even though in Belle‟s case there is, admittedly, some irony in this description (784).
Even though her religious practices may sometimes be as much for show as for actual worship, she
does nonetheless follow morals such as the requirement marital fidelity faithfully. She is also leading
her daughter, not only to proper femininity, but to follow religious morals – perhaps even better, or at
least more genuinely, than she does herself – as she has chosen to have her educated in a convent (782).
Thus, using chickens to symbolize her is quite an apt choice.
If Belle Worthington‟s character is at times somewhat humorous as a portrayal of feminine virtues,
Mrs. Duplan is very serious. This “…little woman in her black silk…” is rather stylish, if not
fashionable, and thus resembles the sleek Plymouth Rocks (843). She may not be as impressive in
appearance as Mrs. Worthington, but she is nevertheless a plantation owner‟s wife and as such rich and
rather high up in the social scale. Her character is not described as extensively as those of the two other
wives, but from what is seen in the novel, she appears to be rather the old-fashioned, traditional wife.
Like Mrs. Worthington, she accepts the traditional views of femininity and women‟s roles and tries to
guide others to do so as well. She has been educated in a convent before her marriage and is planning a
similar future for her daughter, Ninette. She, too, is related to religion and religious norms for women.
It is fitting, then that her type of a woman is represented by chickens, a symbol of wives and mothers as
well as religious righteousness, virtue and guidance.
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The third type of women represented by chicken, exemplified by Thérèse Lafirme, could be viewed
as the ultimate wife, and an ideal woman. She is not only perfectly virtuous and angelic, but also
attractive and sociable. She is intelligent and even “…a clever enough business woman…” but she uses
all her talents in a way that is socially acceptable (744). In both her marriages that are referred to in the
novel, she is a self-sacrificing wife who is devoted to her husband rather than to her own interests. She
is described as having loved her first husband “…with the devotion which good husbands deserve…”
(761). Indeed, she is so devoted to him that when he dies, she wants to die with him, “…feeling that life
without him held nothing that could reconcile her to its further endurance” (741). She continues with
her life and takes on managing the plantation after his death only because she feels it is her sacred duty
towards her husband to do so, not because of any personal ambitions: “she felt the weight and
sacredness of a trust, whose acceptance brought consolation…” (741). Her selflessness becomes even
more evident, when, after having run the plantation successfully for years, she insists that she should
give the control of it to her second husband even though he has no experience of such work
whatsoever. Thérèse is most certainly a very strong and capable woman herself, but she is nevertheless
influenced by the patriarchal mindset she has been educated to have, and thus ends up supporting a
system of belief which is based on the assumption that women are weak and incapable of managing
anything larger or more complicated than a single household. This is evident from her proclaimed
opinion that in marriage, control over any businesses, estates and finances automatically belongs to the
husband – entirely irrespectively of which spouse would be better equipped to take care of these.
Thérèse, too, not only accepts but passes to others the traditional views of gender roles within a
marriage. Like the other two wives, Thérèse is religious. Her selflessness is again evident in that she
places religious norms and rules of propriety before her own desires: she tells the man she loves to
return to his former wife because, as a Catholic, she finds divorce difficult to accept.
Along with her selflessness, Thérèse is an ideal woman in that she is a perfect hostess, socially
skilful and exceedingly good at managing her household so as to make it comfortable and attractive.
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After she has worked her magic in the cottage that Fanny is unable to manage properly, Fanny‟s
husband finds the place more welcoming to return to than ever: “[t]he room was as he had pictured it;
order restored and the fire blazing brightly. On the table was a pot of hot tea and a tempting little
supper laid” (838). Even the demanding Belle Worthington recognizes Thérèse‟s skills: “„[t]his is what
I call solid comfort,‟ she said looking around the well appointed sitting-room…” (840). As one of the
other characters states: “…that woman is an angel” (760). It is generally not untypical of Chopin to mix
angelic qualities with those of a chicken: both Bradley and Despain and Bonner point out that in the
description of mother-women in The Awakening, the wings of an angel are confused with those of a
hen protecting her brood (Bradley, 57; Despain and Bonner, 57).
Despite their differences, the three women in At Fault have one thing in common: they are all wives
who accept their situation and role within their respective marriages, even when it is not entirely
satisfactory or includes an unequal power-balance. The marriage of the Worthingtons, for example, is
seemingly rather happy. However, while Mr. Worthington is a relatively courteous husband and tries to
avoid quarrelling with his wife, he does not respect her very much, or view their marriage as that of
equals. This becomes evident when his views on women are related as follows:
Mr. Worthington regarded women as being of peculiar and unsuitable conformation to the
various conditions of life amid which they are placed; with strong moral proclivities, for
the most part subservient to a weak and inadequate mentality.
It was not his office to remodel them; his rôle was simply to endure with patience the
vagaries of an order of human beings, who after all, offered an interesting study to a man
on speculative habit, apart from their usefulness as propagators of the species. (782)
None of the three wives attempts to rebel or change the situation – on the contrary, at least one of them,
Thérèse, actively endorses the traditional roles of the spouses in her marriage. In this sense it is fitting
that these women be symbolically represented by different kinds of chickens. The significance of
poultry, as opposed to caged and chained birds, includes submissiveness, as these domestic birds are
tame. This does not negate the fact that the birds are kept in captivity, but the nature of the captivity is
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different: rather than any clear outside influence comparable to the cage, the restraining factors are
internalized. The norms are, of course, socially constructed, but these women have learned them by
rote and accepted them as natural – even to such an extent that they will impose the same rules on
others: their daughters, friends and acquaintances.
A significant additional feature in this scene is the way that the Creole chickens are described: as
making for a tasty dish. It is part of a pattern in Chopin‟s work, where domestic birds are recurrently
referred to as food, as well as a commodity to be traded. This happens for, example, in “In Sabine”
(1893), “At the ‟Cadian Ball” (1892) and “A Night in Acadie” (1896). The reference to chickens as
tasty food in At Fault is particularly interesting because it appears at the end of a passage where the
fowls are strongly personified. It could easily be read as a reference to sexuality: according to Rowland,
it is common for chickens to take on a bawdy significance when cooked (78). Along with her other
virtues, Thérèse also represents ideal Creole womanhood with regard to sexuality. She is sensuous and
attractive to men, but at the same time exceedingly modest and proper in her behavior with the
representatives of the opposite sex outside marriage. She is, however, a sensual woman, and it is
suggested in the novel that within a marriage she would be sexually active: the ending of the novel
clearly implies this, as well as the reference to Creole chickens as food.
Even when relating the reference to chicken as food to sexuality, one must bear in mind the other
elements of meaning related to chicken: control and ownership. The late 19th-century Catholic Creole
society depicted by Chopin in much of her fiction, had strong expectations of control of sexuality,
especially female sexuality. The Creole society was somewhat less strict in its norms of acceptable
topics of conversation and physical expressions of affection than the Northern, Protestant societies
referred to in Chopin‟s fiction. However, the Creole society did have absolute “convictions about the
indissolubility of marriage and the adequacy of maternity for feminine fulfillment”, as Ewell states
(147). What she calls an “entire absence of prudery” did not threaten “[t]he unshakable reality of
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chastity”, but in fact reinforced it by allowing an outlet (146-147). The freedoms of this society are
superficial, then, and based on strong expectations of allegiance to the norms of proper behavior.
Furthermore, it is evident in Chopin‟s fiction that the Creole society has strong and clearly defined
gender roles within marriage. This is true in all the Creole marriages in The Awakening as well as in At
Fault and “Athénaïse”. These marriages all include an uneven power balance and an assumption that
the wife is to be passive and yielding. This fact is further highlighted by the two short stories analyzed
above, where an engagement or the prospect of marriage marks the ending of the young woman‟s
independence and defiance. In Chopin‟s stories, the wife is essentially there only to make the life of her
husband and children more comfortable. This is clearly true of the Ratignolles in The Awakening. Their
happiness and mutual love is based on angelic and happy self-sacrifice on the part of Madame
Ratignolle. Similarly, Edna‟s marriage is a successful one as long as she does exactly what Léonce
wants – marital problems ensue from even such a small disobedience as not waking up properly in the
middle of the night to hear Léonce‟s story. Furthermore, in The Awakening, Léonce rather openly
considers Edna as a possession of his, demonstrating most strongly another feature of the relationship
between spouses in Creole marriages. Similarly as in Edna‟s case, Athénaïse‟s failure to perform her
marital duties to the satisfaction of her husband also causes trouble in “Athénaïse”. Her position in the
marriage becomes more than clear when her husband retrieves her back home from her mother‟s house
in much the same way as cattle or poultry might be driven.
Thérèse‟s marriage to Hosmer in At Fault promises to be more equal than the marriages portrayed
in the other stories. However, Thérèse herself voices her community‟s demands of subservience on the
part of the wife: she expresses a wish that Hosmer would take over the estate after they are married.
When her new husband rejects the idea, stating that he knows much less about managing a cotton
plantation than she does and tells her that he will not “rob [her] of [her] occupation” or put “[a]
bungling hand into [her] concerns” she labels such talk as “nonsense” and declares that “that‟s absurd”
(874). Rather than wishing for independence and freedom in a marriage, or a more equal division of
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labor, income or power in the relationship, she actively refutes such ideas and upholds the Creole
society‟s traditional views of gender roles within a marriage. David Russell argues in his article that
Thérèse upholds the traditional values of the South in many other ways as well: she dislikes the
railroad, prefers traditional architecture, and, as Russell effectively points out, insists on the traditional
power relations between the white plantation owners and the black workers (8-9). Similarly, her
character serves to uphold the traditional ideals of relations between the sexes. As a character she is
ambiguous: on the one hand her success as a plantation owner shows that women can have business
expertise, but at the same time her submissiveness implies that to meet the expectations and to gain the
appreciation of surrounding society, a woman is not supposed to be imposing or to demand power or
independence even if she is intelligent and capable.
However, it is not only married women whose sensuality and sexuality are controlled by the society
and the institution of marriage. It is equally important in Chopin‟s stories and with regard to their
poultry symbolism that young, unmarried girls are subject to similar control – similar, if not even
stricter than that directed at married women. The institution of marriage as a form of controlling
sexuality is very relevant to many of the girls in Chopin‟s fiction as well, as marriage is viewed by the
society as the ultimate goal in young girls‟ lives, towards which they are educated at home and in
schools. This education, of course, includes strong norms of propriety regarding contact with members
of the opposite sex.
There are several instances where poultry is used as a symbol of girls in Chopin‟s production. This
is the case with the second scene in At Fault where particularly strong personification of chickens
appears. In this case, the birds feature as a topic of a conversation between Thérèse and her friends who
are visiting Place-du-Bois. This conversation is described by the narrator as follows:
With Mrs. Duplan there was a good deal to be said about the unusual mortality among
„Plymouth-Rocks‟ owing to an alarming prevalence of „pip,‟ which malady, however, that
lady found to be gradually yielding to a heroic treatment introduced into her basse-cour
by one Coulon, a piney wood sage of some repute as a mystic healer. (843)
57
This latter scene in particular could also be read as an ironic portrayal of the Duplans, whose status as
country people is highlighted by their choice of topic and their treatment of domestic birds almost as if
they were people. Such an interpretation would not, however, agree with how they are otherwise
presented in the scene. They are not laughable characters, but are actually portrayed rather
sympathetically throughout the scene: Mrs. Duplan is described as “…a delicate, refined little woman,
somewhat old-fashioned… but giving her views with a pretty self-confidence, that showed her a ruler
in her peculiar realm” (843). Both she and her husband are able to befriend Thérèse‟s Northern guests
and enjoy their company. In the end, the country couple is liked and admired even by the more
fashionable Worthingtons.
