Edna
Pontellier as Commodity:
a waif amidst the forces of American capitalism
By: Kim
Pokin
Knox College Common Room: Volume 2, Number 1
January 10, 1998
URL: http://knox.knox.edu:5718/~engdept/commonroom/volume_two/kpokin/
It would be comparatively simple to make yourself a decorative
object to adorn a man's house, if that were all that was expected of you. It would be
simple enough to accomplish marvels of cooking and housekeeping if that were the chief end
of life. It is when one attempts to combine the useful and the ornamental - to be a
Dresden statuette in the parlor and a reliable range in the kitchen - that the situation
becomes trying, and calls for genuine ability. Yet this is what we expect of the average
American wife, merely as a matter of course. She must be a paragon of domesticity, an
ornament in society, a wonder in finance and a light in the literary circle to which she
belongs. (from "The American Wife", by Dorothy Dix)
Some critics have chosen an economic lens with which to examine
Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (first published 1900). Robert Shulman argues that
Carrie is part of a system which commodifies people and makes human relations into mere
exchanges of goods. Because Kate Chopin's The Awakening was first published and
written in the same era as Dreiser's novel (1899), and because the same American
capitalism pervaded the lives of Chopin and, thus, Edna Pontellier, it is worthwhile to
construct an argument which focuses on Edna's commodification and its effects, which
include, ultimately, her self-inflicted death.
Shulman, in his essay entitled, "Dreiser and the Dynamics of
American Capitalism," evaluates the cast of characters in Sister Carrie in terms of
their relationships to one another as objects and possessors of objects. Shulman says that
"Marx and Lukacs on the basic processes of commodification or reification provide a
related way of understanding the divisive pressures of American capitalism." (I, p.
560) According to Lukacs, "'the essence of commodity structure ... is that a relation
between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquired a 'phantom
objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal
every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." (I, p. 561)
Thus, capitalism creates human relations which operate more as exchanges of goods and
services and leave no room for one's selfhood. Such is the case with Edna Pontellier, the
main character whose various "awakenings" to her selfhood we follow in Chopin's
novel: Edna is a "waif amidst forces." (II, p. 1) The forces are those of
capitalism, which creates social conventions and the commodification and reification which
construct her as an object.
In order to prove Edna's susceptibility to these forces, they must
be specified and analyzed within her situation. The expectations of women in her culture
and society were explicit: since they were not expected to help contribute to the
household's income by working, they were forced to be dutiful wives and mothers, as well
as housekeepers and experts in social etiquette. One of the many etiquette manuals of the
time offers women advice on how and why to successfully maintain all of these
expectations: on The Influence of Mothers, one reads that "Many mothers farm
their children out to nurses, and then give themselves to household duties, social
pleasures, or possibly to duties which may be important in themselvesÉMany otherwise
excellent women find the nursery a prison, and the care of their own children irksome,
simply because they have a perverted mother sense." (III, p. 123) It seems as
if Edna is already at odds with this advice; it has been stated that she is not a
"mother-woman," (IV, p. 9) and she most definitely finds her children
"irksome", at least most of the time.
Another qualification to which Edna does not conform is the
requirement that she "receive" guests in her home on a certain day of the week.
Such a service was a very important ‘duty’ of Creole housewives; it was the time
when good ‘business’ relations may be established by the woman of the house:
"Let nothing, but the most imperative duty, call you out upon your reception day.
Your callers are, in a measure, invited guests, and it will be an insulting mark of
rudeness to be out when they call." (III, p. 123) Edna directly defies this
convention. Her husband is visibly upset at her misbehavior, and the connection with the
success of his business endeavors is apparent when he scolds her, saying, "I tell you
what it is, Edna; you can’t afford to snub Mrs. Belthrop. Why, Belthrop could buy and
sell us ten times over. His business is worth a good, round sum to me. You’d better
write her a note." (IV, p. 49) She has not upheld her part as an adornment of his
household which operates its social machinery every Tuesday; his financial situation may
suffer because of it.
Housekeeping was an additional ‘duty’ of the housewife.
