Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 3
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'One of the Many Little Human Documents:' Dr. Mandelet as (Civil War) Physician in The Awakening / Richmond Adams
<##> In what can be called the hospital sequence from the cinematic adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1939), Scarlett O'Hara (Vivian Leigh) somewhat reluctantly serves as a nurse to wounded Confederate soldiers as General Sherman held siege over Atlanta during the late summer of 1864. As she and her sister in law Melanie Wilkes (Olivia de Havilland) tend to their wounded fellow Southerners, the principal physician, Dr. Meade (Harry Davenport), informs an unnamed soldier (Eric Linden) that one of his legs has gangrene and will have to be amputated. When a medical aide reminds Dr. Meade that the hospital has no chloroform to anesthetize the patient, he responds, "[t]hen we'll have to operate without it." Going home to see his family for the first time over a three day period, Dr. Meade leaves the operation in the hands of Dr. Wilson, an otherwise unknown and silent colleague. Scarlett is quickly recruited by the same aide to assist with the operation, but upon seeing and hearing just what such a procedure entails, she escapes from the hospital in very short order. Victor Fleming's camera does not return to the operating room, but given its proximity to the remainder of the hospital, every other wounded man, physician, nurse and aide could all too clearly hear the agonized horror coming from within it.
<##> The limitations of Civil War medicine within themselves, however, are not the focus of the present examination. They have been well documented over the last 150 years (Mitchell 115-149; Adams, 49-50; Eicher 787-788; Freemon 41-50). For even as the wounded of North and South received care in an era described by historian David Eicher as "two steps behind the greatest explosion of disease and battlefield wounds the world had yet seen," there has been little to no attention given to how those physicians who, like Dr. Wilson and Dr. Meade, dealt with memories of wounded soldiers receiving inadequate treatment in often incomprehensible conditions throughout their post war lives (787). For perhaps more than any other group of veterans from the conflict between 1861 and 1865, Civil War physicians came to understand, in the term Kate Chopin uses to describe Dr. Mandelet in The Awakening (1899), that the nature of "wisdom" is connected to the reality of limits (116). With virtually the first group of wounded men brought to them in 1861, these physicians realized that the stark limitations of care they could provide even under the best of circumstances. Furthermore, these physicians, and I believe Dr. Mandelet to have been among them, had to find within themselves the ongoing emotional stability to render what treatment they could while somehow attaining a "detachment" from the agonies they saw and heard seemingly every day of the war (Mainland 81). It is no wonder that their portrayals throughout late post bellum fiction and twentieth century film were, at their core, men trying to escape from their experiences through drink, indifference or a mixture of both.
<##> Among the fictional physicians portrayed for several decades after the war were Dr. Ned Trescott in Stephen Crane's The Monster (1898), Dr. Ledsmar from Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), Dr. John from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and Dr. Lewis Lake from Kentuckian Irvin S. Cobb's short fiction between 1912 and 1932. Each of these men are specifically noted or strongly alluded to have served in either the Union or Confederate medical corps during the war (Crane 449-508; The Damnation of Theron Ware 69-70; "The Yellow Wallpaper" 254-269; "Forrest's Last Charge" 280-323; 308-309; Chatterton 92). While some of these physicians, such as Crane's heroic Dr. Trescott and Gilman's abusive Dr. John, were central to their stories, it still remains that most post bellum physicians served only as complimentary parts within a given narrative.
<##> Such complimenting also found expression through the Twentieth Century in film and, eventually, television. John Ford, who possessed a thorough knowledge of the war's major battles, portrayed physicians in several of his best-known productions (McBride 447; 594). Dr. Boone (Thomas Mitchell) in Stagecoach (1939), Dr. Wilkes (Guy Kibbee) from Fort Apache (1948), Dr. Craven (Carleton Young) in an episode of Wagon Train (1960) and Dr. Willoughby (Ken Murray) of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) all played noticed, if not always predominant, roles in Ford's films. By one means or another, these physicians also referenced their medical service between 1861 and 1865. In directing The Horse Soldiers (1959), centering on the conflict between the military leadership of Colonel John Marlowe (John Wayne) and the insistence on medical priorities asserted by Major Dr. Henry Kendall (William Holden), Ford goes further still by finally bringing a sense of equal importance to the work of physicians during the conflict.
