The Awakening
Glossary
A
- Adèle Ratignolle
- Edna's close friend at Grand Isle, a strikingly beautiful Creole woman married seven years with three children (and expecting a fourth), who represents the 'mother-woman' ideal in its most graceful form. She sews constantly for her children, plays piano so others may dance, and speaks about her pregnancies with a frankness that startles Edna.
- Related: Mother-Women, Creole Society, The Ratignolle Household
- Alcée Arobin
- A fashionable, good-humored young man about town, a familiar figure at the races, the opera, and the clubs, who is introduced in the company of Mrs. Highcamp at the Jockey Club. Doctor Mandelet reacts to hearing his name with quiet unease, hoping — without explanation — that he is not connected to Edna's altered spirits.
- Related: The Jockey Club Races, Mrs. Highcamp
B
- Bathing at Grand Isle
- The daily ritual of sea-bathing that structures life at the resort, with guests wading into the Gulf at set hours in modest bathing costumes. Robert's invitation to Edna to join him for a swim in Chapter 5 is an ordinary courtesy on its surface, but it draws her toward the sea that will increasingly preoccupy her that summer.
- Related: The Voice of the Sea, Grand Isle, Robert Lebrun
C
- Chênière Caminada
- A small island near Grand Isle with a modest Gothic chapel, Our Lady of Lourdes, where members of the summer colony sail on Sunday mornings to hear mass. Edna's impulsive dawn trip there with Robert — sailing across the bay while she feels herself 'being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast' — is one of the novel's clearest early images of her drifting free of convention.
- Related: Mariequita, Madame Antoine, Robert Lebrun
- Creole Marital Customs
- A recurring observation in the novel that Creole husbands, unlike Léonce Pontellier's anxious possessiveness, are conventionally described as never jealous — Chopin's narrator notes that among them 'the gangrene passion is one which has become dwarfed by disuse.' Robert's teasing devotion to married women like Adèle Ratignolle is tolerated within the colony precisely because it is assumed to be harmless flirtation rather than genuine desire.
- Related: Creole Society, Robert Lebrun, Adèle Ratignolle
- Creole Society
- The close-knit community of French-descended, Catholic families who summer together at Grand Isle and dominate Edna's New Orleans social world. Edna, an outsider by birth, is startled by their unguarded frankness — open talk of childbirth and bodily matters that shocks her Kentucky Presbyterian upbringing — even as she comes to recognize it coexists with what the narrator calls their 'lofty chastity.'
- Related: Grand Isle, Adèle Ratignolle, Mother-Women
D
- Doctor Mandelet
- The Pontelliers' old family physician, a semi-retired doctor known more for wisdom than active practice, whom Léonce consults about Edna's altered behavior. He advises Léonce to leave her alone and let her mood pass, privately suspecting — though he does not say so aloud — that another man may be involved.
- Related: Léonce Pontellier
E
- Esplanade Street
- The fashionable New Orleans street where the Pontelliers keep a large, handsomely appointed double cottage, reflecting Léonce Pontellier's pride in his possessions and social standing. It is here, back from Grand Isle, that Edna's growing restlessness first erupts into open domestic conflict.
- Related: Léonce Pontellier, Tuesday Reception Day
G
- Grand Isle
- A resort island south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico where prosperous Creole families summer together at Madame Lebrun's pension of cottages clustered around a main house. The novel opens here, and its unhurried rhythms of sea-bathing, gossip, and croquet form the backdrop against which Edna Pontellier's friendship with Robert Lebrun develops.
- Related: Madame Lebrun, Creole Society, Robert Lebrun
K
- Klein's Hotel
- A nearby hotel on Grand Isle where the resort's husbands and club men gather to play billiards and socialize away from their families. Léonce Pontellier frequently retreats there, sometimes staying so late that whether he returns for dinner depends on the company he finds and the size of 'the game.'
- Related: Léonce Pontellier, Grand Isle
L
- Léonce Pontellier
- Edna's husband, a prosperous New Orleans broker of Creole descent who is fond of his family and possessions but tends to view his wife as something to be admired and managed, remarking on her sunburn 'as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property.' He divides his time between business, his club, and Grand Isle, where he visits his family mostly on weekends.
