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The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Edna’s Finding Her Identity and Independence

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The Awakening

Kate chopin, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions, edna pontellier quotes in the awakening.

“You are burnt beyond recognition,” he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.

Mrs. Pontellier’s eyes were quick and bright; they were a yellowish brown, about the color of her hair. She had a way of turning them swiftly upon an object and holding them there as if lost in some inward maze of contemplation and thought. … She was rather handsome than beautiful. Her face was captivating by reason of a certain frankness of expression and a contradictory subtle play of features.

An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day.

Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.

At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

The acme of bliss, which would have been marriage with the tragedian, was not for her in this world. As the devoted wife of a man who worshipped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.

A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

A thousand emotions have swept through me tonight. I don’t understand half of them… I wonder if I shall ever be stirred again as Mademoiselle Reisz’s playing moved me tonight. I wonder if any night on earth will again be like this one. It is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings.

She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul from responsibility.

Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But the small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet.

She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic.

The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle,—a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium.

He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why —when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day.

She won’t go to the marriage. She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth.

He observed his hostess attentively from under his shaggy brows, and noted a subtle change which had transformed her from the listless woman he had known into a being who, for the moment, seemed palpitant with the forces of life. Her speech was warm and energetic. There was no repression in her glance or gesture. She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun.

“One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don’t know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can’t convince myself that I am.”

It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire.

But as she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtake her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. … There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one.

There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eye: to see and apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life.

She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness, - not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.

I always feel so sorry for women who don’t like to walk; they miss so much—so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.

You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,’ I should laugh at you both.

It was you who awoke me last summer out of a life-long, stupid dream.

With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture.

There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.

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The Classic Novel That Saw Pleasure as a Path to Freedom

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By Claire Vaye Watkins

• Published Feb. 5, 2020 Updated Feb. 27, 2020

Early in “The Awakening” — Kate Chopin’s great feminist novel of identity and self-consciousness, which still throbs with relevance more than 120 years after its publication — the heroine’s husband picks a fight. He has spent the evening at a casino and now it’s approaching midnight, but the card game has left Léonce “in high spirits, and very talkative.” He wakes his wife to gossip but she answers him sleepily, “with little half utterances.” Spurned, and still intent on rousing her, Léonce manufactures a fever for their sleeping son. When Edna dares doubt this, Léonce calls her a bad mother. She springs out of bed to check, while Léonce — no longer worried, if he ever actually was — enjoys his cigar. Soon, Mr. Pontellier is fast asleep, but “Mrs. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake.”

Awake to what? After the fight, Edna moves out to the balcony and weeps profusely: “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.”

Whatever it is, it is indescribable, unfamiliar, vague. Yet also partly named: oppression, anguish. Edna edges into the uncharted territory of her own consciousness. She is beckoned — like Eve, like the women convened at Seneca Falls decades before, like Betty Friedan and Audre Lorde decades later, like Claudia Rankine today — to “use language to mark the unmarked.”

Awakening as a metaphor for accessing not only the unfamiliar part of one’s consciousness but the buried truth of our society has exploded into the mainstream thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. On Jan. 9, 2016, in Baton Rouge — not so far from the novel’s setting of Grand Isle (or what’s left of Grand Isle after so many superstorms) — the activist DeRay Mckesson was arrested while protesting the extrajudicial execution of Alton Sterling by the police. Mckesson broadcast his arrest on Periscope, where viewers around the world watched him handcuffed by the police in a T-shirt reading “#StayWoke,” the millennial iteration of an adage that has bolstered the black community’s freedom fight since the black labor movement of the 1940s, as Kashana Cauley explored in The Believer. Historically, the phrase stay woke , Cauley wrote, “acknowledged that being black meant navigating the gaps between the accepted narrative of normality in America and our own lives.”

Innovative grammatical constructions like “stay woke” and “wokeness” powerfully evoke the ongoing struggle for justice embodied in Black Lives Matter and the movements that came before it, as well as those that followed, including the reinvigorated women’s movement and the swell of activism on the American left working for visibility, participation and self-determination of marginalized people at all levels of civic life. The echoes between this moment and the expanded consciousness represented by “The Awakening” reverberate so loudly they have been recently satirized by the poet Juliana Gray as “The Awokening.” At the risk of engaging in the kind of appropriation and dilution Cauley finds rightfully tiresome, today’s wokeness has a kindred spirit in “The Awakening.” Both emphasize omnipresent, if latent, wisdom.

