"As a speculative explanation of these puzzles I want to argue that The Awakening is a female fiction that both draws upon and revises fin de siècle hedonism to propose a feminist and matriarchal myth of Aphrodite/Venus as an alternative to the masculinist and patriarchal myth of Jesus. In the novel's unfolding of this implicit myth, the dinner party scene is of crucial importance, for here, as she presides over a Swinburnian Last Supper, Edna Pontellier definitively (if only for a moment) "becomes" the powerful goddess of love and art into whose shape she was first "born" in the Gulf near Grand Isle and in whose image she will be suicidally borne back into the sea at the novel's end. Thus when Victor, the dark-haired young man who was ritually draped and garlanded at the climax of the feast, tells his friend Mariequita that "Venus rising from the foam could have presented no more entrancing a spectacle than Mrs. Pontellier, blazing with beauty and diamonds at the head of the board," he is speaking what is in some deep sense the truth about Kate Chopin's heroine."
Sandra M. Gilbert, "The Second Coming of Aphrodite"
The Kenyon Review (Summer 1983)
Sandra M. Gilbert, "The Second Coming of Aphrodite"
The Kenyon Review (Summer 1983)
http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enlt255/awakeningnow.html