<##> With the exception of Dr. Kendall, Ford nevertheless tended to follow the pattern of post war authors by placing his physicians in secondary roles. For Ford, such status also served as a vehicle for comic relief with the physician often playing the part of a given locale's happy alcoholic. At the same time, Ford offers provocative hints that his Civil War physicians carried a unique set of painful memories from their service which bear direct connection to their post war personas. In so doing, he extends the work of many post bellum authors who, upon closer examination, portray their physicians as bodily present, but emotionally distant, in their relationships with others. Through an especially revealing sequence, Ford establishes the link between the experiences of Civil War physicians and their post war lives during the climactic sequence of Valance. As Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) prepares to fight Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) on the streets of Shinbone, Ford shifts the scene to the town saloon where Dr. Willoughby is expounding upon his experiences during the late war. Bottle in hand and already intoxicated, Dr. Willoughby describes his role in the Battle of Gettysburg during which he performed "250 amputations" over a three day period of time (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Such efforts, multiplied by several scores of procedures in a four year war, redirects the scene from a comically drunk physician to one whose memories in military service are all but unimaginable. After the war ended, it seems to have been a common necessity that these physicians quickly sought some form of escape in order that they might simply be able to function. Historian Steven M. Stowe adds weight to these fictional portrayals by noting how the experiences of Southern physicians, trained professionally and culturally to view medicine as a "moral endeavor in a local community setting," proved so shocking that many "left the South or quit medicine altogether" after military hostilities had concluded (260). It does not stretch the imagination to believe that their northern counterparts entered medicine with the same moral underpinnings and reacted in a similar way. Given such a literary and historical context, the manner by which Kate Chopin's portrays Dr. Mandelet, her physician within The Awakening (1899), as one valued more for "wisdom" rather than "the actual practice of medicine," reasonably creates the possibility that there may be something more than technical shortcomings behind his post war reputation among the white social elite of New Orleans (116-117).
<##> Within a culture that even from the earliest post war years tried to make sense of their civil slaughter by almost any means necessary, it seems somewhat peculiar that its physicians who experienced its horrors all too closely were not given a more noticeable place in late century American fiction (Faust 266-271). While certainly the case that no physician, at his death, was viewed as a "living god" or became President of the United States, as did Generals Lee and Grant respectively, it also seems plausible to conclude that none of them were ever placed atop the memorials which began to spring mostly from the memories of northern and southern widows in the first several decades after 1865 (Goldfield 422; Wineapple 448; 477; Foster 40-41; 128-129). There further appears to be no formal association or encampment of Civil War physicians, as there were for other veterans, where they could meet in fellowship with former colleagues (40-41; 128-129). In short, the very men who, for often days at a time under any conditions, had to deal with thousands of mangled men suffering immense pain bore their memories with an almost total silence. There was, as Chopin suggests about Dr. Mandelet's relationships with his younger medical colleagues in New Orleans, almost no one with whom they could knowingly share war time experiences. It seems subsequently logical to note that the writers of the immediate post bellum period did not expand upon the significance of the physician since those who practiced in the Union and Confederate medical corps basically, with exceptions made for medical journals and other technical writings, kept their memories to themselves (Straubing 1-3).
<##> As she introduces him to the novel, Chopin makes no explicit reference to Dr. Mandelet's war time experiences. Chopin does note, however, that he is some twenty or so years older than Edna Pontellier, and coupled with references to the war having been over for approximately that same length of time, it is altogether probable that he served in the Confederate Medical Corps and as a result, inevitably experienced the agonies of wounded men under his care (57; 116-117; 123). While after the war's conclusion, and much like his colleagues in fiction and film, Dr. Mandelet practiced the medicine through the delivering of babies, Chopin portrays his late nineteenth century life within the context of his time in the Confederate Medical Corps (169-172). Culturally conventional and necessary within any given setting, bringing babies into the world may have also provided the extra benefit of an emotional anesthetic for the "screams" of wounded men that were never far from Dr. Mandelet's consciousness (Hurst 64). Such a numbing became, as drink and distance did for many of his fellow physicians, ultimately a means of escape from what would never leave him. For unstated reasons and unlike several of his fellow military physicians, however, Dr. Mandelet chose to escape by returning to the same New Orleans and Grand Isle social circle in which he presumably came of age and from whom he received blessings to obtain medical training (169-172; Stowe 260). Such an escape into plain sight enables Edna Pontellier, her husband Leonce and presumably others of their circle to seek his counsel while allowing Dr. Mandelet the ability to mostly avoid the memories of his war time limitations (The Awakening 116-117; 123; 176).