In an essay entitled "Creole Women," by Mary L. Shaffter, which actually reads
more like an advertisement of women than an essay, she states that "Creole women, as
a rule, are good housekeepers, are economical and industrious. ... They have accepted
their lot, they attend to their homes, they make their cheap dresses with their French
taste and wear them with the grace of a grande dame." (V, p. 138) So, not only is
Edna expected to be an "economical and industrious" worker, thus keeping the
capitalistic unit intact, she is commanded to be happy with such an objectification; she
should even skimp on her own dresses so as to save more money for the family unit. Edna
certainly does not keep house very well. Mr. Pontellier tells a doctor that she lets it
"go to the dickens." (IV, p. 63)
Besides performing services and operating as the machine-like
keeper of the children, house, and social contracts, Creole women such as Edna (who has
been forced into this society by her marriage) are only valuable if they are beautiful.
Shaffter’s "essay" praises Creole women for their exceptional beauty:
"There live no lovelier girls than those one meets in Creole society in New Orleans.
Such figures, lithe yet full, such shapely heads, with crowns of glossy black hair, such a
clear olive complexion, and great dark eyes, which speak before the arched red lips ...
" (V, p. 138) There are other stipulations with regards to what women should wear.
Thus, it is expected that they present an aesthetically pleasing facade to society in
order to be accepted. They are also advised to teach their daughters early on how to
maintain this facade, this "object" nature: "Their babies are made welcome
and tenderly reared. Especially are the girls the object of much solicitude. Above all
their beauty must be preserved, their hands and feet, their glossy hair and white teeth
must be cared for." (V, p. 137) This piece of advice almost makes the young girl
sound like a porcelain doll whose surface must be cleaned and shined every so often to
please its owner. Such was the fate of the Creole girl; to be primped, dressed, and
made-up until she was a suitable "piece of personal property" (IV, p. 4)
All of these services and maintenance of acceptable appearances, it
is important to remember, created a seemingly stable family environment which could ensure
the safe social progress and financial well-being that was so cherished in these times,
and which created a capitalistic unit of consumption and production that conformed to
social expectation.
Along with the commodification which American capitalism has
inflicted upon Edna and her contemporaries, Mr. Pontellier clearly subscribes to this
system and personally tries, whether subconsciously or consciously, to make Edna and his
children do the same. His wife, to him, is clearly not a person with agency or individual
needs and respectability. He "had been a rather courteous husband so long as he met a
certain tacit submissiveness in his wife." (IV, p. 55) Thus, as long as she plays
into his conception of her, as a passive object or vessel which must fulfill his demands,
he is satisfied with their "exchange" as a married couple.
At the beginning of their marriage, Mr. Pontellier "fell in
love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and an
ardor which left nothing to be desired." (IV, p. 18) Now, however, she serves a
purpose, she performs a job; she has become for him a kind of 'mother-machine.' When he
finds one of the children with a fever he chides Edna: "If it was not a mother's
place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with
his brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once." (IV, p. 6) He does
not seem to care deeply for the children; he is merely concerned that his wife is not
performing her duty. It could be said that he objectifies his children as well; they are
there because they serve a purpose: 'if it isn't their job to run around and make noise
and keep Edna busy and eat the bonbons and peanuts I bring home (when I remember to),
whose on earth is it?' His relationship with his children exemplifies what Shulman
describes when he notes that, in Sister Carrie, "After the exchange of money [with
Drouet], Carrie 'felt bound to him by a strange tie of affection' (Sister Carrie,
p. 61). Because she is human, Carrie experiences the exchange relation as creating 'a tie
of affection.'" (I, p. 565) The exchange of physical, valuable goods becomes the
basis of Mr. Pontellier's "ties of affection" with his children and, to a
certain degree, with his wife, which demonstrates his inextricable involvement with and
promotion of the capitalism that has served him well.
When Mr. Pontellier sees that his wife has been out in the sun a
while, he says, "'You are burnt beyond recognition,' ... looking at his wife as one
looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage." (IV,
4) From the first few pages, then, he is characterized as an individual who values his
property, his material belongings (including his objectified wife and children) very much.
Later, when the Pontelliers are in bed, he is discussing the day's events with Edna and
she is "overcome with sleep." (IV, 7) Finding her unresponsive, Mr. Pontellier
"thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his
existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him and valued so
little his conversation." (my italics, IV, 7) It seems as if their conversation is a
sort of exchange that may benefit them financially or at least socially (which would lead
to financial benefit) at a later time, and he is upset that she is unwilling to
participate.
Mr. Pontellier does not, arguably, consciously desire to objectify
and mechanize his wife and children. He simply knows no other system of running things; he
has lived with commodification and profited from it his whole life. As John Carlos Rowe
states,
Pontellier's equation of money with production emphasizes his
inability to see the difference between what Shulman calls the "use-value" of a
thing and its "exchange-value." (I, p. 561). He sees money as having value
within itself and therefore is indubitably a victim of American capitalism.