In Mrs. Duplan‟s case the reference to chickens under her care could be linked to her daughter,
Ninette. In the scene following the reference to chickens Ninette is contrasted strongly with the
daughter of the Worthingtons, Lucilla. Lucilla‟s strong religious faith is highlighted in the scene,
whereas Ninette is shown to be rather an individualistic and independent spirit, who wishes to make her
own decisions. The two discuss life in a convent, which Lucilla whole-heartedly appreciates, and which
Mrs. Duplan is planning for her daughter as a form of education. Ninette, however, is not sure that kind
of life would suit her, and states defiantly that: “…I‟ve been saving up money for the longest time, oh
ever so long. I‟ve got eighteen dollars and sixty cents, and when they send me to the convent, if I don‟t
like it, I‟m going to run away” (847). Ninette is also drawn to earthly joys, represented by her longing
to join the adults‟ card game, which idea Lucilla immediately reproves of as morally wrong. According
to Rowland, “wandering chickens were the people of God following evil pleasures and worldly
desires”, from which they needed to be rescued by the mother-figure, the protective hen (77). In At
Fault, Mrs. Duplan attempts to rescue her chickens from “pip”, similarly as she could be viewed as
attempting to rescue her daughter. Ninette does not suffer from any actual malady of course, but she is
indulged by her father – who, for example, allows her to play cards for money with him – and she
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generally fails to exhibit the traditional feminine virtues. Instead, she is headstrong, witty and willful.
The cure that Mrs. Duplan procures for Ninette is a traditional education for girls, in a convent, where
she ideally turns into a proper young woman. After her time in the convent, Ninette will be qualified
for the duties of wife and mother, as Mrs. Duplan was.
In both the poultry scenes in At Fault it is significant that the ladies who own chickens and discuss
them, are in a position to arrange marriages at the present or in the future. Mrs. Duplan has a young
daughter whose future she is planning, and while Thérèse is childless, she actually does arrange one
marriage in the novel, that of David Hosmer and Fanny, and she is interested in Melicent‟s love life as
well. The chickens in At Fault seem, then, to be symbols of the control of women and particularly their
sexuality and love-life. This control is achieved by conventional morals and norms to which girls are
educated from early on in their lives. It is not only married women that the fowls in the novel represent,
but also unmarried women and girls, who are controlled by the institution of marriage and its
underlying ideals of female sexuality and subservient behavior.
Similarly, the control of women and particularly female sexuality is implied in “Lilacs”. In this
short story, chickens are referred to in much the same way as in At Fault. A Parisian singer, Adrienne
Farival visits yearly the convent where she was brought up. While showing Adrienne around in the
convent, one of the nuns, Sister Agathe draws her attention to “…the enlarged poultry yard, with its
dozens upon dozens of new inmates” (357). It is not difficult to see a potential link between these
inmates of the poultry yard and the inhabitants of the convent, particularly those new, young
inhabitants who are not necessarily there out of their own choice. Even though none of the girls and
women in the convent are married or possessed in the same way as married women are, the convention
of educating girls in convents is definitely a form of control, which directly links to the institution of
marriage. More particularly, it relates to the expectations of women‟s sexuality and sensuality, and the
strict control of these. “Lilacs” does take place in France, but there is, nevertheless, a clear connection
to other stories by Chopin. Educating girls in convents was a part of the Creole lifestyle of wealthy
59
families in the United States in the 19th century, and this practice is referred to in Chopin‟s work, too,
for example in At Fault.
The education of young girls and the organizing of their future by their parents and female relatives
is a central issue in “Charlie” as well. The story resembles Louisa May Alcott‟s novel Little Women
(1868), which Showalter describes as “…one of the best studies we have of the literary daughter‟s
dilemma: the tension between feminine identity and artistic freedom…” (1994, 43). The short story
“Charlie” features seven sisters whose mother has died and who are educated by private teachers in
their home. Six of the daughters, while different from each other in many aspects, resemble each other
in that they all exhibit traditional feminine characteristics. Julia, for example, is the perfectly behaved,
charming young belle, Amanda the possessive girl who is interested in her clothing and appearance,
and Irene the sweet and kind but overly sentimental girl. However, the seventh sister Charlotte – or
Charlie, as she is commonly called in the story – is far from any feminine stereotype. She is described
as not having a mean bone in her body, and indeed she is not predisposed to such traditional feminine
vices as envy or spite towards other beautiful women or girls – on the contrary, she quite gladly joins in
a young man‟s praise of her sister Julia: “She has a right to be beautiful. She looks like dad and has a
character like Aunt Clementine. Aunt Clementine is a perfect angel!” (651). Along with her
friendliness, she has a clear talent for writing, but she is also loud, self-assertive and willful. She is as
boyish in her outward appearance as she is in her behavior, and even her nickname is that of a boy. Her
education in particular is a key element in the story. At first, her father indulges her behavior – or is
unwilling to force her to change, at least – until she oversteps the boundaries of even a tomboy by
taking out a gun and shooting in the woods, accidentally wounding a young man. When this is
discovered, she is sent to a boarding school to learn proper feminine behavior. She is not keen on this,
but as she is infatuated with the young man, she actually tries to become a proper woman in order to
attract his attention. In the end the man proposes to Julia and Charlie seizes to keep up the façade of the
traditional woman. Instead, she focuses on taking care of her injured father and the estate which he is
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now unable to manage himself. In the end it is implied that she has an understanding with a childhood
friend of hers, Gus, and that they will eventually marry.
In the first half of the story, chickens are recurrently present. As Miss Melvern attempts to form
proper young women out of the seven girls – attempts which are successful in the case of the six other
sisters, but which Charlie defies – chickens are described as moving about in the yard, “clucking [and]
always scratching in the dust” (641). After having been banished from the classroom, Charlie has a
lengthy exchange with a “‟Cadian girl”, Aurendele, about the sale of some chickens. These chickens,
too, are the famous Plymouth Rock kind, and Aurendele “…ha[s] them tied together at the legs with a
strip of cotton cloth and they h[a]ng from her hand head downward motionless” (642). These chickens
are strongly personified as well: Charlie is worried about their condition and orders one of her father‟s
servants to “…turn these martyrs loose. Give them water and corn and rub some oil on their legs…”
(642). This would imply that she is set apart from her sisters as the more independent one, whose
example they should, perhaps, follow. Her sisters, on the other hand, are presented as rather passive
and docile in receiving the education their father has organized for them. Like the motionless chicken
which merely hang there as their fate is being discussed, the six sisters do not attempt to take their fate
into their own hands. It is only Charlie who ever openly resists.
The personification of the chickens is continued as Charlie tells Aurendele what fine birds she
thinks they are and states that “I don‟t know how you can part with those Plymouth Rocks; you‟ll feel
the separation and it‟ll go hard with your mother and the children” (642). This could easily be
connected to Charlie‟s father‟s sentiments about his daughters. He does want to marry them off and has
certainly arranged their education with that in view, but at the same time anticipates he will miss their
presence and is reluctant to let them go.
The girls are referred to as birdlike in connection to their father elsewhere as well: two of Charlie‟s
sisters are described as habitually being “…perched on either arm of his chair” (644). Towards the end
of the story, the seven girls are also referred to as a bouquet of flowers which their father is unwilling
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to break up. In this instance, too, his possessiveness of his daughters becomes evident, as does their
relationship. It is, to a great degree, up to his decision how the girls‟ future is shaped. While he does not
own them the same way as chickens or flowers can be owned, he has great control over them and is in a
position to decide what happens to them – a position, which resembles that of Aurendele, who can
decide whether or not to sell the chicken.
In addition to instances which highlight the girls‟ position as a possession which is about to be
transferred from their father to various husbands, there is another kind of poultry reference in
“Charlie”. Charlie is openly referred to as goose twice in the story. The first of these is the result of her
hiding her talents for writing as well as her texts, in a manner which is very feminine and different from
her previous self-assuredness. One of her friends tells her that “…you are a large sized goose. The idea
of keeping such poetry as that cooped up here! Why don‟t you go to work and publish those things in
the Magazines…” (659). The second time she is referred to as a goose by one of her sisters because of
her behavior when she finds out the man she has been infatuated with will marry Julia instead of her:
after Charlie‟s emotional outburst, the sisters‟ reactions vary, and one of them, Amanda, makes the
remark that that “Charlie‟s a goose”. In this instance as well, Charlie‟s reaction is very traditionally
feminine: she has been passively waiting for the man to take notice of her and is upset and jealous
when he does not. Although her sister does not know the real reason behind her reaction, she could well
have described her so even had she known the truth. Thus it seems that in “Charlie”, the protagonist is
referred to as a goose whenever she exhibits traditional feminine behavior and allows herself to be
controlled by men or a system of beliefs that values men over women, as was clearly the case with the
literary and artistic world of the time.
To conclude, in Chopin‟s fiction, poultry appears to have a strong connection with marriage and
sexuality, as well as ownership and control. The domestic birds in Chopin‟s production symbolize
women and girls whose lives are controlled by strict rules of propriety and ideas of women‟s proper
behavior and sphere. As the birds are domestic, so should the women be, and in many cases are. This is
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the case for both the married women and the young girls in the stories. Ironically, it is not only men
who enforce the patriarchal values, but control of women is exercised by other women as well. In the
case of domesticity even more than with the cage, the limiting factors are not only, or even mainly,
physical, but essentially psychological, social and ideological. An essential ideal image of women in
the Victorian era was that of the angel in the house, which arose out of the ideal of Virgin Mary
(Gilbert and Gubar, 20). Poultry symbolism is strongly connected with this ideal. While men‟s lives
were obviously limited in many ways as well, the institutions and ideologies related to sexuality and
separate spheres for the sexes limited women‟s existence far more strongly than men‟s. This is evident
in Chopin‟s production, too, and therefore it is fitting that Chopin‟s poultry symbolism, as well as pet
bird symbolism, centers around women.
Poultry symbolism, as opposed to that of the caged bird, does not include as open rebellion or
resistance. Those bird scenes where domestic birds are used as a symbol of women are perhaps the
least subversive in Chopin‟s production, but there is often a criticism of women‟s position inherent in
those stories as well where such bird images appear. Even though the women represented by chicken
do not object themselves, there are other characters who do question the ideals for femininity that the
chicken-women represent. In At Fault the Northern siblings, Melicent and David Hosmer, could be
viewed as such characters, and in “Charlie” women‟s education and traditional roles are most certainly
criticized via the eponymous character. It must be noted that while the stories include domestic birds
and with them, a certain sense of resignation, chicken are not the only type of bird present in the
stories; there are also wild birds in At Fault and “Charlie”, as well as in “Lilacs”.
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4. Escaping the Cage: Women’s Rebellion and Self-Expression
In chapter 3 I focused mainly on the types of captivity and restrictions that are symbolically represented
in the bird images in Chopin‟s production. The image is lacking, however, if the elements of the
symbolic meaning of birds described in 2.2 are not taken into account: spirituality, emotions and
freedom as opposed to material, practical and confining things like the cage – representative of society
and its institutions, such as marriage. Birds, even domesticated birds, are not there in Chopin‟s
production to suggest that women are inherently more domestic and loyal or less adventurous and free
than men, but that they have been trapped in and by such ideas of femininity. Furthermore, many of the
women in Chopin‟s texts try to fight such images and refuse to be passive victims in their stifling
situations, similarly as the birds in their cages often continue to make noise.
Rebellion and women‟s attempts at self-realization and self-expression are, then, central in
Chopin‟s production. Resistance is directed at different things in different stories, and realized in
different ways, but it is often the confining social roles, norms and institutions that are rebelled against.
This rebellion is present in bird symbolism in Chopin‟s production to as great a degree as are the
confinements themselves: even the caged birds, while also strongly representing captivity, essentially
symbolize desire for freedom and, in many cases, attempts at fighting the restraints society and its
institutions have for women. In chapter 4 I will focus on this rebellion, which in my view is at least as
important aspect in the bird images as the confinement itself. In 4.1 I will discuss how birds in
Chopin‟s production symbolize women‟s attempts at self-ownership and freedom more generally, and
in 4.2 I will move on to discuss the birds that are used as symbols of women‟s quest for artistic
freedom in particular. Art, and especially women‟s art, is a central issue in Chopin‟s work, and it is
addressed via bird symbolism as well. Finally, in 4.3 I intend to look at how the contradiction between
dreams of freedom and the more complicated situation in reality is expressed through bird symbolism
in Chopin‟s production.
