Maternal

“Freedom” is the main theme of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charles Johnson’s

Middle Passage; despite Chopin’s Edna and Johnson’s Rutherford having very little in common

at first glance, a deeper analysis proves that they are both driven by their desire for freedom, with

the ocean being both the catalyst that awakened their desire for it, and the place they view as a

physical manifestation of it.

Firstly, both Edna Pontellier and Rutherford Calhoun are much more similar than they

may seem at first glance; Edna and Rutherford grew up in Kentucky and Illinois, respectively,

but their stories begin in Louisiana. Both are fascinated by Creole culture, and beauty, with the

second being especially true for Rutherford, who is enamored by New Orleans and its people.

The sea plays a vital role in both Edna and Rutherford’s stories in being their catalyst for

freedom; their endings parallel each other’s in the fact that they both end in the sea, but Edna has

chosen to give herself to it completely, while Rutherford has chosen to return to land and to settle

into the society from which he once escaped into the ocean. Most importantly, both Edna and

Rutherford are oppressed by 19th-century American society in different ways: Rutherford was

formerly enslaved, and endures racism for being Black, while Edna is a woman that has been

forced by societal expectations into a life she didn’t choose, and both are “caged” by societal

expectations of them.

For instance, women, like enslaved people, were viewed as property – to a different

degree – within this time period: “You are burnt beyond recognition,” he added, looking at his

wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage” (5).

Mr. Pontellier says this to Edna during the first scene in which he interacts with her and in which

he is introduced, outlining the basics of their relationship. Edna is “a valuable piece of personal

property,” but property nonetheless. (Of course, it would be extremely inaccurate and

disrespectful to imply that enslaved people and white housewives were treated exactly the same

way – enslaved people were treated in a way that was completely inhuman, and this comparison

is not meant to diminish this, or to erase history. The point is, they were both viewed as property

of the white man, to different degrees.) Now, this passage also makes Edna’s constraints as a

housewife clear for readers – she cannot even fully enjoy something like tanning on the beach,

because getting a sunburn is “damaging” her husband’s personal property.

Furthermore, Edna’s children are used as tools to keep her trapped in her role as a

housewife. This is not a tactic used solely by Edna’s husband, and perhaps he is not even

conscious of it, but a tactic that society at large used (and uses) to keep women in their “rightful”

roles and prevent them from stepping out of line. For example, a scene near the beginning of the

book shows Mr. Pontellier coming home at eleven o’clock at night from Klein’s hotel. He has

been drinking, having a good time with his friends, while Edna has put the children to bed and

gone to bed herself. Her husband is annoyed that she doesn’t get out of bed and fully wake up to

listen to him chat about his party, so he finds an excuse to wake and reproach her through his

children. He tells Edna that Raoul, one of their sons, has a fever, and reproaches her for being a

“neglectful” mother, then goes to smoke a cigar and leaves her to handle it. Edna sees the

injustice in that she just has to sit and take his verbal lashings, and in that she is expected to be at

home with the children all day and can still be accused by her husband of being a “neglectful”

mother, but he can be gone all day, tell her their son has a fever when he doesn’t (he didn’t when

she put him to bed), and then go smoke a cigar and leave her to tend Raoul. Edna feels “An

indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her

consciousness, [filled] her whole being with a vague anguish… She did not sit there inwardly

upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which

they had taken. She was just having a good cry to herself” (9).

Because of a later passage in which it’s stated that Edna “isn’t” thinking something to

specifically show that she is, it’s clear here that Edna is unhappy with her life. She laments the

steps she took which brought her to her permanent role as just Mr. Pontellier’s housewife and the

mother to his children. It’s mentioned later that she liked to paint, but she hasn’t in a long while.

This is to say, Edna does not get to be defined by what she chooses to do, or what she is to

herself – she is defined by being Mrs. Pontellier, mother of Mr. Pontllier’s two sons.

This inability to even define herself is what she later begins rebelling against. This

rebellion begins with the ocean. Edna had been trying to learn how to swim all summer, but one

day she is finally able to “get it,” and feels a kind of exultation she had never felt before. This

first taste of freedom that the ocean gives her guides her later actions in trying to seek freedom in

her life – freedom from her role as a housewife, as a mother, freedom from Mr. Pontellier,

freedom to live as Robert, her lover, does… to live as freely as a man does. But even her

thoughts during her first swim foreshadow her death: “She grew daring and reckless,

overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum

before…As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose

herself…But to her unaccustomed vision the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a

barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to overcome” (30).

