Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

16Kate Chopinwith wanting itself ” is unintelligible unless we explore what Michaelsignores: her wish for “the unlimited in which to lose herself.” Foralthough, as Michaels points out, “no body in Chopin can embody theinfinite” (499), Edna desires precisely what she cannot embody.What, or perhaps more important, how does Edna want? In TheAwakening fulfillment entails not satisfaction but prolongation; it isneither a matter of getting what one wants (independence, money,sexual freedom, etc.) nor of removing desire from the realm of contingency.Rather, it involves a certain relation to excess, one that requiresthe representation or “embodiment” of that which one cannot possess.What Michaels fails to notice is that Edna’s encounter with desireis simultaneously an encounter with language, here embodied by theocean’s voice, and that she wants the ocean’s “everlasting voice” becauseit alone signifies that which is in excess of any boundary or limit. Likethe bluegrass meadow that “she traversed as a child, believing that ithad no beginning or end” (114), the ocean offers itself as sustaining arelation to that which she cannot represent. Given the choices availableto her, the “fulfillment” of Edna’s desire can only be merger, andpresumably death, in the element that first awakened it. And althoughEdna wants to maintain a relation to what the ocean represents, herworld offers nothing beyond the satisfaction of her demands. In thiscase, then, “desire gives birth to its own death” (496) because deathwithin the force that awakened desire is all that remains for Edna towant. By the end of the novel there remains “no one thing in the worldthat she desired” (113)—a situation that comes about not because sheis now incapable of wanting nor because she wants too much. The“object” of Edna’s desire is neither a person nor a thing but a sustainedrelation to the ocean and everything it signifies.To make what is unnameable appear in language itself—the desireat stake in the sublime is akin to Edna’s desire for the ocean’s voice:both defy the subject’s representational capacities and can be signifiedonly by that which, to borrow Lyotard’s formulation, “puts forward theunpresentable in presentation itself,” seeking “new presentations not inorder to enjoy them but to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.”25 At issue is not a mastery of the ineffable, as in Hertz’s andWeiskel’s account of the romantic sublime, but rather an attestationto the unspeakable and uncontainable elements within language itself.This version of the sublime contests what Weiskel contends is the“essential claim of the romantic sublime: that man can, in feeling and