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4.1 Attempts at Self-Ownership
One of the forms in which women rebel against social expectations in Chopin‟s production is various
attempts at self-ownership. As marriage was perhaps the single institution that most strikingly and
openly limited women‟s possibilities of controlling their own lives physically, emotionally, sexually,
financially and professionally, it is fitting that the birds symbolizing women‟s attempts at selfownership occur when wives are trying to free themselves of some of the demands of marital and
familial life. These attempts are not always successful, but it is nevertheless significant that many
women in Chopin‟s fiction do try to fight their way towards more independence and a more equal
power-balance in their marriages – a situation where they are no longer the property of their husbands
and fathers, but rather free individuals who have equal relationships with people around them. Their
aim is, as Edna proclaims in The Awakening, to be able to choose freely and independently where they
give themselves.
In The Awakening, one of the many bird images related to Edna‟s slowly emerging resistance to the
family ties and in particular to the demands made to her by her husband, is that of an owl hooting at the
top of a water-oak. The first appearance of the owl happens early on in the novel: “[i]t was then past
midnight … There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and
the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour” (6). The introduction of the owl
coincides with the first open signs of Edna‟s dissatisfaction with her marriage. Her husband has woken
her up after an evening out, and is very reproachful of her supposed neglect of both him and their
children. After listening to his complaints and questioning which she refuses to answer she cannot sleep
anymore but goes out on the porch and sits there for a long time crying, feeling oppressed and
experiencing a “vague anguish” (6). This is not the first time Edna has felt something of the kind, but
the reason for it is just now beginning to dawn on her: she is slowly awakening to realize her
containment and her dissatisfaction with the roles she has been cast. The scene foreshadows the ending
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of the novel, as the symbol of Edna‟s rebellion is also a symbol of death. Furthermore, in this scene,
Edna‟s rebellious mood “…which might have held her there in the darkness half a night longer…” is
dispelled by “little stinging, buzzing imps”, similarly as her rebellion will in the end be thwarted by the
demands of her sons (6).
The hooting of the owl, in particular, seems to accompany situations of conflict between Edna and
Léonce, caused by Edna‟s rebellion against the wishes of her husband. This becomes quite evident,
when, later on in the novel, Edna wishes to stay outside while her husband demands her to come in.
First she objects decisively, but then tiredness and her husband‟s relentlessness manage to break her
spirit. At this moment “…the world seems to hold its breath” (32). The defeat that will follow is
foreshadowed and amplified by a description of how “[t]he old owl no longer hooted, and the wateroaks had ceased to moan as they bent their heads” (32). What makes this latter scene even more
interesting is the fact that even though the owl is not mentioned before in that scene, the definite article
is still used for it. Clearly, then, it is implied by means of grammar that this is not just any owl, but the
same one that hooted on the site of Edna‟s first rebellious thoughts – and indeed, in that first scene the
owl was a new acquaintance, “an old owl” (6, italics added) – as new an acquaintance to Edna as was
the idea of rebellion.
According to Beryl Rowland, the owl has a dual symbolism: it has always carried the symbolic
meaning of wisdom, and has even represented victory, but has been strongly connected with death, too
(115-116). She continues that as a creature that prefers darkness to light the owl has carried negative
symbolic meanings particularly in Christian religious contexts (117-118). Roy Battenhouse points out,
in his review of Beryl Rowland‟s book, that the daytime blindness of owls “[represents] in Christian
iconography a soul‟s search for a „vain knowledge‟ in preference to Gospel illumination…” (442). In a
sense, this is what Edna is doing: instead of relying on role-models and rules handed down to her by
religion and patriarchy, she is trying to find her own way, to discover who she is and what it is she
wants. These attempts, realized, for example, in her taking up her art again, are judged as vain by some,
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compared to her true, important duties as wife and mother. As Léonce puts it: “„It seems to me the
utmost folly for a woman at the head of a household, and the mother of children, to spend in an atelier
days which would be better employed contriving for the comfort of her family‟” (57).
The noise made by the parrot in the opening scene of The Awakening is especially related to artistic
freedom and will therefore be analyzed in 4.2, but the second appearance of the parrot in the novel
could be viewed as symbolizing rebellion towards women‟s confinement more generally. The
resistance symbolized by the parrot in this instance is directed towards almost religiously followed
conventions. Slightly more controversially than in the first scene of the novel, the bird again disturbs
the peace of the society around it by interrupting a conventional performance on the piano by the
Farival twins – who are, significantly, “…always clad in the Virgin‟s colors, blue and white…” (23).
As the girls play, the parrot interferes loudly: “„Allez vous-en! Sapristi!‟ shrieked the parrot outside the
door” (23). The bird is described as the only honest one in the company of pretenders, “…the only
being present who possessed sufficient candor…” to criticize the performance (23). It is, however,
threatened for this intrusion by a patriarchal figure: “[o]ld Monsieur Farival … insisted upon having the
bird removed and consigned to regions of darkness” (23). Another man, the son of the bird‟s owner,
objects, with “decrees [that] were as immutable as those of Fate” (23). The parrot then falls silent, and
is allowed to live as it “…[offers] no further interruption to the entertainment, the whole venom of [its]
nature apparently having been cherished up and hurled against the twins in that one impetuous
outburst” (23).
The paragraph is full of underlying meaning, as the strong and dramatic wordings suggest. To
certain extent the second appearance of the parrot is similar to the first one: the noisy and inconvenient
bird again interrupts a scene where men and those women and girls who accept the rules and roles
provided by patriarchy are comfortably going on with their habitual rituals. However, there is one
significant difference: the men do not react simply by leaving the company of the unpleasant bird. This
time the disturbance is considered by some grave enough to warrant death. This detail is particularly
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interesting when considered against the fact that by this time Edna‟s extra-marital romantic interest in
Robert has been voiced in the form of Adèle Ratignolle‟s warning to Robert, that Edna might well take
his advances seriously. Edna‟s sensuality is awakening. So far, Edna and Robert have remained within
the boundaries of what is considered acceptable behavior in the Creole society, that is, flirting;
similarly, the bird‟s interruptions to peace have not been serious before. However, the Creole society
does have strong expectations of marital fidelity, particularly in women. The ideal for women, referred
to here as well by the colors of the clothes worn by the two girls, was Virgin Mary, in whose figure
motherhood was combined with chastity. Women, while often linked to the body and viewed as
essentially sexual beings, were nonetheless strongly expected to limit their sexuality to marriage.
According to Jennifer Gray, there is typically a punishment for those who refuse to acknowledge and
thus uphold the dominant ideology (56), and this paragraph in The Awakening clearly suggests that as
well. When certain boundaries are crossed, the reaction from patriarchy may be surprisingly strong,
even violent. Again, the only thing that keeps the bird safe is its owner‟s influence, along with the fact
that it quits, at least momentarily, its rebellious activities.
Self-ownership could be defined as one of the main goals of nineteenth-century feminism (Gray,
53). That is clearly what Edna strives for as well. Even in the town, Edna‟s attempts at independence
are related to birds: the house Edna moves into to be away from their home while Léonce is out of town
is called “the pigeon house” (81). Edna‟s moving out to a house where she can support herself
financially is clearly an act of, or at least an attempt at, independence. Despain and Bonner argue that
she is, however, not entirely independent, and that she still remains a possession, even if to a different
man this time, to her lover Alcée Arobin, who “finally possesses her sexually” in her new home (59).
This argument is questionable: Alcée may have seduced Edna, but their affair is as much her doing as it
is his, because she has willingly accepted him and his advances. He has no power to control her since
she has been and continues to be able to turn him down when she wishes to. He does not possess her,
then, physically, financially or emotionally.
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Still, even if Alcée has no claim of ownership upon her, she is not free: I would argue that she has
not managed to free herself of her marriage or her husband. The ties that hold her also provide safety
and comfort, and she does not have the courage to cut them. It is only fitting that the house should be
named after a bird that, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, carries the symbolic
meaning of “cowardice” (36), as Edna does not commit to independence entirely. Instead, she takes the
easy way out: she allows her husband to pretend her moving out is due to repairs in the old house,
instead of declaring it as what it is, a separation. She never reveals the truth, not even to her children.
Her financial freedom is suspect as well: even after her declaration of independence she accepts an
expensive present from her husband and sends the bills for her extravagant farewell dinner to Léonce
instead of paying them herself. In fact, the situation is similar to her first swim. Even though she feels
she has gone far, actually “…she had not gone any great distance” (28) – which is literally true in this
case, too, since the new house is very close to the old one, as Heath points out (23). Furthermore, on
her first swim, she soon turns to shore, and afterwards she asks her husband why he had not looked
after her. His answer is as revealing as her question: “„You were not so very far, my dear; I was
watching you‟…” (28). She wants freedom, but at the same time clings to the safety provided by her
husband, and Léonce, on the other hand, never relinquishes his control and supervision over Edna even
though it may at times seem as if he had. With the pigeon-house as well as the first swim, it is made
clear that Mr. Pontellier intentionally allows Edna‟s behavior. He has consulted their family doctor and
follows his advice to be patient and not to contradict her, in hopes that “„…[her mood] will pass‟”, as
Doctor Mandelet assures him will happen (66). As Elz argues, quoting Margo Culley, the name
“pigeon-house” suggests that Edna‟s independence there is more play-pretend than real, and that she
has not yet managed to shake off the shackles of domesticity:
…while the house is smaller and simpler than her home with Léonce, a pigeon house is
„for the domesticated birds kept for show or sport. The breeds kept by these fashionable
hobbyists were elegantly colored, little resembling the drab street pigeon‟ (Culley 81).
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Edna has actually traded in a gilded cage for a simpler one […] Even when fleeing, Edna
cannot escape. (Elz, 22)
A similar sense of the insufficiency of escape that can be sensed in The Awakening is apparent in
the bird symbolism in “Athénaïse”. In the short story, Athénaïse escapes two times, attempting to free
herself of her husband and the married life that she detests. The first time she goes to her parents‟
house. Her parents do take her in, although reluctantly, but since she is not abused and does not have
any other reason that they could understand and accept for objecting the marriage, they offer her little
support. When her husband Cazeau comes to collect her, Athénaïse wants to rebel but realizes that “…
she ha[s] no weapon to battle subtlety. Her husband‟s looks, his tones, his mere presence, [bring] her a
sudden sense of hopelessness, an instinctive realization of the futility of rebellion against a social and
sacred institution” (432).
Cazeau‟s activity in taking Athénaïse away is silently approved by her mother who “pretend[s] to
be occupied with having a chicken driven from her parterre” (432). Athénaïse‟s situation is reflected in
the action of her mother driving a chicken away – similarly as she is having her daughter driven away
from her house. The symbolical representation of Athénaïse by a chicken is apt here, in many ways. As
discussed in 3.2, all game and poultry have a sexual meaning due to the fact that they make for a
delicious dish (Rowland, 134). Poultry is also tame and as such owned and controlled by people, unlike
wild birds. The relevance of these facts, sexuality, control and ownership, to Athénaïse‟s situation in
the scene is great. In marriage, of course, these three things would be deeply linked, and it is the
married life that Athénaïse is being returned to. In the scene Athénaïse‟s parents again give her away to
her husband, and while they may not view her directly as property, they definitely assume that control
over her is being shifted from them to Cazeau – of which her father especially is delighted and grateful
(434). In this scene the original giving away of the daughter in marriage is being repeated, because
Athénaïse has tried to fight against the idea that she is not in control of who she belongs to and with.
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It is evident that Athénaïse‟s escape is inadequate and ends up failing. This failure is highlighted by
the fact that she is escorted back home by Cazeau much in the way cattle or poultry might be driven.
This image is further amplified as the activity is compared to a rebellious slave being brought back to
the plantation. As Cazeau rides towards home behind Athénaïse, he remembers an event from his
childhood:
He had passed that old live-oak hundreds of times, but it was only now that the memory of
one day came back to him. He was a very small boy that day, seated before his father on
horse-back. They were proceeding slowly, and Black Gabe was moving on before them at
a little dog-trot. Black Gabe had run away, and had been discovered back in the Gotrain
swamp. They had halted beneath this big oak to enable the negro to take breath; for
Cazeau‟s father was a kind and considerate master, and every one had agreed at the time
that Black Gabe was a fool, a great idiot indeed, for wanting to run away from him. (433)
This highlights the problem Athénaïse feels keenly, although she is unable to voice it: her cage may be
relatively comfortable, but it is nonetheless a cage. She cannot accept a life of confinement and an
unequal relationship with her husband: all human beings regardless of gender and ethnicity long to be
free, and it is not enough to be treated kindly by one‟s master to make one happy. The mere idea that
one human being should be the property of another is intuitively objectionable, and it alone is reason
enough for some rebellious souls to try and escape. This, however, is a foreign idea to people around
Athénaïse. Her mother, for example, concludes that she has no “sane” reason for her behavior (434).
