“The Ghost that Drives the Machine”?: Figurations of the Quadroon in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
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A predicament perhaps not unique to this text, Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening presents certain challenges for readers who want to marvel at the aesthetic perfection and the thematic richness of a novel by a remarkably gifted writer. Compared to the wealth of scholarly effort devoted to the text, there is a relative lack in specifically dealing with an area that distresses a number of readers: The novel’s representation of race, or the presence of those silent, faceless, plodding black female characters whose labor the “awakening” of an upper middle-class woman Edna Pontellier is contingent on. In this paper, I examine several scenes in the novel where baffling affinities can be drawn between Edna and the quadroon nurse who attends to Edna’s two young sons. Though Edna does not establish any emotional kinship with the quadroon or sympathize with her suffering or with that of other black women who perform menial labor in her world, Chopin offers moments of metaphorical doubling between Edna and the quadroon. The quadroon’s performative and feigned manner, whose relationship to her caretaking tasks are depicted as affected and forced, curiously mirrors Edna who increasingly absents herself from her daily activities and her roles in wifehood. And yet, despite such moments of identification, for Edna to actually be compassionate to the plight of the black women—as critics have pointed out this failed recognition as to some degree relevant to the final, tragic ending—is impossible given the terms of race and class in the novel. Scenes that oscillate between identification and dissociation illustrate that it is only in separating herself from the quadroon in her daily encounters that Edna is able to establish connection with the black woman. I then proceed to consider, a la Morrison’s “the ghost that drives the machine,” the implications of Chopin’s representation of the quadroon, who is, though inarticulate and characterless, a central, lingering presence in the novel.
Abstract
A predicament perhaps not unique to this text, Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening presents certain challenges for readers who want to marvel at the aesthetic perfection and the thematic richness of a novel by a remarkably gifted writer. Compared to the wealth of scholarly effort devoted to the text, there is a relative lack in specifically dealing with an area that distresses a number of readers: The novel’s representation of race, or the presence of those silent, faceless, plodding black female characters whose labor the “awakening” of an upper middle-class woman Edna Pontellier is contingent on. In this paper, I examine several scenes in the novel where baffling affinities can be drawn between Edna and the quadroon nurse who attends to Edna’s two young sons. Though Edna does not establish any emotional kinship with the quadroon or sympathize with her suffering or with that of other black women who perform menial labor in her world, Chopin offers moments of metaphorical doubling between Edna and the quadroon. The quadroon’s performative and feigned manner, whose relationship to her caretaking tasks are depicted as affected and forced, curiously mirrors Edna who increasingly absents herself from her daily activities and her roles in wifehood. And yet, despite such moments of identification, for Edna to actually be compassionate to the plight of the black women—as critics have pointed out this failed recognition as to some degree relevant to the final, tragic ending—is impossible given the terms of race and class in the novel. Scenes that oscillate between identification and dissociation illustrate that it is only in separating herself from the quadroon in her daily encounters that Edna is able to establish connection with the black woman. I then proceed to consider, a la Morrison’s “the ghost that drives the machine,” the implications of Chopin’s representation of the quadroon, who is, though inarticulate and characterless, a central, lingering presence in the novel.
참고문헌 (18)
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