- Related: Grand Isle, Esplanade Street, Doctor Mandelet
M
- Madame Antoine
- A stout, hospitable Acadian woman on the Chênière Caminada who takes Edna in when she feels faint during mass, letting her rest for hours in a plain, immaculate four-poster bed. Her son Tonie helps Robert look after Edna through the afternoon, and her simple cottage becomes a brief, dreamlike refuge from the ordinary rhythms of Grand Isle.
- Related: Chênière Caminada, Robert Lebrun
- Madame Lebrun
- The widowed proprietress of the Grand Isle pension, a brisk, energetic woman who keeps a noisy parrot and mockingbird outside the main house and manages her collection of guest cottages with a constant stream of instructions to servants. She is the mother of Robert and Victor Lebrun.
- Related: Grand Isle, Robert Lebrun, Victor Lebrun
- Mademoiselle Reisz
- A reclusive, disagreeable, and unmarried pianist who summers at Grand Isle and possesses formidable artistic gifts. Her fierce, unsentimental playing at a Saturday-night gathering moves Edna to tears in a way mere pretty music never has, marking her as the novel's figure of the uncompromising, socially unaccommodating artist.
- Related: The Farival Twins, The Chopin Impromptu
- Mademoiselle Reisz's "Strong Wings"
- A metaphor Mademoiselle Reisz offers Edna, feeling her shoulder blades to check whether her 'wings' are strong enough: 'The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.' The image becomes the novel's touchstone for the risk and courage required of anyone, like Edna, who tries to rise above convention.
- Related: Mademoiselle Reisz, The Parrot and the Mockingbird
- Mariequita
- A barefoot young Spanish girl who joins the party's sailing trip to the Chênière Caminada, carrying a basket of shrimp and trading teasing banter with Robert, whom she knows well. Edna studies her with open curiosity, and Mariequita's frank, unselfconscious flirtatiousness contrasts with Edna's own more guarded manner.
- Related: Chênière Caminada, Robert Lebrun
- Mother-Women
- The narrator's term for the women who 'idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals,' fluttering protectively over their families like 'ministering angels.' Adèle Ratignolle is presented as their most perfect embodiment, and Edna's evident failure to fit the type marks her as an outlier among the Grand Isle summer colony.
- Related: Adèle Ratignolle, Creole Society
- Mrs. Highcamp
- A worldly, unaffected society woman in her forties who cultivates the company of fashionable young men, ostensibly on behalf of her daughter, and frequently invites Edna to the races and to dinner alongside Alcée Arobin. Her indifferent, staring manner masks a shrewd sociability that keeps her at the center of New Orleans's smart set.
- Related: Alcée Arobin, The Jockey Club Races
Q
- Quadroon
- A period term for a person of one-quarter Black African ancestry, used in the novel to describe the unnamed nurse who looks after the Pontellier children at Grand Isle. She follows the boys about the grounds with what the narrator calls 'a faraway, meditative air,' a domestic role typical of the racial hierarchies of Creole New Orleans households in the 1890s.
- Related: Creole Society, Grand Isle
R
- Robert Lebrun
- The younger son of Madame Lebrun, a friendly, unassuming clerk in a New Orleans mercantile house who spends his summer vacations at his mother's Grand Isle pension. He is fluent in English, French, and Spanish, often talks of one day seeking his fortune in Mexico, and strikes up an easy companionship with Edna Pontellier that summer.
- Related: Madame Lebrun, Grand Isle, Victor Lebrun
T
- The Birthday Dinner
- The elaborate dinner party Edna hosts at her Esplanade Street house to mark both her twenty-ninth birthday and her impending move to the pigeon house, attended by Arobin, Mademoiselle Reisz, the Ratignolles, Victor Lebrun, and other acquaintances. Amid champagne, roses, and gathering opulence, Edna is seized by an unaccountable wave of hopelessness, and Victor's tipsy, half-forbidden song unsettles the evening's polish.