She, like Black Gabe, is considered a fool for running away. Even her brother Montéclin, who
sympathizes with her feelings, states that “[t]he day had not come when a young woman might ask the
court‟s permission to return to her mamma on the sweeping ground of a constitutional disinclination for
marriage” (431).
Athénaïse‟s second attempt at escape could be viewed as a more successful one: with the help of
Montéclin, she runs away from her husband and travels to New Orleans. Birds are again present when
the two meet to plan the escape, and this time it is wild birds, that give “shrill rhapsodies of delight”
(437). Again the birds reflect Athénaïse‟s feelings and situation: she feels great comfort and joy in the
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company of her brother who is also her only supporter, and while she is not entirely pleased with his
plan, she accepts it as a way out of her “matrimonial yoke” (437). Athénaïse funds her stay in New
Orleans with money given to her by Montéclin. She attempts to find employment for herself, but
“…with the exception of two little girls who had promised to take piano lessons at a price that would
be embarrassing to mention, these attempts had been fruitless” (451).
Even if her escape is successful in that neither her husband not the rest of her family discover her
whereabouts, this is perhaps not so much because the escape was well planned as it is because her
husband does not even try to locate her. He misses her and has “a terrible sense of loss” in her absence,
but he does not want to experience again “the humiliating sensation of baseness that had overtaken him
in passing the old oak-tree”, and has no intention of forcing Athénaïse to come back again even though
“[h]e knew that he could again … compel her to return to the shelter of his roof, compel her cold and
unwilling submission to his love and passionate transports…” (438). She is free, then, only because
Cazeau has decided to allow her freedom. Furthermore, even though Athénaïse is now free to come and
go as she pleases, she has not attained any real independence, since she is entirely dependent on her
brother for an income.
It is perhaps for these reasons that Athénaïse is referred to as a goose after she has decided that she
will return home (452). Her independence has not been real, and therefore one might raise the question
of how free a choice it really is for her to return home. It is clearly stated in the short story that she does
want to return and has realized she loves her husband after all, but then again, she has no money of her
own and no employment so she would be dependent on one man or another in any case: if not her
husband, then her brother or her new friend and would-be lover, Mr. Gouvernail. It is, therefore, fitting
that she should again be compared to a domesticated bird rather than a wild one. Goose is perhaps
particularly fitting because it is linked to fertility (Rowland, 68): it is not directly stated that Athénaïse
is pregnant, but it is clearly implied on many occasions that this is the case (451-454), and her brother
seems to suspect it to be the reason she has chosen to return (454). Furthermore, there is a clear
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connection here to the eponymous character‟s situation in “Charlie”, which I analyzed in chapter 3.2. It
seems that women are referred to as geese in Chopin‟s fiction especially in situations where they
exhibit traditional feminine behavior and accept or return to their feminine roles instead of aiming for
more independence.
The ending of “Athénaïse” may be somewhat disappointing from a feminist point of view, as it
ends with a woman returning to her husband instead of reaching independence on her own. One might
be prone to share Montéclin‟s feelings as “he could not help feeling that the affair had taken a very
disappointing, an ordinary, a most commonplace turn, after all”, even if “he had no fault to find since
[Athénaïse] came [back to her husband] of her own choice” (454). Something significant is,
nonetheless, achieved in the story: the discovery that marriage is only fair and right – and happy – if
both parties enter it with knowing volition, as Athénaïse does in the end, instead of it being “a trap set
for the feet of unwary and unsuspecting girls” (434), which is how she feels about it at the beginning of
the story. Using the word trap to describe marriage is yet another way in which women are aligned with
birds and, specifically, referred to as game in the context of marriage and in relation to men in the
story. The development of the female main character is significant: Athénaïse realizes she does not
wish to be the property of anyone and that she should be allowed to „give herself where she chooses‟
(which is Edna‟s pronounced goal, too, in The Awakening, 108), instead of other people deciding who
she belongs to. However, it is not only Athénaïse who develops, but also, importantly, her husband. It
is equally important to her attempts at gaining freedom that her husband realizes he does not wish to
own his wife or force her to stay with him like his father did with his slaves.
Even if Athénaïse is not completely successful in gaining her freedom, there is a sense of hope and
optimism in “Athénaïse” that has perhaps been lost in The Awakening. The men in the short story are
decidedly more sympathetic than the men in the novel are towards the aspirations of the female main
characters. Furthermore, it is implied that while Athénaïse may be considered a fool for wanting
independence at the time, she may be better understood in the future – similarly as the slave was only
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thought of as a fool for wanting to run away at the time and his desire and right for freedom is later on
comprehended and accepted. A like presaging of times and the society changing could be traced in
Montéclin‟s statement, quoted above, that the day has not yet come when women have a true freedom
to choose – even though this is not true yet in the short story, some day it might be.
4.2 Refusing to Remain Silent: Women and Art
The question of women and art was problematic in the United States in the 19th century. On the one
hand, women were producing art in growing numbers, and fiction written by women was quite popular.
This was the case for Chopin‟s local color fiction as well, for which she achieved renown. On the other
hand, however, ideas of women‟s true duties as domestic angels were still strong, and these images did
not easily allow for such an independent, public and attention-seeking behavior as producing art. As
Gilbert and Gubar point out, the true creative power was still connected with men, and women‟s
possibilities for producing meaningful art were undermined (21). Women writers were forced, then, to
think about and often to justify to others the relationship between their gender and their artistic
ambitions. Therefore it is hardly surprising that the issue of women and art is present in many women
writers‟ texts as well, in one way or another. This is famously true of Gilman‟s “The Yellow
Wallpaper”, for example. The short story quite openly discusses the situation of a female artist, who is
forbidden to write because it is supposedly not good for her health and psychological wellbeing, as was
the case for Gilman herself. Similar tendencies are present in Chopin‟s production as well. Her fiction
includes numerous artistic women and discusses their situation both overtly and via symbolism, and
bird symbolism in particular is used for this purpose. It is used to address the situation of female artists
most notably in The Awakening.
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Voice is a central aspect that needs to be analyzed in examining how Chopin uses and changes the
binary logic related to gender in her bird symbolism. In Chopin‟s fiction, voice is directly related to art.
While relating women to nature is traditional, continuing from this standpoint to relate women and their
symbolic representative, birds, to voice, is no longer in accordance with the traditional dichotomous
thinking. Of the concept pair voice/silence, voice has traditionally been connected to men, along with
activity in the activity/passivity pair, whereas women‟s traditional roles have included silence, passivity
and a strict limitation to the private sphere. As I pointed out in 2.1, women were not expected to
perform publicly in front of a mixed audience in the United States in the 19th century. Even though
writing and painting do not require the artist herself to be personally present in public, any art borders
on public performance as it includes placing one‟s thoughts and visions for others to see. It also
includes a certain focus on the self and a wish to gain attention. According to Gilbert and Gubar, the
ideal woman in the 19th century was not supposed to have a real self or even a story of her own, let
alone create stories (22). Her role was making men great, not promoting herself, and thus producing art
was, at best, considered a questionable and ill suited activity for women (Gilbert and Gubar, 22-24). In
this sense, by giving many birds – and thus, symbolically, women – a rebellious will and a voice by
which to express it, Chopin most certainly at least questions, if not deconstructs, traditional binary
thinking.
There is a clear continuum in parrot imagery in Chopin‟s production, a progression starting from
the birds that are mute, perhaps unaware of any possible life outside the cage as the wild animal in
Chopin‟s “Emancipation: A Life Fable” (1963) and either unwilling or for some reason unable to
promote the cause of freedom. These mute parrots appear in “Lilacs” and in “A Lady of Bayou St.
John” (1893). From these parrots that are effectively silenced and passive we move on to birds that do
make some noises, as the parrot does in “Athénaïse”, for example. Athénaïse is somewhat rebellious,
and similarly, the caged bird does have a voice, even though it is not yet very skillful or eloquent in
using it. At the other end of the continuum is the openly rebellious, noisy and clever parrot that opens
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The Awakening by screaming in French “Go away! Go away! For heaven‟s sake!” to one of the
patriarchal figures in the novel (1). The parrot in The Awakening epitomizes women‟s quest for
freedom and completes the parrot‟s development from dumb to defiant. In this subchapter I intend to
analyze the rebellion symbolized by the noise made by pet birds, and connect it especially to women‟s
artistic ambitions.
The recurrence of parrots in Chopin‟s work has been noted by Despain and Bonner (54) as well,
and mentioned by Heath (11, 22). Both Despain and Bonner and Heath, however, limit their analysis of
this sustained parrot imagery to stating that the parrot is a negative image in Chopin‟s production. This
claim is justified in both articles by referring to Chopin‟s diary where she attests to disliking the
creatures for their clumsiness and stupidity, adding that she has never heard one talk (Despain and
Bonner, 54; Heath 11, 22). Despain and Bonner go as far as stating that “[Chopin‟s] avowed hatred for
parrots suggests a similar distaste for a „possessed‟ woman” (57). As they link the parrot in The
Awakening to Edna, who is viewed as a possession by her husband, they implicitly claim that Chopin
hates the protagonist of her novel. I would emphatically disagree with such an interpretation of the
parrot. Admittedly, it could be interpreted as a negative image in some of Chopin‟s short stories,
especially in “Lilacs”, where the bird is described not only as mute, but also as stupid, and indeed
clumsy. However, I would argue that by The Awakening the parrot has lost such negative connotations:
it has, after all, found its voice and learned to speak not only one, but three human languages along
with its own. It is described in rather positive terms, and is certainly not referred to as stupid or clumsy.
The parrot has changed drastically, then, and while I do not wish to make any claims as to Chopin‟s
views of the actual birds, there is a definite change in attitude present in the images of parrots in her
fictive writing. The narrator in The Awakening shows no dislike or disdain towards this new and
improved parrot – if anything, it is the cage that is reproved. It is only characters representative of
patriarchy that find this new parrot unpleasant.
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The opening scene of The Awakening is indeed one of the most memorable in Chopin‟s production,
especially from the point of view of bird symbolism and its feminist interpretation. The scene presents
two birds, caged and confined: a parrot who could speak, along with French, English and Spanish “…a
language which nobody could understand, unless it was the mocking-bird…”, and the mockingbird
who “…[whistles] his fluty notes … with maddening persistence” (1). This entrapment of the birds can
easily be related to women‟s captivity and lack of independence in several areas of life, as I pointed out
in 3.1. Along with the cage and captivity which are communicated in the scene, there is, however, more
to it. In this subchapter I will analyze the birds themselves, and particularly the one activity that they
are still able to perform even though strictly confined by the cage and the chain: their noise-making. I
will argue that this activity of the birds relates particularly to women‟s artistic ambitions. The bird
symbolism in this scene addresses the situation for two different kinds of women with a shared need,
ambition and talent for self-expression in the form of producing art.
According to Showalter, the image of a caged song-bird was commonly used as a symbol of the
female artist in American women‟s writing in the 19th century: “…the caged song-bird … represents
the creative woman in her domestic sphere” (1994, 14). This examination of female artists‟ situation
was a part of women writers‟ increased focus on women‟s lives and experiences within the woman‟s
sphere and their relationship to other women and to the society at large. While a parrot is not a songbird, Chopin could nevertheless be viewed as continuing this tradition, especially in The Awakening.
