Repetition And Logical Incompatibilities

The Awakening (1899), written by Kate Chopin (1851-1904), has gone through ups and downs since it was published over a century ago. Now, it is one of the classics on the bookshelf of women's literature. The criticism concerning the novel has also experienced a complicated process. It suffered violent attacks from the ethical and moral viewpoint at the beginning of its publication. The popularity of the feminist criticism has brought it praises and applauses since 1960s. Since 1990s, it has been explored from the post-structrualist multi-angles. The theory of repetition, the hypothesis of heterogeneity and univocal reading and deconstructive reading respectively put forward by J. Hillis Miller (1928- ) in his Fiction and Repetition (1982) and The Critic as Host (1977) make it possible to interpret The Awakening from the deconstructive point of view. By applying Miller's theories to The Awakening, readers may come to a conclusion that the textual Platonic repetition tells a story of the awakening of a"new woman"striving for independence and freedom, while Nietzschean mode of repetition indicates that Edna's love tragedy originated from her fixation to the love pattern formed in her early period of life. She had never grown up psychologically, let alone her female awakening. The logical incompatibilities created by the two forms of repetition exhibit the uncanny phenomenon of the double-faced Chopin. Distinguishing and analyzing textual logical incompatibilities will help avoid stereotyped opinions in interpreting literary works.