The 'reification-of-wife' system seems to work so well for Mr.
Ratignolle and so many others whose wives who have assumed their 'duties' with a glowing
smile and a similar ability to quantify and make good use of the people around them:
"They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed
it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering
angels." (IV, p. 9) His wife does not seem to be taking her objectification so well,
and it bothers him immensely. He cannot relate to her awakening selfhood and dismisses it
as mental illness or some sort of emotional trouble that he cannot hope to understand. He
merely hopes that his 'machine' gets 'fixed' soon enough so that it will not disrupt their
social standing.
Edna exists as a commodity not only to her society and to her
husband; she also serves a purpose of exchange with Robert Lebrun and with Alcee Arobin.
Both of these men are clearly depicted by Chopin as womanizers. They have both also come
into money without truly earning it, which demonstrates the difficulty relating to one's
product of labor or, thereby, one's wealth: "In [the] world of late capitalism,
production and consumption are separated and the entire process has been mystified. The
relation between production and consumption has been obscured and so has the role human
labor plays." (I, p. 563) Clearly Robert and Alcee are not skilled in taking proper
measures to ensure the worth of one's commodities, which could explain their meaningless
relations with women. Both Robert and Alcee, while 'rescuing' Edna temporarily from the
objectification of her husband and family, place her in a new category of commodified
worth: that of the "lover." She is allowed to experience passion and pleasure
with these men, which defies social convention, but she is still treated as a page to be
written upon, an object that is useful, as is the series of women which Robert and Alcee
have romances with. Once they have become tiresome, died, or gone back to their husbands,
these women no longer fulfill their role as vessel for pleasure and attention. Edna cannot
be defined by them in terms of herself, only in terms of their changing need for her.
Edna, however, begins to realize (or imagine), in the beginning of
the novel, that there is something more than an object beneath her surface. She begins to
blatantly refuse to accept the role society, her husband, and her children have given her,
one which takes no notice of her inner desires, passions, artistic tendencies toward
expressions of self. In an essay which confronts the changing roles of women in society,
entitled "Are Women Growing Selfish?" Dorothy Dix stated that
The truth of the matter simply is that women have awakened to the fact that they have been overdoing the self-sacrifice business. ... The woman who makes a slave of herself, gets a slave's pay in contemptuous indifference. No man ever cared for the thing that groveled at his feet, and those women have been best loved who have stood up for their rights ... (my italics, VII, p. 145)
Indeed, her comments echo Edna's seemingly subconscious realization that she is a "thing", a "slave", and has been a commodity in the "business" of social conformity for too long.
Edna's awakenings and attempts to connect with (or create) her
'self' take various forms. One such attempt manifests itself within Edna's physical being:
her body. Long before she has sexual relations with Alcee or passionate physical
interactions with Robert, Edna begins to recognize her own flesh as something that does
not belong to her husband or her children. Rowe argues that, for a woman at this time,
it is always someone else who possesses your body, and such 'possession' already signifies something other than your body: a 'wife,' a 'lover', a white sunshade, a sun-bonnet, children, heirs. In short, the body is exchangeable for something else, has been transformed into something else, has entered an economy in which it can be so changed. (VI, p. 4)
For Edna to desire possession of her own body, then, is a rather revolutionary thing. This desire to shed materiality and her 'self' as a commodity is visible in the interactions with her peignoir. She takes it off or puts it on at various times, according to who is around her and what they want her to be. Even the reader is not fully privy to how Edna is discovering herself and removing robes of objectification, as Rowe recognizes:
Utterly unlike Dreiser's Carrie Meeber, whose body is nothing but her clothes or the gazes of others in which she assumes form, Edna experiences her body in scenes that are remarkable for their refusal of the reader's own gaze. (VI, p. 1)
Her final shedding of the commodified self is represented by her nakedness at the beach in the final scene. She can no longer stand to stay clothed in an image which other people have assigned to her.
Another significant attempt to throw off conventions and
objectification is through her painting. She paints more and more consistently throughout
the novel; at first she tries to realistically portray Madame Ratignolle and fails, at
least in terms of Madame's own perception of the portrait: "She was greatly
disappointed to find that it did not look like her. But it was a fair enough piece of
work, and in many respects satisfying. Mrs. Pontellier evidently did not think so. After
surveying the sketch critically she drew a broad smudge of paint across its surface and
crumpled the paper between her hands." (IV, p. 13) Thus, it may have been, in fact, a
decent portrait, but because Madame Ratignolle was not pleased with Edna's rendering of
her, Edna is not pleased with it herself. It seems she lacks the courage or self-assertion
to portray people as she sees fit, no matter how they view her work afterwards, and to
formulate her own opinions of her art.