<##> Such a working connection between limits and wisdom provides the basis for the present exploration. In that sense, what follows will not be yet another discussion that concerns the nature of Edna's suicide (Mainland 75-85; Bunch 43-61). The present work will also forego connections between the novel and the socio-cultural upheavals, such as Darwinian science, raging throughout late Victorian America (Bender 185-204). Catherine Mainland's 2011 article focusing on how five principal male characters, Edna's two sons, Victor LeBrun, Alcee Arobin and Dr. Mandelet, "represent the four stages of childhood adolescence, young manhood and maturity" will receive more specific attention, but only as it links with the ways in which the Pontellier's physician attempts to understand their relationship (75). For the purposes at hand, it is additionally unnecessary to engage discussions that either attempt to place Chopin's work within a given literary movement or the possibility of her contention with "hegemonic northeastern publication traditions and demands" (Pizer 5-13; Taylor 150). Rather, it is the manner of Dr. Mandelet's hovering, but not intrusive, presence through The Awakening that creates an image of the post-Civil War physician which becomes worthy of extended exploration. For unlike several of his compatriots, Dr. Mandelet neither escaped to the west nor stopped practicing medicine (Stowe 260). Instead, Dr. Mandelet returned to his home and continued as a respectable member of the elite white society in New Orleans (The Awakening 116-117; 169-172). At the same time, unlike Dr. Meade in Mitchell's novel, he neither participated in Reconstruction politics nor affiliated himself with the Ku Klux Klan (Gone with the Wind 798; 804; 806). By primarily dispensing "wisdom" rather than practicing craft, Dr. Mandelet managed to create a way that he could remain within, while being separate from, his post war circumstances (The Awakening 117).
<##> As Chopin described the way he appeared to Leonce Pontellier, who anxiously turned for counsel concerning what he perceived as Edna's recent behavioral changes, Dr. Mandelet lived in a home set "rather far back from the street, in the center of a delightful garden" so that he could study in near total peace and quiet (117). By emphasizing that Dr. Mandelet's house was removed from the street, Chopin accentuates the picture that while available, he would mostly rather be alone. Simultaneous with such an open withdrawal, Chopin extends her description of Dr. Mandelet's apparent contentment by suggesting that even the practice of delivering babies proved insufficient to assuage his still living trauma (117; 169-171). By further describing him as "a great reader," Chopin implies that Dr. Mandelet added still another layer of escape from the memories that were constantly threatening to overwhelm him (117).
<##> Chopin's portrayal of Dr. Mandelet takes place through an interrelationship of cultural and historical discourses that need some form of explication prior to a strictly literary grappling with his function throughout the novel. Central among these is how the enhanced technologies of Civil War battle quickly overwhelmed the known methods of medical practice as soon as the conflict began (Straubing 7). Coupled with the staggering numbers of dead and wounded, the notion of a Victorian "Good Death" where each departing soul is surrounded by loved ones, still held a central place for not only those Americans who fought on the battlefield and waited at the home front, but not unimportantly, also among those medical practitioners who attempted to treat the wounded descending upon them by the thousands (Faust 6-18; 10). Even if, however, a soldier met his death in battle, the desire for a "Good Death" expressed itself through intense efforts, such as photos of spouses and children or fellow surrogates within the ranks, to bring some form of family to the front (10-12). Despite these aspirations and the herculean efforts to meet them, as historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), the "sudden and all but unnoticed end of the soldier slain in the disorder of battle … denied these consolations" (9). For physicians such as Dr. Mandelet, trained to treat illness and save life within the context of a moral imperative, encountering almost innumerable cases of "unidentified diseased and wounded men," combined with their having witnessed a "'universal sway'" of slaughter, came to be almost unbearable (9; Perry 21; Stowe 260). Those contextual outlines will, in turn, provide a more comprehensive means by which Dr. Mandelet as a post bellum physician can be understood.
