Aesthetics of desublimation in Kate Chopin’s the awakening

Abstract

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) is a feminist novel in which woman’s resistance against patriarchal society occurs and also a tragedy that ends with the protagonist’s suicide. Keeping alive in their common sensuality and homoeroticism running counter to the ideologies of patriarchal society, the resistant power is consummated by the suicide of the female protagonist. The aesthetic dimensions of The Awakening are examined as the main means of reinforcing the feminist resistance. Specifically, the novel ultimately embodies desublimation in terms of the aesthetics of the ugly as an antithesis of Kantian aesthetics of sublime and its transcending rationality. In this process, The Awakening raises readers’ social consciousness, rather than allowing them to transcend or sublimate it, as a cultural product that represents its materiality, while concomitantly becoming a source from which new meaning is produced in both a dialectical and revolutionary way. In this context, what I ultimately assert is the possibility of a feminist aesthetics that resists the long-held aversion to realism and women’s art and embraces women’s realistic tragic novel. Copyright © 2019 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.