Later, Edna becomes more and more involved with her painting,
targeting her father and her children. It becomes more clear that she has none of the
"artistic courage" that Mlle. Reisz tells her she must have in order to be an
artist. She asks Madame Ratignolle's opinion of a painting, knowing all the while that her
opinion is "next to valueless." (IV, p. 53) The woman tells Edna they are
wonderful, and she succumbs to the comfort in the statement, almost feeling
"complacency at her friend's praise." (IV, p. 53) The reader is probably meant
to understand that Edna's paintings are not, after all, wonderful. Chopin chooses Edna's
teacher's name to be "Laidpore", and laid means "ugly" in
French. Edna clearly lacks the talent, the courage, or both, to become a successful
painter. She will not succeed in expressing her inner self via this method. It is
revealing, however, that she felt compelled to try, and also that she "had reached a
stage when she seemed to be no longer feeling her way, working, when in the humor, with
sureness and ease. And being devoid of ambition, and striving not toward accomplishment,
she drew satisfaction from the work in itself." (IV, p. 70) Thus, Edna knows the
difference between the "use-value" and the "exchange-value" of a
thing. She does not wish to sell her art to other people or see it become popular and
monetarily valuable; what she 'values' is the very process of creation, the passion
and expression of self that cannot be effectively married with a commodified self or a
commodified art.
Another option which is presented to her is music; its passionate,
self-nourishing, and non-capitalistic qualities are introduced to her by Mlle. Reisz.
Previously to Mlle. Reisz's rendition of the Chopin piece, Edna was merely "very fond
of music. Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind."
(IV, p. 25) Thus, she has found it pleasant to listen to, as most people do, and has
usually conjured up concrete images of people and things and places when she has heard
various songs. With the onslaught of Mlle. Reisz's playing, however, Edna's "material
pictures" (IV, p. 26) of concrete objects disappear. She finally experiences passion:
"It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the
first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress
of the abiding truth." (IV, p. 26) She has a very nonverbal, abstract, immaterial
response to Frederic Chopin's music and Mlle. Reisz's marvelous enactment of it. The
correlation between the composer's name and the author's pseudonym (her actual name was
Kate O'Flaherty) is, of course, no accident. Perhaps there was something of the
"Romantic tradition" (IV, footnote about F. Chopin, p. 26) in Kate Chopin, as
there seems to be in Edna. Whatever the correlation, Edna's self is finally aroused. She
is shedding concreteness, objects, material things, the idea that she herself is any kind
of 'commodity'.
Again, however, Edna cannot succeed in music. The passage in which
she sits down at the piano, waiting for Mlle. Reisz to arrive, is a short but telling one.
She was "softly picked out with one hand the bars of a piece of music which lay open
before her. A half-hour went by. ... She was growing interested in her occupation of
picking out the aria, when there was a second rap at the door." (IV, p. 93) Robert
interrupts her. She is distracted from expressing herself musically by the symbolic
temptations of Robert. She could have taken lessons from Mlle. Reisz, but instead she was
happy to merely listen to the old woman play, or to Robert singing. Robert is an
accomplished musician: his "voice was not pretentious. It was musical and true. The
voice, the notes, the whole refrain haunted her memory." (IV, p. 39) Edna is thus
satisfied to sing his song, "Ah! Si tu savais," rather than make up - or
think up - her own, which is, of course, indicative that she is without a self, is
objectified, in their relationship. It is also significant that Edna chooses to pick out
the notes that are placed before her instead of "improvising", as Mlle. Reisz
does so impressively. Edna will never find a way to march to the beat of her own drum. Her
increasing tendency towards artistic endeavors at least indicates that she wishes to
release some part of her 'self' that has been neglected under the reification of her
husband and children.
Edna's desire to succeed in and ultimate failure in painting and
music may seem to the reader to be merely a lack of talent, or a lack of better things to
do all day long [the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described her artistic attempts as "all
sorts of foolish fancies to divert her mind." (VIII, p. 164)]. It may also be argued,
however, that Edna is trying to undermine - however unknowingly - the capitalistic
tendencies that pervade her society. She may, on some level, understand or feel that
production and objectification are, ideally, the antitheses of art itself. Deborah E.