Even though Edna‟s artistic ambitions are not openly voiced at the beginning of the novel – unless in
the noise made by the caged birds – eventually it becomes clear that underneath the housewife‟s role
Edna has always wanted to express herself in visual art. In the light of this interpretation, several
elements related to the birds gain new meanings, which I will elaborate upon later. One of the central
things about the birds in this scene is that these pet birds insist on being heard as well as seen; they
refuse to be passive. This is a very pointed beginning that goes straight to the essence of female
containment, using a well-established metaphor for it. The idea of caged birds symbolizing upper and
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upper middle-class women confined by society can be traced as far as to the 18th century and Mary
Wollstonecraft, as discussed above in 2.2.
Clearly, the first bird scene is significant from a feminist point of view. However, several elements
in the scene have been interpreted unsatisfactorily in previous studies. For example, I am prone to
disagree when Elz suggests that the language the parrot speaks and that nobody but the mockingbird
can understand represents the social customs of the Creole society, and continues that “…while Edna
comprehends and is conversant in French and English, because she did not grow up in the Creole
society she is weak in both understanding and practicing the language of Creole social customs” (Elz,
15). First of all, it is hardly so that nobody can understand the Creole code of behavior except these two
odd birds; in The Awakening and from Edna‟s point of view it is clearly the prevalent social order, one
that everyone around her seems to understand. Despite the fact that Elz is not alone in stating that Edna
is an outsider to the Creole society, and although signs of her not fitting in perfectly can indeed be
found, as Stephen Heath does in his article (26), I would argue that Edna has become quite fluent in
this „language‟ as well. It may not be her „native tongue‟ but she is conversant in it. As a good friend of
one of the most admired Creole women and a favorite of many of the men she seems to be rather a
successful new member to their society than an outsider, even if she does sometimes find their ways
peculiar or uncomfortable – and they hers.
Elz‟s argument becomes even more confusing as she states that “[Edna] does at times understand
Léonce, just as the mockingbird may understand the parrot, but Edna does not alter her song, just as the
mockingbird does not alter his [sic] „whistling…” (Elz, 15). Even if we overlook the fact that Elz now
suggests – in contradiction with her own previous argument that birds in The Awakening represent
women in captivity – that one of the birds actually represents a man, Léonce, this interpretation seems
to be in contradiction with the novel itself, too. The Awakening is full of evidence that it is in fact Edna,
rather than Léonce, who alters her behavior, adapting to the society she resides in – her native society
in Kentucky or the Creole society she married into – all the while hiding her own thoughts and feelings.
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This double life of hers is narrated later on in the story clearly enough: “[e]ven as a child she had lived
her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual
life – that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions” (13). It is suggested
elsewhere as well that in her marriage Edna has long been the one who has to bend and make
compromises: when Léonce comes home late at night he demands sleeping Edna to wake up, at first
only to hear his story and then to tend to their children – who seem to be more in need of sleep than
tending to. Finally Edna does wake up, with little complaints of her husband‟s selfishness, even though
she is dissatisfied and cannot sleep anymore. Of the two, it is clearly Edna who changes her tune and
tries to adapt even her feelings to answer the demands and expectations of her surroundings.
Rather than to connect the parrot and the mockingbird to Léonce and Edna, and the almost shared
private language of the birds to the Creole social customs, however, I shall argue that the birds are, in
fact, a symbolic representation of female artists: of two different types of artistic woman; of two
different ways of combining art and womanhood. Women‟s art and artistic ambitions, their
misunderstood language, is indeed incomprehensible to people around them who view motherhood as
the ultimate goal and source of satisfaction for women. While some scholars, for example Clark, have
argued that there is no communication between the birds and that they are completely isolated from
each other, my interpretation is that there is at least a potential for an understanding between the birds
(Clark, 336). Even though the narrator is, for some reason, uncertain of whether the mockingbird
understands the parrot, he/she nonetheless opens up such a possibility by implying that only the
mockingbird has the potential for understanding the parrot‟s private language. Communication and
finding understanding may be possible for the parrot, then, but only with the other bird, as “…nobody
understood, unless it was the mocking-bird…” (1).
The uncertainty of a common understanding between the birds in this scene is significant if the birds
are to be read as representing the two female artists in the novel and their noise-making as a
representation of art. The number of the birds in this scene is significant, as is the fact that they are
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different kinds of birds and that, even though they both contribute to the noise, their modes of noisemaking are different. In the novel there are two women who are, or wish to be, artists: Edna and
Mademoiselle Reisz. As the story progresses, Edna discovers her artistic talent and ambitions and
becomes a painter. She tries to combine her art with her roles as wife and mother, similarly as the
parrot alternates between and combines different languages in its self-expression. Mademoiselle Reisz,
on the other hand, is a successful musician, an older woman who has been able to pursue her artistic
ambitions, but only at the cost of spinsterhood. She is an odd bird in the eyes of the society for devoting
her life to her art instead of striving to become „a mother-woman‟ – she hardly fits into the image of
any kind of woman at all. Like the mockingbird, she keeps on whistling her own tune: she plays the
piano fervently; she is neither good at nor interested in pleasing others, in her looks or in her manners;
she quarrels with everyone around her, men and women; she is self-assertive and has “…a disposition
to trample upon the rights of others” instead of allowing others to trample upon hers (25). She even
bows instead of making a curtsy (25). If her type of female artist were presented as a bird it would be
only fitting that it should be the mockingbird. She does seem to mock the society around her. Her
„tune‟ – that is, her personality, behavior and lifestyle – is both baffling and maddening to people
around her, and unlike Edna, she refuses to compromise, to speak any other language than her own.
Mockingbird is particularly fitting as a representation of an artist, because the bird acquires
inspiration from its surroundings in much the same way as an artist might. Mockingbirds are able to
mimic almost any sound they hear with great accuracy – not only sounds made by other birds, but even
those of inanimate objects, such as machines like lawn mowers. Instead of repeating what they hear
mindlessly, however, these birds combine the sounds they pick up from their surroundings and form
complex tunes of their own. Furthermore, they use almost entirely different ranges of tunes in different
times of the year: they clearly use different kinds of sounds for different purposes. Despite the fact that
mockingbirds draw their inspiration from their surroundings, their combinations of the different
elements of sound are unique, and could well be viewed as genuine self-expression. As a symbol of a
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female artist this bird does not imply mindless imitation, despite its name, but immense skill – as a
mockingbird can produce a great variety of sounds very convincingly – as well as a wide range in
repertoires and creativity in combining existing sound elements to form a new, unique whole.
The second type of artist, symbolized by the parrot, is one who attempts to play the traditional roles
of a woman, one who does comply with the demands of society, at least outwardly. Unlike
Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna has learned to speak several „languages‟: not only did she assume the
feminine role provided by the society she was born into, but she has also been able to adapt to the
somewhat different expectations of the Creole society. She has learned to play the roles of an obedient
daughter, a wife and a mother, even if many aspects of these roles are against her own inclinations and
they all have required her to smother her individuality and lead something of a dual life. The unnamed,
private language, then, could be seen as representing her attempts to express herself – attempts which
nobody else understands, not even Adèle Ratignolle, a close friend of Edna‟s. This language, her art, is
Edna‟s very own and originates from within her instead being imposed on her by the patriarchal society
around her, similarly as one of the clever parrot‟s languages is apparently its own creation, and has no
been acquired by imitating humans. Indeed, this language is so different from the other, learned
languages the parrot and Edna speak, that it is incomprehensible to people around them. Only the other
artist-woman may perhaps understand Edna, similarly as the mockingbird may understand the parrot:
even if the chosen forms of art and lifestyles of these two women are different, the desire to create and
the longing for free self-expression are basically the same. Their art is also in both cases the thing that
separates them from the surrounding society and makes that society, with all the expectations and
limitations it has for women, seem like a cage.
As I pointed out above, there are similarities between the two birds. However, there are important
differences as well. One of these is the fact that the parrot can speak human languages, unlike the
mockingbird. Similarly, the relationship the two artist-women have to the society around them is
different. The restraints and demands of society are much stronger on Edna than on Mademoiselle
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Reisz. As Jennifer Gray points out in her article, the latter is rather unattractive, not very feminine in
the first place and thus not as threatening as an advocate of women‟s independence as Edna is: “If a
woman is outside of the traditionally feminine, and is not marked as sexual, she is not disruptive to the
binary relationship of dominance and subordination. Rather, she is outside of the relationship…” (62).
Edna, unlike Mademoiselle Reisz, has potential for ”a mother-woman” and thus is ”hailed” to the role
more strongly, which follows that her defiance is strong-felt by the patriarchal society (Gray, 62-63).
Because of the stronger pressure of familial roles, success as an artist is much more difficult an aim for
Edna, as the opposition towards any signs of a desire for independence from her will be more strongly
objected to than those of Mademoiselle Reisz‟s.
In analyzing how the birds represent women artists, and their rebellion against the social norms
which do not allow for combining art and womanhood, it is important to pay attention to what happens
around the birds as well as to the birds themselves. In this case this means particularly analyzing the
reactions the birds‟ noise creates. Along with the birds, there is a man present in the first bird scene in
The Awakening. Edna‟s husband, Léonce Pontellier is bothered by the noise made by the birds and,
“…unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, [he arises] with an expression and an
exclamation of disgust” and leaves the room (1). If the noise of the birds is indeed interpreted as a
symbol of women‟s artistic ambitions and their rebellion towards the dominant ideals of femininity
which do not allow such ambitions, it is easy to understand how the persistence of the two birds may be
a source of disturbance and unease for a man, or male-dominated society listening to them. It poses a
potential threat to the status quo, as the two women threaten to enter the traditionally male domain of
publicity. The fact that the parrot has learned human languages is also highly significant. Besides
representing Edna‟s flexibility in adjusting to her surroundings, it could be interpreted as implying that
nature is in fact invading culture: women are starting to claim ground in an area from which they have
previously been strictly excluded. The parrot-woman is learning how to use the tools of the patriarchal
system to her own advantage. Thus the noise made by the birds and their insistence in continuing this
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activity might easily cause Mr. Pontellier, a patriarchal character, to be unable to carry on with his
routines, represented by his reading the newspaper, “…with any degree of comfort…” (1).
It is evident elsewhere as well that male characters are irritated or even angered by the noise made
by birds, especially parrots. This happens in a later parrot scene in The Awakening, as well, which I
analyzed in 4.1. A male character, old Monsieur Farival, threatens the life of a noisy parrot, who
shrieks “Allez vous-en! Sapristi!” (23). This interruption causes Old Monsieur Farival to “[insist] upon
having the bird removed and consigned to the regions of darkness” (23). Men are rather commonly
annoyed by the pet birds and wish to dispose of them, or at least the noise they make. It is particularly
the noise that the men find unpleasant: in the scene quoted above, for example, Monsieur Farival is
angered not by the presence of the bird but by the noise it makes, and he regains his calm after the bird
falls silent again. In Chopin‟s fiction women, on the other hand, often try to communicate with the
caged birds, rather than leaving their company or attempting to silence them as men do. In “Lilacs”,
there is a girl who tries to persuade a parrot to talk: “[i]n a large, gilded cage near the window perched
a clumsy green parrot. He blinked stupidly at a young girl in street dress who was exerting herself to
make him talk” (361). Similarly, in “A Lady of Bayou St. John” a young wife plays with her pet parrot.
It seems, then, that people‟s attitudes towards caged birds and their noise-making vary according to
their gender in Chopin‟s fiction, which is highly significant, if the noise of the birds is interpreted as
female rebellion. While men find the birds‟ vocal activity unpleasant and try to stop it, many women
are fond of the birds and try to communicate with them in one way or another. This is another feature
which implies a connection between women and birds.
Even though women in Chopin‟s fiction often support the birds‟ attempts at being heard as well as
seen, the bird imagery in her work also reflects the difficulties women had in trying to express
themselves. Furthermore, the notion that the traditional image of womanhood does not allow for any
kind of professional ambitions is present not only in Chopin‟s work, but in much writing by other
women in the 19th century as well. Being forced to choose between professional career and a husband
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and a family is an issue in Sarah Orne Jewett‟s A Country Doctor (1884), for example. Such a choice is
recurrent in Chopin‟s production: along with The Awakening, which clearly addresses the issue of the
possibilities of being both a true woman and a professional artist, it is at the centre of one of Chopin‟s
stories, “Wiser than a God” (1889). In this short story, a young woman recognizes the fact that she
cannot have both and refuses marriage in order to pursue her artistic career. It is understandable that the
topic should be present in much of women‟s writing, as it was a very real concern to most of the writers
in their own lives. It is hardly a coincidence that many woman writers in the 19th century were either
unmarried or widows – including Chopin herself.
