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Minta Smith
Professor Richards
English 357
October 20, 2010
Summary and Critique of Patricia C. Yaeger’s “Language and Female Emancipation”
Mercifully or not, the Norton Critical Edition of Chopin’s The Awakening cut down Patricia S.
Yaeger’s critique of the novel, so from what the analogy’s companying annotation tells was
originally a twenty-two pages becomes a round six. Such a fact needs to be kept in consideration
during reading of the article for, despite that original length, Yaeger herself employs a to-thepoint concentration from the newly-cut start: in the first two presented paragraphs one finds what
would act as a map to the rest of the article, concerning how The Awakening is a “grand
subversive novel” which could also belong to a “great tradition of emancipatory fiction” (Yaeger
289). Here the emphasis in not on what already constitutes the “grand tradition” but how the
“new, utopian image of the emergence of women’s antithetical desires” is constructed,
presumably the female emancipation of the title by the means of that other aspect of the title:
language. From here Yaeger presents textually based elements of Chopin’s use of literary
constructs aimed toward revealing female emancipation or, as with the case of Edna Pontellier,
“the emergence of women’s antithetical desires” (286). Yaeger supports that the “pivotal event
of Chopin’s novel” is in the “tension between Edna’s imagined freedom and Robert’s incessant
speech” (288, 286); the tension forms a language where from Robert talking to Edna in a
“dialogic ground” “Robert’s metaphors become [Edna’s] own”, unlike the one-sided
conversations Edna has with her husband (286). Using the sea-spirit story scene from the novel,
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Yaeger likens the language adopted by Edna from Robert “like fairy-tale: romantic, enticing,
utopian”, the last of which “afford[s] us a special consolation”, paradoxical for being both
liberating and limiting (286, 297). For although the language provides Edna with a voice or
“self-articulation” the language also limits that voice through the filters of “Robert’s conceit”
and the “moody discourse of romance” dictates the tale, the language and thus Edna herself (287,
288).
Even with pieces missing from editing or perhaps because of said abridgment, Yaeger’s
argument throughout the piece reads continuous and focused in a for-the-most-part coherent
(read: small words) mode of writing that interweaves with the text using both small samples—for
example, the phrase “to swim far out, where no woman had gone before”—as well as large
paragraph length samples containing the gist of a situation for which Yaeger can use to work her
argument—such relating the “hundred years…comic repartee” set between Robert and Edna
(286, 287). With one large sample, such assertions as “fairy-tale” and “romantic” are given direct
textual evidence in bulk presenting the characters interacting with each other—as in this case—
Edna acting the Sleeping Beauty and Robert her guarding knight (286). In such comparison
Yaeger also provides useful idioms or words to neatly sum up a formalistic abstraction such as
“moody discourse of romance”, “romantic framework” and “hieroglyph” (287, 290).
Yet, continuing on this tangent, the handy catchphrases can work against Yaeger’s force
of argument when the use of the phrase or word seems out of place or ambiguous. When
comparing what was essentially Edna’s confession of love to Robert against a difficult web of
theory on Edna’s “falsification of her story” or her “system of self-explanation” to the beginning
of the novel makes it necessary to reread the section, which is additionally hindered by the lack
of exemplar text from the early part of the novel and the usual use of such words as
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“heterogeneous” rather than ‘diverse’ (289). But most difficult to metaphorically swallow is
Yaeger’s point of argument using sudden evidence of Julia Kristeva’s “signifying system”,
where little if any explanation is given as to what textual details fall under Kristeva’s levies of
“phobias” and “frailty” in Edna’s love for Robert which so close to the end of Yaeger’s argument
deviates what more force it could have held otherwise.