<##> The war began, of course, with cultural and technological assumptions that traversed regional boundaries of North and South (Faust 3; 40-41; Freemon 41). To a significant degree, these premises were expressed at the Wilkes' family barbeque during the opening sequences of Gone with the Wind. Major Charles Hamilton (Rand Brooks), having just obtained Scarlett O'Hara's consent to marry and prior to answering the Confederacy's call for military volunteers, attempts to reassure his fiancé that "it'll be all over in a few weeks, and I'll be coming back to you" (Gone with the Wind). As Faust wrote of those cultural premises shared by Americans on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, however, "[n]o one expected what the Civil War was to become" (3). While many Southerners believed that their adversaries either would not resist their secession from the Union or, at best, "would mount nothing more than a brief and ineffective resistance," the North conversely marched onto early battlefields believing they would win a victory so comprehensive as to end the conflict (3; Wilbur 8; Roper 7). Rather than "a few weeks" in which the totality of spilled blood was promised to be consumed by South Carolina Senator James Chesnut, the war cost, as Guy Gugilotta writes of estimates revised in 2012, some 750,000 lives (Faust 3; New York Times "New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Total" 4-2-2012). As Faust explains, even the previously accepted figure of 620,000 deaths "was approximately equal" to all American conflicts from the Revolution through Korea (3). Even while these overwhelming numbers quickly reshaped the whole of American life, they still only refer to those who died as a result of battle or disease (9). They do not focus either upon those who received combat wounds or the physicians whose methods of treatment were simply inadequate to the suffering that confronted them (Roper 7-8). For with most non-medically trained American believing the war would be short and relatively bloodless, it stands to reason that most physicians in 1861 did as well (Faust 3; Wilbur 8; Roper 7).
<##> After First Bull Run and into late 1861, both Northerners and Southerners came to realize that Senator Chesnut's statement had nothing to do with the realities that confronted them (Faust 3; Freemon 41; Perry 21-22). Both sides were soon inundated with sick and wounded patients far beyond anything that either their medical or cultural training had led them to anticipate (Gugliotta New York Times "New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll" 4-2-2004; Faust 9). Such factors, along with the inadequacies of medical knowledge during the mid-Nineteenth Century, all combined to create scenes of agony that Civil War physicians carried with them well beyond the actual end of the conflict.
<##> While medical advances such as the development of anesthesia had been made before 1861, other improvements, including those discoveries by Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, were still to be fully accepted (Cunningham 225; 9; Sternberg 721; Wilbur 1-2; Eicher 788). As such, proper sanitation in both operating area and given camp settings, was instituted, at least in the North, not primarily by medical professionals from a base of knowledge, but due to a public insistence from women throughout the country (Wilbur 17). Southern officials such as Medical Director William A. Carrington issued sanitary and other regulations designed to increase quality of care in the Confederacy as well, but despite having an interest in "a new French medical theory related to pathology," each side continued to lack a fundamental understanding of disease prevention beyond empirical observation and, one might suggest, sheer guessing (Cunningham 87-89; Straubing 6; Eicher 788). Such an inadequacy of training, coupled with the cultural centrality of a "Good Death," made it almost impossible, even for those physicians trained in the burgeoning number of medical schools across the United States, to provide adequate treatment to the ever-increasing number of men who needed their care (Faust 6; Cunningham 3-5; 9-10; Fuller 114).