After this, Edna has a quick vision of death, but is able to regain control and swim back

to shore. This passage is rife with metaphor and foreshadowing. After the sea gives Edna her first

taste of freedom, she wants more. She wants freedom in all things in her life, she wants to go

“where no woman has gone before.” But, she overestimated what she is able to do as a woman in

the 19-century. People who had once been close to her, including Robert, Adele Ratignolle, and

Madame Reisz, all see her behavior as “reckless,” and she eventually looks back at her life and

realizes that her sex has always, and will always, present a barrier to her that she can never

overcome on her own. After realizing this, instead of “swimming back to shore,” as she does

during her “awakening,” she drowns rather than go back to the way she was living before.

Her first taste of freedom doomed her: she could never be completely free, as she wanted,

she could never be unconstrained by her sex. But it was impossible for her to go back to the way

things were, and this is also foreshadowed in the passage above, because once someone knows

how to swim, they can’t “unlearn.” She was doomed either way, because if she had never

“woken up,” she would’ve lived the rest of her life passively, “…a little unthinking child…just

following a misleading impulse without question” (19), but after she was “awakened,” it was

only a matter of time before she realized the freedom she wanted would forever be unavailable to

her, and she physically could not go back to the way she was before even if she tried, so her only

option was to die. It’s significant that Edna chooses to die in the same way she was “awakened” –

swimming in the ocean, except this time, she doesn’t fight her impulse to go as far out from the

shore as she wants, because she has finally freed herself from the responsibility of having to turn

back. For Edna, the sea represents total freedom, even with it being her death: the ocean, in

drowning her, gave her the ultimate freedom that she wanted from the societal constraints placed

on her sex and the responsibilities that have been placed upon her, without her really wanting

them.

It’s important to note that for Edna, killing herself is an act of self-liberation, and this is

why it’s so important that it happens in the sea, which woke her up with the taste of freedom

before. There are many things in her life before that she does not like, and did not choose, but

cannot admit to herself. Namely, her children: “Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did

not admit this, even to herself. It seemed to free her of a sort of responsibility which she had

blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her” (21). Edna makes a lot of internal

references to “Fate” as the unknown hand that has guided her to her husband and children, her

“responsibilities” and role as a woman, which she seems to have come into without being

consciously aware of, because she did not truly, consciously choose or want them.

Moreover, this is also why it’s significant that Edna, at the end, can admit to herself that

she does not want to stay alive for her children, and that she has, indeed, been imprisoned by

them ever since they were born. Much like Mr. Pontellier used Raoul’s made-up “fever” earlier

in the novel to make Edna get up when his stimulating conversation couldn’t, society used the

children it had guided her to have, not completely willingly, to keep her imprisoned in her role as

a mother, and as a woman. As she is walking into the sea to drown herself, she thinks of her sons

“The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had

overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew

a way to elude them” (115). It’s important that Edna is being irrational and a bit cruel towards

her children, because she is voicing feelings that countless women have repressed throughout the

ages. At this point, when Edna feels the impulse to live for her children, she resents them not just

for “trying” (even though they are not there, and are unaware of what she is doing) to keep her

constrained in her role as a mother, but for “trying” to keep her alive in a society in which she

will never be free in the way she wants as a woman. The “soul’s slavery” she is referring to isn’t

only gender roles, but life itself, which to Edna, seemed at this point completely impossible to

disentangle from gender roles.

Additionally, one of Edna’s last thoughts was of her husband and her children, who

“…were a part of her life. But they need not have thought they could possess her, body and soul”

(116). Again, it’s important that she’s being irrational about the children, who are definitely not

trying to possess their mother, “body and soul.” It’s about what the children represent. Leonce

Pontellier used his children to keep Edna in her role as his wife, primarily by impregnating her in

the first place. More importantly, society at large uses Edna’s children to “keep her in her place”

as a woman – in her role as a mother. The cold way she thinks of her children and husband in her

last moments is meant to show readers that she did not really consciously choose them, and they

are no longer people at this point in the book, they are archetypes – the husband, the children, the

sons – that are meant to keep women in their subservient roles.

The difference between how she thinks in her last moments of people she didn’t choose

(her husband and children) vs. a person she did – Robert – is stark: “There was no human being

whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when

he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone” (115). Even

though she chose Robert after “gaining consciousness” in a way she did not choose Leonce and

her children, she realizes now that Robert could not give her what she really wanted – freedom.