Virginia Woolf discusses several limiting factors to women‟s possibilities for artistic success in her
book A Room of One’s Own (1928). In analyzing why literature was a male dominated field in the early
20th century she traces the difficulties women writers have had to face, from the past to her own time.
Along with the demands of marriage and motherhood, these have included the lack of higher education,
especially of high quality, difficult economic situation, the lack of artistic female role models and a
generally hostile environment which reproves of attempts at intellectual development and expressions
of individuality in women and ridicules women‟s intellectual and artistic capacities (Woolf, 53-56).
These factors were also the reality that women had to face in the United States in the 19th century, as
pointed out in 2.1, and they continued to hamper women‟s success as artists well into the 20th century.
Many of the impeding factors recognized by Woolf are present in Edna‟s situation as well: it is
evident that people around her neither understand nor approve of women becoming professional artists,
especially those women who have potential as mother-women. Edna‟s husband, for example, labels her
artistic ambitions as folly and belittles her talent. Painting is only acceptable to him as long as it does
not become her first priority, as he exclaims to Edna, comparing her unfavorably to the embodiment of
ideal Creole femininity in the novel: “„[t]hen in God‟s name paint! but [sic] don‟t let the family go to
the devil. There‟s Madame Ratignolle; because she keeps up her music, she doesn‟t let everything else
go to chaos. And she‟s more of a musician than you are a painter‟” (57).
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Interestingly, many women artists in Chopin‟s production, such as Edna and Charlie, are motherless.
This could be viewed as reflecting their situation as women striving for more independence and having
few role models other than those of the angelic mother-women. However, it also reflects their situation
as artists and one of the limiting factors that Woolf mentions: they do not have female artistic
predecessors. While Edna does have something of an artistic role model in Mademoiselle Reisz, their
chosen forms of art are different, as are the conditions of their lives. Edna can hardly follow the
example set by Mademoiselle Reisz without complications, because their situations are very different,
as I pointed out above. Even more importantly, however, there is no implication in the novel of any
existing tradition of female painters that she could join. The only real feedback she acquires for her art,
along with the comments from the man who sells her sketches, comes from Madame Ratignolle. Her
benevolent but inexpert opinions encourage Edna, while she is, at the same time, aware that she cannot
trust them: “[Edna] knew that Madame Ratignolle‟s opinion in such a matter would be next to
valueless… but she sought the words of praise and encouragement that would help her to put her heart
into her venture” (55). She does not have, or at least know of, any artistic predecessors whom she could
relate to, let alone having an artistic community at hand to inspire and support her. In this sense, she is
quite alone.
Furthermore, Edna needs to fight the demands of her marital and familial duties in order to produce
art. This is difficult, partly because she is financially dependent on her husband, but also because of the
strong expectations the Creole society has for women: the roles of wife and mother are supposed to be
sufficient to make a woman happy. In The Awakening, marriage and family life seem to be central
obstacles in the way of women becoming artists: the gifted Madame Ratignolle‟s art is only fully
acceptable because she would not dream of putting her own ambitions before her family‟s comfort, and
on the other hand, Mademoiselle Reisz, who is a full-time artist, is not married. There are no happily
married female artists in the novel, and most certainly none who could combine art and motherhood.
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Significantly, it is the thought of her children that finally makes it impossible for Edna to negotiate her
individual and artistic desires and the realities of her life.
Nevertheless, it is important that Edna does attempt to fight the restraints society has for women,
and particularly for married women and mothers. In doing so she questions the binary logic underlying
these expectations, and the belief in strong, immutable gender identities, similarly as Lily Briscoe later
does in To the Lighthouse by Woolf, according to Toril Moi (1985, 13). In The Awakening these fixed,
idealized gender identities are represented by Mr. and Mrs. Ratignolle. I would argue that, similarly as
Lily Briscoe does, according to Moi, Edna, too, as an artist “…represents the subject who deconstructs
this opposition, perceives its pernicious influence and tries as far as is possible in a still rigidly
patriarchal order to live as her own woman, without regard for the crippling definitions of sexual
identity to which society would have her conform” (13). This defiance of Edna‟s, which is realized in
her art, is symbolized in the novel by the noise made by the parrot.
4.3 Dream Birds Taking Flight: Imagining Freedom
Freedom, while being the goal and ideal in many of the texts by Chopin that I have analyzed, is also
presented as an extremely complicated matter. Even though more freedom may be attainable in any
given situation, complete freedom is not possible, and any attempts at gaining more freedom will be
difficult and partially unsuccessful. In The Awakening this is especially clear, and the difference
between dreams and reality is communicated through bird imagery as well. The contrast between the
caged bird and the imagined, free bird is strongest in The Awakening, even though women‟s dreams of
freedom are related to birds elsewhere as well. In this subchapter I will analyze how women‟s dreams
of freedom are contrasted with the reality of a struggle towards more independence, and how this is
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expressed in bird imagery especially in The Awakening, and also analyze one scene in At Fault where a
dream of freedom is connected to birds.
Along with actual birds used in the imagery in The Awakening, there are two appearances of birds
that are imagined by Edna. Inspired by music, she pictures a bird flying away from a man, and on
another occasion she narrates a story of a woman who runs away with her lover, and at the site of their
encounter several birds rise to flight. These birds must be at least as interesting in tracing Edna‟s
awakening as those used in the imagery, as these birds are imagined, created, by Edna; thus they might
be viewed as reflecting her hopes and dreams more clearly and openly than those used by the narrator.
These imaginary bird scenes are part of her development in the novel, voicing her at first latent and
later more open desire for freedom. They play an important role in the description of her rising
awareness of and rebellion against the constraints of marital life and the norms and expectations in
society.
The first appearance of an imaginary bird happens relatively early in the novel, and is inspired by
music:
Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind … One piece…
Edna had entitled „Solitude‟ … When she heard it there came before her imagination the
figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His
attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its
flight away from him. (25)
The bird here can be connected to Edna and her desire for freedom. Although Edna is not very aware of
her feeling of entrapment in her marriage yet, the picture she imagines implies quite strongly that
underneath she longs for freedom. In Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery flying is listed to symbolize
“escape from a disagreeable situation” and “spiritual elevation hampered by material life” (196). The
interpretation of a more or less conscious desire to escape is indeed almost unavoidable in reading the
paragraph quoted above. Linking the scene to the desire for physical or emotional freedom is perhaps
the most obvious choice, as the image seems to deal with the relationships between women and men. It
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could, then, be viewed as Edna‟s dream of escaping her marriage, which she is beginning to view as an
increasingly disagreeable situation as her desire for independence is awakening. It is evident that her
husband does not support any expressions of her own will or individuality: on several occasions it
becomes clear that he expects her to exist solely for him and their children. Thus, it is only logical that
if Edna is to dream of free existence and self-expression, the dream includes escaping from her
husband and the family reality that hinders her development as an independent individual.
What is perhaps most significant in this imaginary bird image is the feeling of success related to the
bird. Unlike the caged parrot and the mockingbird in the novel, this dream bird of Edna‟s is free. It is
not only able to soar to the sky freely and without limitations, but it actually does so. If the pet birds in
the novel symbolize Edna‟s artistic ambitions which her surroundings are trying to subdue and control,
then the bird flying freely could be viewed as representing the ideal solution to her complicated
situation. In this ideal situation she dreams of she is able to do as she wishes, and, to use a metaphor
Mademoiselle Reisz introduces in the novel, to grow artistic wings of her own and use them to reach
whatever heights her abilities and strength allow her to reach, unimpeded by social norms and
restrictions.
Again in analyzing this bird image, as with several others, it is worth while to examine what
happens around the bird, as well as the bird itself. In this case, similarly as with the parrot images in
The Awakening, there is a man observing the bird and reacting to it. In this dream image of Edna‟s he is
not annoyed or angered, however, but experiencing “hopeless resignation” (25). If the man is
interpreted as a patriarchal figure, representing perhaps Léonce Pontellier, this resignation could be
viewed as a defeat related to the victory of women: the bird manages to fly away from the realm of
patriarchy and can no longer be owned or controlled by men. The man‟s hopelessness could be related
to his now impossible wish of having the bird back and keeping it in the cage, within the bounds of the
ordinary life and the domestic sphere. It would, then, be an expression of nostalgia, a longing for the
time when women were content with their role as domestic angels. In this dream image this time is
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gone and never to return, as women have awakened to resist their roles of limitation, and reached
freedom. However, it is also possible that the man in the dream, who is left behind as the bird flies
away, wants to be like the bird, or perhaps with the bird. After all, strict gender roles limited men as
well.
Along with addressing the multifaceted issue of freedom, this bird image raises the question of how
art affects people. Edna is strongly moved by Mademoiselle Reisz‟s music, and this inspires her to
dream of freedom. These dreams help her to understand how stiflingly limited her life is, and this, in
turn, causes her to reach for more freedom. Art has a great role in The Awakening, not only as the
embodiment of Edna‟s rebellious thoughts – which it most certainly is – but also because it opens new
vistas for Edna and enables her to explore possibilities she did not know could exist. Art is figured in
the novel as something that can change the world: perhaps not directly, but by affecting people. Edna‟s
dream of freedom may at first appear futile, but it is, in fact a necessary phase preceding and even
prompting her actual rebellion: freedom must be imaginable first, before it can ever become attainable.
If one cannot even imagine flying free, one has no means or even motivation to try and escape the cage.
Art is important in that it offers the means for such imagining.
Another symbolic meaning for flying mentioned in Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery is “sexual
„lifting‟” (196). This meaning is relevant particularly for the second appearance of imaginary birds,
although it could be argued to be present in the first one as well. The second appearance of birds
imagined by Edna occurs in the form of a story she tells to a dinner party in the city. On this occasion
there is hardly anything unconscious or unintentional about the indirect voicing of her desires, as she
narrates an invented story “…of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a piroque and
never came back” (70). The image Edna creates is pointedly sensuous, and it is described how
“…every glowing word seemed real to those who listened … they could hear … the beating of birds‟
wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the
lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown” (70).
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The desire for emotional and sexual freedom for women is conveyed in this scene particularly
clearly, and birds rising to flight are an important symbolic element by which the sexual meaning of the
story is implied. The element of escape is again present in the story: whether the woman escapes from a
husband or not is not stated, but clearly she nevertheless escapes the patriarchal value system and
morality. In this scene the escape and the desire for freedom relates strongly to the idea of romantic or
sexual satisfaction and the possibility of choosing one‟s companion.
Connected with the idea of female sexuality in the story, there is the idea of equality in a
relationship. Something of a deviation from traditional gender roles, is, then, present in Edna‟s story.
The figuring of men as active and women as passive is a typical expression of the binary logic related
to gender. This tendency is particularly strong in relation to sexuality and reproduction, as Butler, too,
notes: “…within the framework of reproductive sexuality the male body is usually figured as the active
agent…” (141). In this image, however, it is the woman who is active, adventurous and daring in
paddling away; it is she who takes her lover with her, not the other way round. This dream image of
Edna‟s defies typical gender roles that are built around dichotomies.
Edna‟s story and its bird image could be connected with her affair with Alcée Arobin. In engaging
in this relationship she is daring and adventurous. Furthermore, she is decidedly an equally active party
to Alcée, unlike in her relationship with her husband. Her marriage is described in The Awakening as
having been formed through Léonce‟s activity, being “purely an accident” (18) from her part.
Furthermore, whatever happiness there is in the marriage is based on passive docility from Edna: “Mr.
Pontellier had been a rather courteous husband so long as he met a certain tacit submissiveness in his
wife” (57). Indeed, even the harmony of the ideal marriage of the Ratignolles and the perfect “…fusion
of two human beings into one…” (56) it represents is revealed to be founded mainly on Madame
Ratignolle‟s absolute devotion and her willingness to passively admire any activity of her husband‟s.