Barker states that "The key concept linking Edna's artistic growth and her growth as
an individual is her progression from an obstructed view to a penetrating vision."
(IX, p. 75) Barker links her obstructed vision to the protections of her husband's
affluence and her growth as an artist to a decline in material obstruction. She cites the
following passage: "There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social
scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she
took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an
individual." (IV, p. 89) Ultimately, she has moved away from her commodified self in
an attempt to find something more there, within herself. She tells Robert, "I am no
longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not." (IV, p. 102)
The unfortunate circumstance is that Edna cannot find anything else
within her. As Rowe points out, "What troubles Edna so profoundly is that [her body]
no longer belongs to her, but what 'she' is can find no natural ground, no utterly
transcendental experience of herself as a body." (VI, p. 4) She cannot, in the end,
escape her assigned role in society. She has been a commodity, a thing for sale, for so
long, that she cannot fully escape from her ingrained objectification; as Benn Michaels
points out, that money and what it can give you "confers power but as a thing that
you want and don't have ... [it] is never simply a means of getting what you want, it is
itself the thing you want, indeed, it is itself your want." (X, p. 33-34) Perhaps the
'self' Edna is seeking has been an 'antiself', a "thing she wants" for so long
that it will forever remain out of her reach. Her escape routes to higher planes of 'self'
are not truly open to her: she lacks talent and courage as an "artist", she
feels the objectification that still would await her as a "lover", and she
consequently has no where to go to express or create an inner self. If she were Madame
Ratignolle, she could have survived. But she was not a "mother-woman," and was
not willing to allow either word to mean the same thing as the word it is connected to in
that phrase. She consequently felt overwhelmed, perhaps, by the fact that she was a
"waif amid forces" and was not courageous enough to fly against the winds of
capitalism and convention; or perhaps a self was too much to hope for from the very
beginning, being something always out of reach, as is the desire for money and worldly
goods in Benn Michael's essay.
Her old, objectified ways overtake her and the last images she
processes are those of confinement and of herself as a governed entity. She has become the
victim of reification, which, as Carolyn Porter is quoted as stating, "'generates ...
people who assume a passive and 'contemplative' stance in the face of that objectified and
rationalized reality - people who seem to themselves to stand outside that reality because
their own participation in producing it is mystified' (Porter 189)." (VI, p. 9) Edna
is left in awe of the "rationalized reality" about her and feels her own painful
lack of agency or ability to create a 'self'. This echoes what Shulman says of Carrie:
"In her passivity, Carrie perfectly embodies the compelling power of commodities to
assume a separateness that make the self seem insignificant, unworthy." (I, p. 562)
Edna has been belittled and overpowered by the influence of
"commodities." As she retreats finally into the ocean she is flooded with images
and other sensory perceptions of her past: "Edna heard her father's voice and her
sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore
tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch." (IV,
p. 109) Thus, the sources of her most early objectification - her oppressive father,
overbearing sister, and idealized, meaningless romantic interest - return to her in a
tragic realization of her selflessness. She is left with no hope of an inner self, no
chance for redemption against American capitalism, and allows herself to sink into the
sea.
WORKS CITED
I: Shulman, Robert. "Dreiser and the Dynamics of American Capitalism." from Sister Carrie. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Donald Pizer, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. pp. 560-575.
II: Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Donald Pizer, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.
III: Wells, Richard A. "Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress of the Best American Society." from The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Margo Culley, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994. pp. 122-130.
IV: Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Margo Culley, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
V: Shaffter, Mary L. "Creole Women." from The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Margo Culley, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994. pp. 137-139.
VI: Rowe, John Carlos. "The Economics of the Body in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." from Perspectives on Kate Chopin, Proceedings from the Kate Chopin International Conference April 6, 7, 8, 1989. Natchitoches, LA: Northwestern State University Press, 1990. pp.1-24.
VII: Dix, Dorothy. "Are Women Growing Selfish?" and "The American Wife." from The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Margo Culley, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994. pp. 144-147.
VIII: Deyo, C.L. "From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch." from The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Margo Culley, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994. pp. 164-165.
IX: Barker, Deborah E. "The Awakening of Female Artistry." from Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, ed. by Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State Universtiy Press, 1992. pp. 61-79.
X: Michaels, Walter Benn. "Sister Carrie's Popular Economy." from The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, pp. 31-58.