She realizes that just like her family, at the end, were no longer people but instead archetypes

that represented “the slavery of the soul” to her, Robert had never really been that exciting to her

as a person, either, but rather the concept of what he represented – freedom – was what she so

desperately sought to possess. This is why it can be confusing at the end, where she is thinking

“Good-by – because, I love you” (116). Edna did not die for love of Robert, but for love of, and

longing for, freedom.

Similarly to Edna, Rutherford Calhoun seeks freedom through the ocean. Much like Edna

seeks freedom from gender roles and expectations, Rutherford seeks freedom from the

expectation of marriage. He opens his story by narrating how women are what most commonly

drive men to the sea (to become sailors), and how it was the case for him. However, the sea was

drawing him even before he met Isadora; Rutherford would sit and “… stare out to the sea,

envying the sailors riding out on merchantmen on the gift of good weather, wondering if there

was some far-flung port… where a freeman could escape the vanities cityfolk called self-interest,

the mediocrity they called achievement, the blatant selfishness they called individual freedom –

all the bilge that made each landslide a kind of living death” (6). Rutherford doesn’t have any

interest in living in the “traditional” way that’s expected of him, and thus his view of the ocean

as a free place is part of what draws him to it. He’s very clear in the beginning in not being

interested in participating in what is considered “decent” life on land – he is a thief, and he

believes that “decent” land-people are selfish, mediocre, and barely alive at all. He wants the

adventure of the sea, the unknown, and to really live before settling down in the “traditional”

way that’s expected of him – marriage – if ever, at all.

Furthermore, since Rutherford views “traditional” life on land as a kind of “living death,”

then he views life on the sea as what really living is; while he is watching the waves, he thinks

that just looking out at the sea allows him to “…believe, like the ancient philosopher Thales, that

the analogue for life [is] water, the formless, omnific sea. Businessmen with half a hundred

duties barnacled to their lives came to stare, longingly, at boats trolling up to dock. Black men,

free and slave, sat quietly on rocks…” (6). Rutherford observes how everyone is drawn to the

sea, from businessmen “barnacled” (an interesting choice of words, reflecting how they long for

the sea even in their “traditional, decent, successful” landlocked lives) to their responsibilities, to

free men, to enslaved men. If the sea represents freedom to Rutherford, then this is just another

way of him saying that he observes that everyone quietly longs for complete freedom, and he

refuses to live like them, trapped in a life he hates while quietly languishing for the sea – for

freedom.

However, much like Edna is trapped into gender roles by her husband and children,

Rutherford was almost trapped into the societal expectation of getting married by Isadora.

Although Isadora means well, she refuses to respect Rutherford’s decisions, as he tells her

multiple times, “No, Isadora… I don’t believe I’ll ever get married… Life is too short for me to

shackle myself to a mortgage and marriage…” She stared at me for the longest time, then

flashed, “You just won’t act right, will you?” (11). Isadora views Rutherford, a man who was

recently enslaved, as someone who is not acting “right” because of the fact that he refuses to

follow the societal expectation of getting married, and seeking freedom and to enjoy his life

rather than tie himself down to anyone or anything ever again. It seems that they are

fundamentally incompatible – Isadora is “traditional,” she wants to follow societal rules, while

Rutherford doesn’t want this, and he just wants to be free and to actually enjoy his life now that

he finally gets to decide what to do with it.

However, just as the sea drew in Rutherford to his adventure, it also guided him to his

ultimate destiny – for, indeed, it was on the pier that he met Isadora. It was necessary for

Rutherford’s story for her to pressure him into marriage, causing him to escape to the sea, and

change into a different man, one who was no longer afraid of the long-term commitment of

marriage. Rutherford is not like Edna – his reasons for not wanting marriage are not because he

will feel trapped in it forever, when he does choose it, but because he wants to live first. Even

from the start of the book, even after Isadora reveals the trick she played to try to force

Rutherford into marriage with her, he thinks, “A part of me ached to be with her always, to see

that only things of beauty and light came before her. Would marrying her be so bad? That night,

a little before dawn, I had a vision of how that union would be in decades to come – eighteen

thousand six hundred and ninety-three cups of watery sassafras tea for breakfast, and in each of

these I would find cat hairs or pigeon feathers. No, it was not a vision to stir a soul that longed

for high adventure” (20). This passage makes it clear that his issue is not with not loving his

(intended) spouse, the way Edna’s is, but rather with not getting to live freely first, and with not

getting to choose to propose to her of his own free will. This is why it makes sense later in the

novel for him to want to marry her, now that he’s no longer being forced to.

