<i>The Awakening</i> as Aesthetic Critique: “Art for Art’s Sake” and Autonomous Sensation in Kate Chopin’s Novel

ABSTRACT This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Kate Chopin’s aesthetics in The Awakening (1899), bringing in author biographical evidence, cultural artifacts, and Western aesthetic philosophy to illuminate the aspects of Chopin’s novel that tie her to European Aestheticism. It argues that Chopin not only participates in but progresses European Aestheticism primarily through Edna’s aesthetic and erotic experiences. Reading Chopin’s novel as an aesthetic critique, or philosophical contemplation of aesthetics, this article views The Awakening as a progression of Western aesthetic philosophy at large. It shows how the novel engages with concepts featured in aesthetic discourse from early philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to the nineteenth-century British Pre-Raphaelites and European Aesthetes. These transatlantic and interdisciplinary connections help Chopin meditate on the aesthetic problems of the ubiquity and inevitability of mediation and artifice—issues that Chopin believes should be distinguished from questions of morality. Understanding Chopin’s final novel as a progression of a white, male-authored European tradition of aesthetic philosophers and Aesthetes has the potential to alter existing notions of whose work constitutes the field of aesthetic theory.