- Related: The Pigeon House, Alcée Arobin, Victor Lebrun
- The Chopin Impromptu
- A piece by the composer Frédéric Chopin that Robert, writing from Mexico, asks Mademoiselle Reisz to play for Edna, calling it his favorite. When Mademoiselle Reisz performs it during Edna's visit, its 'soulful and poignant longing' reduces Edna to tears, linking music, Robert's absence, and Edna's unspoken longing in a single scene.
- Related: Mademoiselle Reisz, Robert Lebrun
- The Colonel (Edna's Father)
- Edna's father, a former Confederate cavalry officer from Kentucky who visits New Orleans to buy a wedding gift for his daughter Janet and sits for a portrait sketch by Edna. Tall, silver-haired, and given to mixing his own strong 'toddies,' he is convinced his daughters inherited his own capacity for achievement, and he charms the Creole social circle Edna moves in.
- Related: Adèle Ratignolle, Doctor Mandelet
- The Farival Twins
- Two fourteen-year-old sisters, granddaughters of old Monsieur Farival, who were dedicated to the Virgin Mary at their baptism and so always dress in blue and white. They provide the recurring, faintly comic soundtrack of the Grand Isle pension, dutifully performing piano duets such as the overture to 'The Poet and the Peasant' at every gathering.
- Related: Grand Isle, Madame Lebrun
- The Jockey Club Races
- A fashionable New Orleans horse-racing venue where Edna, whose father raised racehorses in Kentucky, spends an exhilarating afternoon with Alcée Arobin and Mrs. Highcamp. Her evident expertise and excitement there mark one of the first times since Grand Isle that she feels fully, vividly alive.
- Related: Alcée Arobin, Mrs. Highcamp, The Colonel (Edna's Father)
- The Parrot and the Mockingbird
- The caged birds that open the novel, kept by Madame Lebrun outside the main house at Grand Isle: a green and yellow parrot who repeats French phrases and other language nobody understands, and a mockingbird whistling with 'maddening persistence.' Their noise so annoys Léonce Pontellier that he retreats to his own cottage, setting the domestic tone of the opening scene and introducing the novel's recurring bird imagery.
- Related: Grand Isle, Léonce Pontellier
- The Pigeon House
- The small, four-room rented house around the corner from the Pontelliers' Esplanade Street mansion that Edna decides to move into on her own, telling Mademoiselle Reisz she is tired of a home and servants that never felt like hers. She resolves to fund the move herself, from painting sales and a small inheritance, seeking a taste of independence she cannot yet fully explain.
- Related: Esplanade Street, Mademoiselle Reisz
- The Ratignolle Household
- The contented, harmonious home of Adèle and Monsieur Ratignolle, whose visible domestic accord Edna witnesses when she brings her sketches to show Adèle. Rather than reassuring her, the spectacle of their apparent marital completeness leaves Edna oddly depressed, functioning as a foil that throws her own dissatisfaction into relief.
- Related: Adèle Ratignolle, Mother-Women
- The Voice of the Sea
- The novel's central image for Edna's awakening: the Gulf's 'seductive' murmur that invites 'the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude.' In Chapter 6, Chopin's narrator uses it to describe the vague, unsettling dawn of Edna's self-awareness as an individual with an inner life apart from her roles as wife and mother — the process the novel's title names.
- Related: Bathing at Grand Isle, Grand Isle
- Tuesday Reception Day
- The weekly ritual, observed since her marriage, in which Edna receives callers at home on Tuesday afternoons in a formal reception gown, following the strict social conventions — _les convenances_ — of upper-class New Orleans life. Her unexplained decision to skip it and go out instead is a small but pointed act of defiance that alarms her husband.
- Related: Esplanade Street, Léonce Pontellier
V
- Victor Lebrun
- Madame Lebrun's younger son, a headstrong and rather spoiled young man his mother describes as a _tête montée_ with an ungovernable temper. He helps around the Grand Isle pension — overseeing the ice cream, driving off in the rockaway against his mother's calls — and is contrasted with his more even-tempered brother Robert.
- Related: Madame Lebrun, Robert Lebrun, Grand Isle