SOURCE: Griffin Wolff, Cynthia. “Un-Utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in The Awakening.” Studies in American Fiction 24, no. 1 (spring 1996): 3-23.

In the following essay, Wolff examines The Awakening in terms of nineteenth-century medical discourse on female sexuality.

Because novelists are particular about beginnings, we should notice that The Awakening opens with two things: sumptuous sensory images and an outpouring of babble—words that resemble ordinary speech, but which really have meaning for no one, not even the speaker.

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:

“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!”

He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood.¹

Although an onlooker is able to enjoy this vivid scene, the parrot cannot; moreover, there is a sense of enigma (or fraud) about this bird who seems able to communicate...