<##> Using Gettysburg, the three day confrontation during July of 1863 that resulted in a combined total of 51,000 casualties, as an example, physicians of both armies spent the battle's aftermath tending to those who perhaps wondered if it had been better for them to have been killed rather than wounded (Ward, Burns and Burns 236). In his diary of war time service, Dr. Jonah F. Dyer, surgeon of the Nineteenth Massachusetts Regiment, detailed his work throughout and following the conflict in central Pennsylvania (91-100). In his entry on the second day of battle, July 2, Dr. Dyer "sat down in the little kitchen of the house near which we have our hospital to write a few words" (91). Within his sight and hearing, Dr. Dyer details that there were "about five hundred to six hundred wounded in the house, barn, and under the apple trees" (91). Only two days later, Dr. Dyer's entry suggests an even more ghastly picture. Beyond those half a thousand or more wounded and the hours needed to offer basic relief, Dr. Dyer writes of the approximately "six hundred fifty of our wounded, and two hundred Rebels in our hospital here, besides two to three hundred in the hospital nearer the field" who were receiving "care at temporary hospitals near the scene of the fight" (93). In addition to bureaucratic bungling that slowed the administration of treatment, a hard rain also fell "on thousands of wounded gathered together" (93). The rain itself, even as it perhaps offered a small relief from the July heat, also added to the misery of the wounded by preventing Dr. Dyer and his colleagues from performing surgery after dark (93). Needing candles to light the operating areas and still finding it "impossible to work fast enough to perform all the necessary operations for two or three days," Dr. Dyer focused upon the transporting of the wounded to his hospital area "and providing for them when here" (93). While efforts were made to give as much care as possible, Dr. Dyer's understated description of "thousands" lying even partially exposed to the elements while suffering from battle wounds creates an image of suffering that leaves little to the imagination (93).
<##> These entries portray memories that created a desire, as Dr. Willoughby articulated some years later in Shinbone, for physicians to achieve almost any form of escape (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Stowe 260). While Dr. Dyer's efforts demonstrated heroism and compassion, his written reflections also portray a stoic helplessness that could not but stay with him during the rest of his life. Going from 500 to "thousands" of wounded over only a two day time span, all of them in pain, and despite every regiment usually having two surgeons and additional assistants often "sawing and cutting more like devils and machines than human beings," it becomes simply impossible to avoid the conclusion that these physicians experienced suffering at levels that threatened to overwhelm them (93; Freemon 41; 48). Upon his return home in presumably 1865, it becomes quite understandable how Dr. Mandelet, carrying similar memories of massive suffering, wanted simply to "detach" himself far from any form of circumstances that even remotely resembled what he had just survived (Mainland 81).
<##> In seeing Leonce Pontellier approach him from the street, it is no wonder that Dr. Mandelet "stared up disapprovingly" at the arrival of his guest ( The Awakening 117). Dr. Mandelet's reaction, and even as it occurs within the "bonds of friendship," nonetheless provides complexity to their subsequent conversation (117). As Leonce began to discuss his perplexities over Edna's recently odd behavior, Dr. Mandelet, on a surface level, invited him to sit, listened attentively, offered three face-saving ways for his young friend to explain away his wife's present peculiarities, and finally suggested that she be allowed to come and see him (117-119). These immediate counsels, however, do not reflect what someone more astute than Leonce might expect from one "with a reputation for wisdom" (116). Dr. Mandelet's responses are little more than late-nineteenth century bromides that sufficiently appease, but do little to address the turmoil within Edna that Dr. Mandelet keenly senses to be taking place (116-119). The turmoil he does sense, as Chopin suggests, is either interrupted by Leonce or deflected through statements concerning his presumed lack of insight into the non-male portion of the human species (117-119).
<##> Despite such appearances, Chopin's description of Dr. Mandelet offers another way to read his responses to Leonce's almost adolescent ramblings. Beyond a word about insight, Chopin builds the encounter from both the basis of both Dr. Mandelet's hard-earned "wisdom, and "an ability to see beyond such boundaries to the center of a given issue" (116-117). In listening to Leonce's rush of verbiage, Dr. Mandelet discerns that his concerns are based in the gender expectations still dominant throughout late Victorian society (DeBerg 17-24). Leonce equates Edna's recent "ail[ment]" with the "odd" notion of permitting "the housekeeping go to the dickens" (The Awakening 117). Dr. Mandelet further notices how Leonce, in a fit of frustration, "throw[s] himself back in his chair," itself a violation of cultural expectations prescribing the behavior of "gentlemen" within several etiquette manuals of the era (117; Duffey 52; Egan 50). As Elizabeth Duffey notes in The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Etiquette: A Complete Manual of the Manners and Dress of American Society (1877), a male houseguest "should take the seat indicated by the hostess" or, in the present instance, host (53). "Tak[ing]," however, does not suggest the sort of "[t]hrowing" by which Leonce accepted the doctor's invitation (53; The Awakening 117). Despite the decline of these manuals as principal expressions of cultural power in the immediate decades after the war, their stipulations of manners were certainly part of the world in which Dr. Mandelet came to maturity (Kasson 44). To a significant, if not as central, degree, Leonce also knew those same expectations (Duffey 51-52; Egan 47). Given such a shared background, it is reasonable to note how Leonce's manner of accepting Dr. Mandelet's invitation to sit in a chair revealed the depth, or its corresponding lack, of his actual inner graciousness (Duffey 52). By "[t]hrowing himself" onto a chair as a guest in another's home, and even within the maelstrom of shifting notions concerning masculinity that Leonce undoubtedly experienced at work and perhaps in his club, he did far more than demonstrate a fit of bad manners (Stearns 83; DeBerg 19-21; The Awakening 45; 117). Rather, Leonce expressed to Dr. Mandelet both the ignorance of and indifference toward the real and living person who was his wife (117).
