Mademoiselle Reisz and Edna Pontellier

In my opinion, the most interesting interaction in Chopin’s The Awakening occurs between Mademoiselle Reisz and Edna Pontellier. Reisz, like Pontellier, has renounced society and its material trappings in order to awaken an inner spiritual life as a serious musician. She has done so fully by choosing to live alone and in poverty. Similarly, Pontellier has embarked on her own path of enlightenment; however, her spiritual journey is in a fledgling state, as revealed by Madame Ratignolle: “In some way you seem to me like a child, Edna. You seem to act without a certain amount of reflection which is necessary in this life” (96). Edna Pontellier enjoys the status of Reisz’s preferred listener. 

The narrator of the story implicitly acknowledges a sacred bond between the two women: “There was nothing which so quieted the turmoil of Edna’s senses as a visit to Mademoiselle Reisz” (78). It was Reisz who told Pontellier that Robert is in love with her. Near the end of the story, Pontellier is swimming into oblivion, the antithesis of awakening, as her life flashes before her: “How 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). Although her final act was one of defiance, did Pontellier ultimately lack that kind of courage?