In other words, it was necessary for him to give in to his longing for the ocean so he

wouldn’t be like those men who gathered at the pier to stare at it longingly, perpetually

dissatisfied with their lives. Because he actually got to experience being on the sea and living

freely before reuniting with Isadora, he was able to enter that union with her happily and entirely

of his own volition. It was also necessary for his story for her to try to force him to marry her,

because without that he never would’ve been brave enough to give in to his longing for the sea

and to just go experience it for himself. She essentially pushed him to the transformative

experience that would ultimately bring him back to her, ready to actually be with her freely this

time.

This is even foreshadowed when Rutherford steps on the boat, as “She would not be,

Cringle warned me, the same vessel that left New Orleans, it not being in the nature of any ship

to remain the same on that thrashing Void called the Atlantic” (36). If it is not in the nature of a

ship to stay the same after a voyage at sea, then it certainly isn’t in a person’s nature! This

reveals that the sea, which Rutherford at the beginning only admires for its freedom, is an agent

of change – no one and nothing can remain unchanged by it. This is to say, freedom changes

people, and after living freely for a while and seeing the positives and negatives of it, Rutherford

was not just willing, but desperate to give that up to be with Isadora.

Moreover, while Edna’s view of the sea as “freedom” stays positive throughout her whole

story, Rutherford starts out by seeing the sea as a place to escape to, to be free on, but he later

comes to see it as a place of unrestrained violence and terror. His view of the ocean as “free”

isn’t necessarily a good thing by the end of his story, because it means that anything can just

happen while on the sea, not just good things. Cringle warns Rutherford of this right before

frightening events really begin to happen, and he describes the ocean as fearful, a “… bottomless

chaos breeding all manner of monstrosities and creatures that defy civilized law” (42). What is

ironic about this is that the sea represents freedom. Rutherford’s journey is about experiencing

the “dark sides” of freedom, which can be used by people who possess it to do horrible things to

their fellow man; the irony lies in the fact that Rutherford boarded a slave ship to find freedom.

Just like the ocean can be unrestrained and frightening with how free it is, Rutherford

experienced the “dark” side of freedom, with that being that people can choose to use theirs to

take away other peoples’, and to do horrible things.

In addition, Johnson does address this duality in the nature of freedom, which can be used

to do both great and horrific things: “Conflict,” says he, “is what it means to be conscious.

Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind” (97). This is also in reference to the inner conflict

Rutherford felt before about wanting Isadora, but not wanting to marry her and be trapped by

her, and in wanting to be free, but also to settle down. This conflict is resolved by Rutherford

finally going to the ocean, being disillusioned by his experiences on it, and ultimately returning

to Isadora. And because the ocean led him to her in the first place, it is also interesting to note

that Rutherford wakes up on the Juno after the Republic capsizes; Juno is the Roman goddess of

marriage, and it is on this ship that he is finally reunited with Isadora and tells her he is ready to

settle down with her. Juno is also the Roman goddess of family, and one of Rutherford’s reasons

for proposing to Isadora is that he has adopted Baleka, one of the children orphaned by the

capsizing of the Republic, and he wants her to have a mother figure.

However, it is important to note that Rutherford is not like Edna – he ultimately chooses

his marriage to Isadora. Close to the end of the novel, he even acknowledges that the ocean,

freedom, just were meant to bring him back to her: “And she, so much slimmer – pulling the

gown over her head – was to me a figure of such faint-inducing grace any Odysseus would have

swallowed the ocean whole, if need be, to swim to her side” (204). Just as Odysseus had to suffer

to return to his beloved wife, Penelope, after the end of the Trojan war, Rutherford had to suffer

to accept that he wanted Isadora and to finally settle down with her.

Ultimately, Edna and Rutherford are very similar characters with many parallels, despite

it not seeming so at first glance. Both are oppressed groups in the 19-century (and still today) –

Edna is a woman, Rutherford is a Black man, who was formerly enslaved. Both initially see the

ocean as freedom, but while Edna is willing to die rather than live in the trance-like state she had

been in before, Rutherford is willing to give up what he used to perceive as “freedom” in order to

be with Isadora, and to have a good life with her. Edna is disillusioned by society after her first

taste of freedom, while Rutherford has changed and is disillusioned with what he thought

“freedom” (and the ocean) was and now just wants to be at peace. Both characters, in fact, end

their novels by just wanting peace – Edna wants peace and relief from the societal constraints

placed upon her as a woman, and Rutherford wants peace from his prior lifestyle of women,

thieving, and drinking. In conclusion, the ocean – freedom – led both Rutherford and Edna to find

peace, because one can only be at peace if one has known freedom.