During one dinner that is described in the novel, Edna observes that Monsieur Ratignolle is the only
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vocal party and “[h]is wife [is] keenly interested in everything he [says], laying down her fork the
better to listen, chiming in, taking the words out of his mouth” (56).
A very similar passage of a woman imagining a romantic escape into wilderness with her lover
appears in Chopin‟s earlier novel, At Fault. The wordings of the bird scene in The Awakening are
reminiscent of a scene, where a young woman, Melicent, is inspired by the mood of a Southern swamp
to imagine the following: “[s]he was an Indian maiden of the far past, fleeing and seeking with her
dusky lover some wild and solitary retreat on the borders of this lake, which offered them no seeming
foot-hold save such as they would hew themselves with axe or tomahawk” (750). This imaginary
passage is both preceded and directly followed by a bird scene. These birds are, as I intend to argue,
related to the escape into the wilderness and to freedom which Melicent imagines.
Before Melicent‟s dream, she hears a “…wild call of a lonely bird…” (749). Despain and Bonner
argue that along with supporting the mysterious mood of the scene the bird is there as an oblique
reference to Thérèse, who is widowed at the beginning of the novel and left to manage the large estate
alone (53). However, Thérèse is neither present nor mentioned once in the scene. It is her nephew
Grégoire and Melicent, the sister of David Hosmer, who are in the boat experiencing the mysterious
mood. It is their relationship that is being developed in the scene. It seems more likely, then, that it is
Melicent who is represented by the bird. While Thérèse may be alone in the sense that her husband is
dead, Melicent is the truly lonely one: she is away from her home and her friends, and even her brother
is often unavailable as he is occupied by his business endeavors. Both the Creole society and the
landscapes around her are foreign to her and her being a stranger is often mentioned in the novel, as
well as her frustration with the situation. She is a Northern woman, and as one, she does not fit in in her
new, Southern surroundings. This is shown, for example, by her difficulties in managing to attain a
cook for herself among Thérèse‟s black servants, despite “…the very good pay which she offered”
(753). One servant after another promises to cook for her but they repeatedly fail to fulfill that promise,
and offer mere weak excuses when questioned by Melicent and Thérèse about this failure to deliver the
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service. Finally, it is discovered that Melicent is not “…the only victim of this boycott…”, but that the
black servants are generally “…very averse to working for Northern people whose speech, manners,
and attitude towards themselves [are] unfamiliar” (753). Hence, it is Melicent, rather than Thérèse, who
is lonely and calling for understanding and companionship in her new and unfamiliar surroundings.
There is one person in particular who seems to answer Melicent‟s call and to offer her support and
understanding, Grégoire. Directly after the description of Melicent‟s imaginary escape, there are again
birds present: “[h]ere and there, a grim cypress lifted its head above the water, and spread its moss
covered arms inviting refuge to the great, black-winged buzzards that circled over and about it in midair” (750). Melicent is accompanied in her exploration of the swamp by Thérèse‟s young nephew,
Grégoire, whose romantic interest in Melicent is becoming evident. While the buzzards could well be
read simply as a symbol that foreshadows death, as Despain and Bonner do (53), it seems that the
symbolic value of these birds is not limited to presaging death. Strong personification is again present
in the scene, as the trees are attributed not only arms, but heads as well, and described as gesturing to
the birds in a welcoming way. The connection between birds and trees is a typical one, and suggests a
meaning beyond the literal. When reading the passage one must bear in mind that birds often symbolize
amorous yearnings: “…we often see birds as metamorphosed lovers” (Dictionary of Symbols and
Imagery, 48). Since both the buzzards and the bird with its lonely call appear at the site of a man falling
in love with a woman in romantic although gloomy surroundings, this element of symbolic meaning
cannot be overlooked. Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery further states that “[m]ost bird-symbolism,
when connected with a tree, shares something of the Phoenix: the male tree, in which the burning
female nests” (47). Thus, the trees can easily be read as symbolizing Grégoire and his eager attempts to
win over Melicent.
It is possible, then, to read a continuum into the bird imagery in the swamp: while Melicent is
lonely and the call of the first bird could be interpreted as representing her attempts to find
understanding, companionship and acceptance in her new environment, she is not, however, ready or
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willing to accept the love that Grégoire offers her along with those things, similarly as the buzzards
circle close to the welcoming cypresses but never quite land on them. Melicent does find comfort in his
company and enjoys being close to him, but she does not want to fully commit to him or accept the
refuge that he offers her, as it would mean giving up her freedom. She, like the buzzards, does not want
to relinquish her flight. This is evident from the scene she imagines: it is neither a conventional
relationship nor a marriage which she imagines, and is implied to want, but rather an escape with a
“dusky lover”. The scene that Melicent imagines is strikingly similar to that Edna describes in her
story, but her actual situation is quite different from Edna‟s. Edna is already married, but Melicent is
still free to make her own choices, as implied by the bird imagery. Despite dreaming of a romantic and
sexual relationship with a man, she resists both Grégoire‟s overbearing manner in commanding her and
his wishes to formalize their relationship into an engagement, similarly as the buzzards never land on
the arms of the trees even though they circle around them.
Melicent, then, like Edna in the latter scene where imaginary birds appear in The Awakening, is
dreaming of emotional and sexual freedom as opposed to the actual situation for women, which
restricted all expression of romantic love to the confines of marriage. The bird imagery around
Melicent‟s imagined escape into the wilderness and thus outside male dominated, patriarchal culture,
supports this idea of resistance. The reality is not as simple as the dream in Melicent‟s case either,
however. Even though Melicent manages to avoid “the soul‟s slavery” (The Awakening, 115) that
marriage, especially one with children, often represented for women, she never reaches the sensual and
emotional freedom she dreams of. She loses her would-be-lover and turns to intellectual pursuits, to
travel with a Mrs. Griesmann, who is, according to Melicent, “…one of those highly gifted women who
know everything” (875). The life of a spinster which she seems to be headed for at the end of the novel
does not seem to promise her any more outlets for her sexual and romantic desires than such life has
offered Mademoiselle Reisz in The Awakening. Melicent‟s new role, although to her liking, requires a
new, serious attitude to life – this is represented by the glasses Mrs. Griesmann recommends to
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Melicent and of which Melicent writes to her brother as follows: “I‟m trying a pair, and see a great deal
better with them than I expected to. Only they don‟t hold on very well, especially when I laugh” (875).
Both Melicent and Mademoiselle Reisz may be free to pursue their artistic and intellectual ambitions,
but for both, this freedom comes at a cost to their personal lives.
Similarly with The Awakening, it is worth while to examine the relationship between dreams and
reality as represented by birds imagined by Edna and those used by the narrator. In both the scenes
Edna imagines, the birds are related to success: they either are free or manage to escape. In Edna‟s
dreams freedom is obtainable. However, the real birds in the novel are not as successful as the
imagined ones: real life is full of complications and a clear getaway is possible only in dreams. It is not
merely one man that a woman must escape from or persuade to change, but the entire system of beliefs
and values. It could be argued that the imaginary birds in The Awakening symbolize an ideal or a dream
of an easily accessible freedom for women – physical, intellectual and emotional freedom – whereas
the real birds represent the actual situation, women struggling towards more freedom in the social
reality of the time. Unlike the dream of a perfect and simple escape, that struggle is difficult and partly
unsuccessful. The difficulty and at least partial failure that are necessarily linked to any real struggle
towards independence are communicated through bird imagery all through the novel and elsewhere in
Chopin‟s work as well. However, the inadequacy of escape is perhaps most notably present in the final
bird scene of The Awakening.
The ending of the novel links The Awakening to the wider literary tradition of women‟s suicide as a
final attempt to gain freedom, and the only way out of the confinement of woman‟s place. The fact that
Edna‟s struggle ends with what could be interpreted as a suicide highlights the difficulties women
faced in their attempts to gain freedom and the impossibility of combining traditional woman‟s roles
with independent agency. The Awakening ends with Edna returning alone to the place where her
awakening begun, by the sea. Again, she takes a swim, but this time she does not turn back; instead,
she keeps on swimming until she is too far to return to shore. At the site of what could be interpreted as
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her suicide – and a conclusion to the process of her awakening to realize her self and her relation to the
society around her – a bird is again present: “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above,
reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (115). This image has often been used to
support analyses of Edna‟s fate, most commonly the suicide reading. Some scholars question such a
reading, however, and claim that Edna does not necessarily drown. Sean Heuston, for example, uses the
final bird scene to justify such an argument: he points out that the bird does not die and implies that
perhaps Edna does not either (224). It is admittedly true that the bird, which is most likely a sea-bird,
may not drown immediately, as Heuston argues (224). However, the image remains one of defeat. If
the disabled bird cannot control its fall, hitting the surface of the water may kill it or at least injure it
further. Furthermore, it has little chance of long-term survival if its wing is broken, because it can
neither escape predators nor find food. While the final fate of the bird is left open, similarly as Edna‟s,
the odds are undeniably against the survival of either. In my view, the bird scene supports the reading
that Edna is swimming to her death, even though it is indeed never overtly stated in the novel that she
does.
Wings must be an essential element in this last bird image: this bird, in contrast with the bird
inspired in Edna‟s mind by music, has a broken wing. It is not able to wing its flight as the dream bird
was, and thus falls to the water – in which an analogy to Edna‟s situation can easily be detected, as
many scholars have done. Attention is overtly drawn to the significance of wings earlier on in the
novel, as Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna‟s artistic mentor, states to her that strong wings are needed to
support a flight to independence of thought, feeling and expression; strong wings and “[a] brave soul.
[A] soul that dares and defies” (64). She is also reported to have lamented the fate of those who try to
wing their way to freedom and fail: “„[i]t is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted,
fluttering back to earth‟” (83). The similarities between these ominous words and those used by the
narrator to describe the bird in the final scene of the novel suggest there is failure present in that final
scene, at least artistic failure. Edna seems to be aware of this sense of failure as well: while swimming,
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she thinks of “[h]ow Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew! „And you
call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that
dares and defies‟” (116). From a feminist point of view, similarly as to Mademoiselle Reisz, it is indeed
“a sad spectacle” that Edna, though occasionally daring and defiant, does not, in the end, seem to
possess wings strong enough and falls – possibly because the development of her artistic wings is
hampered by another set of wings she has had to try and grow, those of a “…ministering angel…”
required from a “…mother-woman…” (8).
It is, in any case, the thought of Edna‟s children that overpowers her in the end; it is because of them
that she is not free to lead the life she wants to. She knows only one way to elude them, and “…the
soul‟s slavery…” (115) they represent: death. Her suicide is indeed a final move, and it does manage to
free her from her family. In a sense, she does obtain freedom. It is bothering, however, that it should
happen through death. The connection between freedom and death may have been foreshadowed by the
previous use of an owl as the symbol of her rebellion. As noted earlier, owls, according to Rowland,
have a dual symbolism as the omen of victory as well as of death or doom (115-117).
Failure of some kind is certainly suggested in that the bird depicted in the final scene is wounded
and unable to fly; even though the suicide is described in a manner that allows it to be read even as
something of a triumph, the bird in the scene questions such a reading. In the scene Edna is described
as having independently and willingly chosen the path she takes. The bird, however, does not fall by its
own choice. Something external has disabled it and made it incapable of flying. Similarly, it could be
argued that Edna does not genuinely choose suicide, but is forced to it. The restraints and demands of
society are much stronger on her than, for example, on Mademoiselle Reisz, as I pointed out in
subchapter 4.2. Success as an artist is, therefore, a much more difficult aim for Edna. It could be argued
that it is because of the familial pressures being stronger – and the fact that she does not settle for mere
artistic freedom like Mademoiselle Reisz but wants complete independence – that she eventually fails,
both in becoming an artist and in achieving freedom: artistic, financial, emotional or sexual.