<##> Such indifference is, of course, well established within criticism concerning The Awakening (Bunch 43-61; Mainland 83-84). Simultaneously lacking, however, remains an exploration of the way by which Chopin links Dr. Mandelet's "detachment from [the] society" of white post bellum New Orleans to the effects of his experiences during the war (81). For Dr. Mandelet, it still mattered how a guest accepted an invitation to sit. To do so properly demonstrated an understanding that etiquette was more than a series of endless regulations that attempted to govern every aspect of social behavior. Rather, etiquette and the manuals which outlined its display served as means to "remove men and women from the natural or savage state into one wherein are called out those higher moral and intellectual qualities" that is otherwise called civilization (Duffey 9). Having seen, heard and given often futile treatment to the outcomes of such "savagery," Dr. Mandelet easily equated Leonce's seemingly trivial behavior with a much more profoundly callous indifference (9). From the same line of thought, Mainland's stipulation that Dr. Mandelet had formed "an air of detachment from society" certainly expresses an appropriate insight (81). By attempting to place it within the doctor's having "retired from much of his practice," however, she overlooks the possibility of how the trauma of Dr. Mandelet's war time medical service made such an attitude necessary (81). Rooted in memories of an unavoidable and brutal "detachment" from the horrifying "screams" of men to whom he could, at best, give only inadequate care, Dr. Mandelet had developed a broad and deep sense of how to measure importance (Hurst 64). Having conducted hundreds of operations in almost perpetually ghastly conditions, he had come to develop a sharp perspective concerning the banality of fools (Mainland 81; Hurst 64; The Awakening 117). Having known the outcome of an earlier foolishness during the war, Dr. Mandelet was not one to suffer long its current embodiment of someone who had just "thrown" himself into an invited chair (117).
<##> Upon noticing Leonce's indifference toward the most basic forms of expected and gentlemanly decorum, Dr. Mandelet lets him lead their conversation, but also invites his troubled visitor to move beyond both the gender-based cultural assumptions along with the ever-present suspicions between Catholicism and the evangelical Protestantism of Edna's childhood (117-118; Noll 17-18). At the same time, Dr. Mandelet knew well that Leonce would neither understand the actual nature of Edna's behavioral changes nor listen to suggestions that his indifference had anything to do with them. Chopin extends Leonce's boorishness in noting how he interrupts Dr. Mandelet's reflection that "[w]ell, well; women are not all alike, my dear Pontellier," and that such particularity "needs to be "consider[ed]" (Egan 50; 75; The Awakening 117).
<##> From that point forward, and while he attentively listened to Leonce's verbal torrents, Dr. Mandelet sought to end the conversation as quickly as possible. By having her fictional physician "lift his shaggy eyebrows, protrude his thick upper lip, and tap the arms of his chair with his cushioned fingertips," Chopin reemphasizes Dr. Mandelet's frustration with Leonce's un-"gentlemanly" behavior (118; Egan 50 ; 75). A significant part of his frustration, at the same time, roots itself in the years Dr. Mandelet spent giving medical service to the Confederacy. Having endured repeated instances during which even the best of human compassion proved unable to alleviate the most immense forms of suffering, Dr. Mandelet returned to New Orleans unwilling to tolerate much of a similar indifference among his neighbors. Knowing that Leonce, who did not possess the inner graces of a gentleman even while he thought himself to be one, would not comprehend the nature of whatever insights that he offered, Dr. Mandelet, at last beyond exasperation, asked that Edna come "around to see" him (The Awakening 118-119). By doing so, he acknowledged his own limits while also expressing concern for Edna as a singular person whose life until that point, he remembered, had been one of "listless" conformity to social norms (123).
