Open your novels to chapter nine. Find the the paragraph that starts "But there was no reason why every one should not dance." Read the rest of the chapter, noting in your book or on a separate sheet of paper the ways that Chopin builds tension/suspense in this important scene.
Great discussion today. I know we got off track later in the period throwing around questions of Leonce's fidelity and materialism. Madamemoiselle Reisz' piano scene kind of got away from us. Essentially, we hit the main points I wanted to discuss (Reisz vs. Ratignolle, that scene as the beginning of her awakening), even if it was in a kind of stream of discussion kind of way.
As a kind of post script to our discussion, I'd like to pose the following questions/thoughts to you:
- Reisz and Ratignolle are very different characters. One is the mother woman, the other is an older, single, "disagreeable little woman" who is also "homely...with a small weazened face and body...no taste in dress...with a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the side of her hair." Yet it's obvious from Chopin's tone who we are meant to favor. What is Chopin hoping to accomplish by presenting us with an integral, profound character that is also socially awkward and, well, "homely"?
- What role does music play in the novel? What does it represent in the larger sense?
- As for the tension, Chopin builds it because it is welling up in Edna, only to be released by the tears. The setting builds tension ("moon was coming up, and its mystic shimmer was casting a million lights across the distant, restless water"), the description of Reisz before she plays adds tension ("perfectly still" and "not touching the keys"), as does the antithetical description of the effect of Ratignolle's playing and the images described that develop in Edna's mind's eye. All this tension builds until that first note when "a keen tremor" runs "down Mrs. Pontellier's spinal column."
