It’s Just PMS (In Fancier Language)

How would anyone react if their husband or wife thought they were crazy? It’s understandable for anyone to think you are crazy if you are actually doing something really off but cancelling you Tuesday meetings and letting the “keeping go to the dickens”, is not really a mental disease in my book. Mr. Pontelier goes to visit the family physician in hope of an explanation for his wife’s weird attitude and off behavior. It’s kind of weird that someone would go to the doctor when their wife is just not catering to their every need and in modern times this would be an extreme, but in the times of The Awakening, I guess Mr. Ponteliers concern is understandable.

We can look at Mr. Pontelier in two ways; one is that he is a close minded fool who just cares for his home to be run smoothly or a man who is really concerned about his wife. His only arguments are that she is not acting like a woman of the time. The physician gets really concerned when Mr. Pontelier mentions that Mrs. Pontelier is mentioning the eternal rights of women and mentions a circle of pseudo-intellectual women. Nr. Pontelier dismisses the idea but it is still appalling that they would find it appalling that there is talk about this. The tone when the physician mentions these women makes them sound malicious. The idea of people coming together to talk about the rights of women scares these two characters and as a woman, it feels as if there is no way out. That really caught my attention in this part and in a sense, let me put myself in Mrs. Ponteliers shoes. The fact that it is so wrong for you to want more for yourself and always being shut down is aggravating to me.

I give props to the physician for his advice of letting her be. He understands what a woman is like when he describes us as “a very peculiar and delicate organism” as well as saying that “most women are moody and whimsical”. Hell, I am both of those things. As a reader this just makes me think that what Mrs. Pontelier is going through is really just a phase, kind of like PMSing. And if her husband was being on top of her all the time maybe what she is trying to do is just show him that, just like he has his man space, she needs her woman space. Its unfair that when a guy does something its ok but when a woman does this, it isn’t. I think these are all the emotions Chopin wants to take out of her readers. That feminist feeling that makes us feel sick sometimes and makes others think we are crazy.

*Idiosyncrasies: a characteristic, habit, mannerism, or the like, that is peculiar to an individual.