<##> Such "listlessness" had all but disappeared when Dr. Mandelet shared dinner at the Pontellier's home the following Thursday evening (122). During the visit of Edna's father to New Orleans, and in the company of Alcee Arobin along with other guests, Dr. Mandelet followed Leonce's request by observing her demeanor throughout the evening. Finding Edna "radiant" and "palpitant with the forces of life," Dr. Mandelet played the part of charming houseguest by telling an "old, ever new and curious story of the waning of a woman's love" and how it "sought new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of fierce unrest" (123). Using a form of rhetorical indirection, Dr. Mandelet explained that he only related something about one of "little human documents which had been unfolded to him during his long career as a physician" (123). Such a "long career," he also alluded, encompassed sufficient time to place him within the Confederate Medical Corps where he came to understand just what it meant to "unfold" those "little human documents" in need of his care (123). Even as he played the gentleman during a formal nighttime visit, Dr. Mandelet's story strengthens the link between how his war time service had transformed his understanding of etiquette from rules for their own sake to principles rooted in human compassion. Dr. Mandelet did not condescendingly see a "little human document" to be clinically evaluated; rather, he witnessed a woman named Edna, whose escape from pain he saw and felt as clearly as he did in the desire of the men who had been under his care a generation earlier (123).
<##> Edna's reaction to Dr. Mandelet's story, while also appearing in the part of elegant hostess, indicated to him that she understood just what he had tried to communicate. Expressed within a type of arbitrarily established code, Edna extended an appreciation for what she saw and heard from Dr. Mandelet (123). Rather than, as a surface reading might suggest, being unimpressed with his tale, Edna understood well just what had been offered to her (122-123). She further reinforced such a grasp of the code that she shared with her physician through relating a story of her own (122-123; 118). "Glowing" in its telling, Edna, ever the "lady" and with a performed humility, notably gave credit to Madame Antoine for the tale (124; Duffey 22; 43). Realizing that as the hostess and as a "lady" that she must play to the pretenses of the men in her midst, Edna's coded deflection assuaged the expectations of both her husband and her father (15). They anticipated that in such a social situation as a dinner party, Edna would work to avoid bringing undue attention to herself and a subsequent embarrassment to them (qtd. 37; 15). Through such a seeming appeasement to Leonce and her father, Edna simultaneously managed to speak with a freedom that Dr. Mandelet, as he later walked home, grasped all too well (The Awakening 124). By hearing how she had begun to free herself from traditional bounds of marital fidelity, Dr. Mandelet realized both the depth of Edna's previous suffering and a fear that only disaster would follow.
<##> While fearing for Edna and, quite reasonably, her young sons if not exactly for Leonce, Dr. Mandelet also understood the constraints of culture and custom within which he could maneuver. If he directly approached Edna with his concerns, he would not only be acting in an ungentlemanly manner, but presuming a superiority that he well knew to be an illusion (Duffey 13). Dr. Mandelet's years in the war had led him to realize that limits existed within every human endeavor, even those based from a desire to demonstrate compassion and concern for one's fellows. As the telling of their tales acknowledged, Dr. Mandelet and Edna were now two adults now devoid of pretense, and had established the boundaries within which their coded relationship might henceforth take place ( The Awakening 123-124; Duffey 19).
<##> At the time of their last encounter, Edna had broken her ties to Alcee Arobin, and had all but done so with Robert Lebrun. Dr. Mandelet had been called to deliver Madame Ratignolle's most recent baby, and Edna had also come at her request for support (The Awakening 167-169). Chopin frames their meeting through the premise that Dr. Mandelet "was glad to see Edna, and wanted her to go with him into the salon and entertain him" (169-170). On an elementary level, such desire for amusement reads as the sort of misogyny expected from Leonce, Alcee or almost any other man in the late Nineteenth Century. Such a reading would also starkly contrast with the insightful and attentive figure portrayed throughout earlier portions of the novel. Chopin additionally provides no direct reason why Dr. Mandelet appeared to have such a dramatic change in his relationship with someone whom he had just recently established an intimacy of understanding (169-170). In itself, the third meeting between Edna and her physician might appeared to have begun with some type of power struggle between antebellum regression and late century liberation.