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Although suicide is Edna‟s choice, it is not an independent or freely made choice, but rather a
choice between two evils. In the end, she realizes that because of her family and role as a mother, she
cannot have her true love, Robert – who could not accept her leaving her family – or devote to her art
and sexual desires with other men without hurting her children. Even if Edna is not a conventionally
self-sacrificial mother, she does love her children, unlike George Spangler argues, in stating that her
concern for her children at the end of the novel is sudden and that previously they “have seemed to
matter little as long as they were out of the way” (244). There are some passages in the novel that could
be used to support such a reading. For example, Edna‟s love is described as “uneven” (18), and she is
not overly protective of her children or inclined to have them around her at all times. However, she
never abandons them either: when they are not with her, they are well taken care of by people they
know, and it is always a temporary arrangement (for example pp. 2, 5, 7, 19, 57). Her lack of excessive
protectiveness seems to be good for them – instead of running to her over the smallest setback, such as
falling down, they rather “pick [themselves] up, wipe the water out of [their] eyes and the sand out of
[their] mouth[s] and go on playing” (7). When they are genuinely upset, however, and do need tending
to, Edna seems to be quite capable and willing to care for them, soothing them even better than the
ultimate mother, Adèle Ratignolle, is able to: despite Adèle having “…pacified [Raoul] as well as she
could…” it is Edna who manages to sooth him to sleep (39). Furthermore, if Edna is at times relieved
to have someone else take care of the children for her, she does not want to be away from them for too
long, but actively seeks their company as well: once, for example, when they come to her to ask for
candy, she attempts “to detain them for a little talk and some pleasantry” (12). She even visits them
after having supposedly reached independence by moving into her “pigeon-house” and “[weeps] for
very pleasure when she [feels] their little arms clasping her; their hard, ruddy cheeks pressed against
her own glowing cheeks. She [looks] into their faces with hungry eyes that [can] not be satisfied with
looking” (94). Furthermore, she herself says she would give up almost anything, including her life, for
her children, even though she would not sacrifice her individuality (47). It becomes clear, then, that
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Edna has not freed herself of neither her marital nor parental ties. Furthermore, unlike Spangler claims,
it is quite convincing that she would find motherhood an even more compelling and unbreakable tie
than marriage. She is perhaps not what one might call „the mother type‟, but she does love the children
in her own way. It is also quite believable that a divorce and scandals related to her lifestyle would be
harmful to the children.
If she wishes to avoid hurting her children, she is left with two alternatives: returning to her
husband to a life of compromising her individuality, and death. Of these two, she chooses what to her
appears as the lesser evil, death. As the bird in the scene is made unable to fly she is made unable to do
what she really wants by external factors, and the only thing left for her to choose is how and where to
fall. As the bird in the scene, she chooses to fall in solitude, into the sea, rather than flutter back to earth
– back to the normal, norm-bound life – as the weaklings do in Mademoiselle Reisz‟s metaphor. These
are her only options at that point. As Gray states: “In life, under the irresistible realm of ideology, Edna
could exist only in a female role of limitation. In death, she symbolically enters the realm of nature as
she wades into „the sea,‟… Heroically, Edna escapes oppressive ideology, but tragically, does so only
in death” (72).
Edna‟s fate links The Awakening to a larger literary tradition of women and drowning. Death by
drowning is a common fate for defiant female protagonists in 19th- and early 20th-century literature,
characters such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot. For Edna, as for
many female characters before and after her, liberation and self-fulfillment can finally be found only in
the engulfing embrace of water and in the death that this embrace brings with it. In The Awakening,
however, drowning is not presented simply as a victory, or as a completely free choice. Undertones of
defeat in the face of powerful social pressures are most certainly present in the final scene of The
Awakening, and particularly in its bird symbolism, as I pointed out above. These undertones
compliment – and complicate – the idea that Edna has finally reached freedom and escaped the societal
cage.
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5. Conclusion
In this thesis my aim was to analyze how birds are used as symbols in Kate Chopin‟s fiction. Freedom
and the aspiration for it, an individual‟s clash with society in pursuit of freedom are central in Chopin‟s
works. Birds in her writing symbolize these things particularly in connection to women. In my analysis
chapters I have studied how birds represent different aspects of women‟s situation. Birds, especially
caged and domesticated birds are connected to women‟s captivity: the societal cage that limit women‟s
existence as well as their traditional silence and domesticity. However, even when confined, birds
almost invariably symbolize aspiration and longing for freedom. Accordingly, Chopin‟s bird
symbolism does not end in the captivity symbolized by the cage, but is linked to women‟s dreams of
freedom and their concrete attempts to gain independence in the form of self-ownership and finding
one‟s voice, for example in art.
Chopin‟s use of bird symbolism should be viewed in its context: it is linked to a larger history of
bird symbolism as well as to women‟s writing which employs birds a symbol. Women‟s position was a
central topic in the 19th century, both in political debate and in literature, and therefore it is not
surprising that bird imagery, too, was utilized to address the issue. The caged bird is traditionally a
strong symbol of wrongful imprisonment, and thus easily convertible to feminist use. Mary
Wollstonecraft used a bird metaphor to criticize women‟s situation in the 18th century. Birds were also
used by several of Chopin‟s contemporaries, such as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and
Willa Cather, whose novel A Lost Lady (1923) is reminiscent of The Awakening in many ways, not
least in its use of birds as a symbol of women. According to Showalter, caged song-birds were often
used as a symbolic representation of the situation for female artists in United States in the 19th century
(1994, 14).
I began my analysis of Chopin‟s birds by focusing on birds that are confined. In 3.1 I analyzed
caged birds in Chopin‟s fiction, which are, in my view, the strongest symbol of confinement in
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Chopin‟s fiction – physical, social and psychological restrictions. To explain why, I pointed out several
features of the cage as a symbol: the continuous, comprehensive and drastically limiting nature of
captivity it suggests, as well as the implication to reprehensible and continuing activity on the part of
the captor. What makes this image so strong, however, is the bird within the cage and its powerful and
almost inevitable connection to freedom. It is through the utilization of birds that the image becomes
one of wrongful imprisonment. In Chopin‟s fiction caged birds are used as a representation of the
limitations to women‟s existence: physical, emotional, financial and professional. The
comprehensiveness and complicated nature of these limitations, women‟s cage, is shown by how
difficult it is for the women to escape it – perhaps it is even impossible, as neither of the women
manage it: Athénaïse returns to her husband and to the conventional roles she tried to escape and Edna
commits suicide.
While the caged bird is rather strongly related to resistance to captivity – even if often at least partly
unsuccessful resistance – domestic birds on the other hand are not as defiant, or as strong as symbols of
longing for freedom. Rather, they are related to internalized control, to the captives controlling
themselves and others, as well as to control coming from outside. In 3.2 I analyzed domestic birds as
symbols of women‟s situation with regard to ownership, control and sexuality in particular. I found that
poultry is connected particularly to marriage and symbolizes the limitations which this institution poses
for women and girls, regardless of their actual marital status. Even unmarried girls‟ and women‟s
existence is limited by the institution of marriage as girls are educated from early on to attract men in
order to marry, and also because of the strong expectations of women‟s sexuality and sensuality being
limited to marriage. In many cases, like in the case of the three wives in At Fault, these expectations
have been learned so well that they seem to originate from the women themselves, and the women even
impose the same rules on others. Another example of how the institution of marriage limits women‟s
freedom even if they are not married is Mademoiselle Reisz in The Awakening: because she is
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unmarried, her life and indeed even her personality are viewed as defective by people around her
despite her great accomplishments in other areas of life.
In chapter 4 I focused on birds as symbols of women‟s rebellion and various attempts at gaining
freedom. It is important to note that birds, even domesticated birds, are not there in Chopin‟s
production to suggest that women are inherently more domestic and loyal or less adventurous and free
than men, but that they have been trapped in and by such ideas of femininity. Equally important it is to
note that many women in Chopin‟s fiction attempt to challenge these ideas in one way or another. In
analyzing Chopin‟s bird symbolism one must pay attention to whether the birds make noise or not, as
voice is very important as a symbol of protesting against distasteful conditions and captivity instead of
accepting them in her fiction.
In 4.1 I analyzed birds as symbols of women‟s rebellion in general, and their attempts to gain selfownership. These birds are most commonly related to women‟s attempts to fight the restrictions posed
by their marriages, and to gain control of their own bodies, emotions and finances. Edna‟s rebellion
against her marriage in The Awakening is symbolized by the hooting of an owl at the top of a wateroak. The owl appears twice at the site of her resistance to Léonce‟s demands, and here voice is clearly
significant: the owl hoots as long as Edna resists, but when she bends to the wishes of her husband, the
owl falls silent. Similarly voice is crucial in the second appearance of the parrot in The Awakening,
which is related to Edna‟s growing interest in Robert. The parrot poses a threat to the patriarchal
society around it as long as it makes noise, but when it ceases to object vocally, the threat decreases
enough that the bird is again tolerable to people around it, and allowed to live. Birds are also used in
“Athénaïse” to accompany the eponymous character‟s attempts to escape her husband. It is clear that
she is trying to gain control of her life, which has been given by her parents to Cazeau. Her attempts
fail, however, as she finds little support for such attempts. The society around both Athénaïse and Edna
fails to comprehend why they are unsatisfied or what they wish to gain by their unconventional actions.
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Along with attempts towards self-ownership, another way in which women rebel in Chopin‟s
fiction is art. In 4.2 I focused on those birds which represent rebellious female artists in particular.
Voice is crucial here as well, as a representation of women‟s art, their rebellion against a society and
such an image of femininity that does not allow for artistic ambitions. Birds that symbolize female
artists are most notably present in the first bird scene in The Awakening, where the two noisy birds
represent Edna Pontellier, who wishes to become a painter, and the musician, Mademoiselle Reisz.
Like the birds, a parrot and a mockingbird, the two women are different: their personalities, lifestyles
and chosen forms of art are different. However, they are both limited by the expectations of the society
around them – expectations, which are equally limiting for both even though they may be of a different
kind in each case, similarly as both birds are prisoners despite the fact that the cage of the parrot is
different from the chain which holds the mockingbird to its perch. Furthermore, both resist these
expectations and continue producing their art, similarly as the birds continue to make noise.
In 4.3 I studied dream birds, and particularly the contrast between the dream bird images and the
real birds in The Awakening. Significantly, dream birds in the novel are related to success: they are
flying free, without anything to limit their flight. The real birds, however, are less successful. The pet
birds never manage to break free of their captivity, and the wild bird which Edna observes on her last
swim, on the other hand, is disabled, circling down to the water and most likely to its death. The
contrast between dreams and reality is, then, powerfully expressed via bird symbolism in The
Awakening. Similar tendencies are present elsewhere as well, for example in At Fault, where a
woman‟s dreams of freedom are connected to bird imagery. The disparity between dreams and reality
is present in At Fault as well, and Melicent, like many other female characters in Chopin‟s fiction,
never finds the equal relationship with a man, of which she dreams. Freedom certainly appears as a
complicated matter and a goal which is not easily reached. Furthermore, it is evident from Chopin‟s
work that any struggle towards more freedom or equality is one that will inevitably include failures and
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setbacks. It is only in dreams that freedom can be gained quickly and simply, by a triumphant,
unhampered flight.
As a representation of women, bird symbolism in Kate Chopin‟s fiction is significant in that it
challenges several aspects of the traditional binary thinking in the West. Cixous has examined binary
thinking and its strong connection to views on gender, and her work has been central in my analysis of
birds as a representation of women. Traditionally, women are connected with nature, silence, the body
and passivity, for example (Cixous, 63-64). Superficially the use of birds as a symbol of women could
be viewed as conforming to this view. According to Rowland, however, the connection of birds to
freedom and to the soul is so strong and common that it could even cautiously be called universal (vii).
By connecting women to birds, then, it is possible to question, as Chopin does, the strong connection
between women and the body, the image that connects women essentially to reproduction and excludes
them from the sphere of culture, political decision making, work outside the home, public performance
and historical significance. Even though connecting women to birds and thus to nature may seem to,
and in a sense does support binary thinking – in that it does link women to nature and men to culture –
it in fact poses a challenge to such thinking connecting women, along with nature, to freedom and
aspiration for it, and to the soul rather than to the body. Furthermore, many of Chopin‟s birds are
subversive in that they make noise and thereby defy and disrupt the patriarchal order around them –
similarly as many of the women in her works refuse to remain silent and accept their traditional roles as
wives and mothers. While Chopin does not entirely deconstruct binary thinking, then, she most
certainly questions many aspects of it by her use of birds as a symbol of women.
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