<##> Such a reading, however, does not account for the depth of code that Dr. Mandelet and Edna had established during their recent dinner party (122-124). Within their established form of exchange, each knew the other's intent and responded accordingly. As Dr. Mandelet verbally expressed his desire that Edna "entertain" him, he did, in point of fact, communicate the precise nature of his desire (169-170). Despite the literal words of his request, Dr. Mandelet wanted Edna for far more than helping him pass the time between Madame Ratignolle's birth pangs (168-170). "Entertainment" for Dr. Mandelet and Edna meant, as Chopin establishes through their subsequent conversation, time in one another's company during which they could speak with a freedom that went well past the established gender roles of late Victorian America (DeBerg 17-24). As each of them almost certainly knew as well, Madame Ratignolle "would not consent that Edna should leave her for an instant" while she continued to denounce Dr. Mandelet's medical abilities (The Awakening 170; 168-170).
<##> Once the birth had come to pass, Edna, feeling ill at ease over having witnessed such "torture," initially refused Dr. Mandelet's offer of a ride to her home in his coupe (170). Sensing that Edna's "stunned and speechless" demeanor was also connected to the growing danger of her own inner turmoil, Dr. Mandelet stepped beyond the cultural "detachment" he had so carefully crafted for himself since the war (Mainland 81). While appropriate that a gentleman offers a lady an escort even for a short ride home, he still exceeds his role by not following her wishes that she walk home unaccompanied ( The Awakening 170; Duffey 88). Taking his liberties still further, Dr. Mandelet speaks to Edna with an overtness of language that he has not previously shown (170-171). The manner of his exceptional directness, surely also served as a confession of the immense emotional pain he carried from an inability to adequately treat the men under his care during the war (171). Full of vigor, passion and yet with a gentleness rooted in "wisdom," Dr. Mandelet told Edna, "youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race" (171). Such youthful "illusions" lack awareness how "[n]ature takes no account of moral consequences" or the "arbitrary conditions which we create" (171). During his youth, Dr. Mandelet suggested to Edna, he had eagerly volunteered for medical service, believing that his skill could meet any need presented to him. The "moral consequences" of not being able to do so for thousands of men, many of whose "screams" still haunted him day and night, had led him away from grand notions of absolutism toward a life rooted in a gentleness of understanding that often took pleasure in something so simple as attentively listening to the pains of another (171; Hurst 64). Such gentleness, Dr. Mandelet continued, would need no preliminaries between Edna and himself; they had already come to know one another well beyond the grasp of most others in their midst. Beyond Edna's response that despite his graciousness, she was determined to go her "own way," Dr. Mandelet continued to urge that she still "come and see me soon" (The Awakening 172). Asking that she "not blame [her]self, whatever comes" and leaving Edna at her front gate, Dr. Mandelet ended his invitation with the same sort of gentle ease that he had had presumably shown her throughout all the years she had lived in New Orleans (172). Edna's acknowledgement in her last moments that "Dr. Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him" makes her suicide an even more painful conclusion to the novel (176).
<##> Upon hearing the news of Edna's disappearance, Dr. Mandelet, however, would not have been, it seems fair to say, all that surprised. Through his service in the Confederate Medical Corps and having witnessed agonies in the extreme, he had come to realize the limits of human endurance and the fallibility of even the most well-intentioned forms of treatment. He would grieve for Edna, as he did for the men who suffered under his care; but the "wisdom" of limits that he gained as a war time surgeon would have enabled Dr. Mandelet to express the same sort of gentle grace in his all but certain conversations with Edna's sons, Raoul and Etienne (117). Such gentleness, Dr. Mandelet knew, would hopefully enable the boys to live in relative peace with the memory of their dead mother even as he did while continuing to hear the screams of wounded men who always threatened to engulf him (Hurst 64).
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