Novels are neither recipes nor advice columns, yet it seems useful — at this moment when feminism yearns to outgrow its divisive metaphors, to correct for its hypocrisies and moral failings, and to resist cynical corporate co-opting that seeks to turn the movement into a marketing tool — to re-examine the transformation underway in a foundational book like “The Awakening.” Feminism endures when it embraces consciousness both within and without, becoming a cooperative struggle for justice across categories, what Kimberlé Crenshaw termed “intersectionality.” With this in mind, it seems to me urgent to read “The Awakening,” a bible of consciousness-raising for so many, and notice: What wakes us up?

In June 1899, a review of “The Awakening” in The Morning Times of Washington, D.C., concluded that “the agency of the ‘awakening’ is a man, Robert Le Brun.” In fact, as generations of readers have observed, the agent of Edna’s awakening is Edna herself: her body, her friends, her art, her time in nature. Edna’s awakening begins outdoors, an escape from the structures of patriarchy into the unbuilt landscapes of the sensual, sublime and the supernatural. Edna swims in the gulf, languishes in a hammock, escapes to the balcony, where “there was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea.”

She finds her own everlasting voice within spaces of sisterhood. Edna’s female friendships are fountains of encouragement for her artistic ambition, as well as sites of confession. Sitting by the sea with her uninhibited Creole friend, Madame Ratignolle, Edna can admit, if only to herself, her maternal ambivalence: “She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way.” Edna knows she is “not a mother-woman” like her radiant and ever-pregnant friend, not “some sensuous Madonna.” If Edna is not a Madonna then by patriarchy’s binary she must be a whore. So be it, Edna all but says, flinging herself into a breathless flirtation with Robert.

But Robert is far from the sole object of Edna’s desire. Their liaison eschews monogamy in more ways than the obvious infidelity, taking as lovers the moon, the gulf and its spirits. In the moonlit sea Edna “walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence” into the gulf, where swimming alone is “as if some power of significant import had been given to control the working of her body and soul.” Solitude is essential to Edna’s realization that she has never truly had control of her body and soul. (The novel’s original title was “A Solitary Soul.”) Among Edna’s more defiant moments is when she refuses to budge from her hammock, despite paternalistic reprimand from both Robert and Léonce, who each insist on chaperoning, as if in shifts. Edna’s will blazes up even in this tiny, hanging room of her own, as Virginia Woolf would famously phrase it nearly 30 years later. Within the silent sanctuary of the hammock, gulf spirits whisper to Edna. By the next morning she has devised a way to be alone with Robert. Chopin’s novel of awakenings and unapologetic erotic trespass is in full swing.

Upon her return home to New Orleans, Edna trades the social minutiae expected of upper-crust Victorian white women — receiving callers and returning their calls — for painting, walking, gambling, dinner parties, brandy, anger, aloneness and sex. She shucks off tradition and patriarchal expectations in favor of art, music, nature and her bosom friends. These open her up, invite her to consider her self, her desires. One friend offers the tattoo-worthy wisdom that “the bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.” Is Edna such a bird? This is the novel’s central question, one it refuses to answer definitively. Chopin gives Edna the freedom to feel and yet not know herself. The women in the novel draw forth Edna’s intuition — they take the sensual and braid it with the intellectual. Eventually, the body and the mind are one for Edna.

“The Awakening” is a book that reads you. Chopin does not tell her readers what to think. Unlike Flaubert, Chopin declines to explicitly condemn her heroine. Critics were especially unsettled by this. Many interpreted Chopin’s refusal to judge Edna as the author’s oversight, and took it as an open invitation to do so themselves. This gendered knee-jerk critical stance that assumes less intentionality for works made by women is a phenomenon that persists today. Especially transgressive was Edna’s candor about her maternal ambivalence, the acuity with which Chopin articulated the fearsome dynamism of the mother’s bond with her children: “She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she would sometimes forget them.” This scandalized — and continues to scandalize — readers because the freedom of temporarily forgetting your children is to find free space in your mind, for yourself, for painting, stories, ideas or orgasm. To forget your children and remember yourself was a revolutionary act and still is.

Edna Pontellier does what she wants with her body — she has good sex at least three times in the book. But the more revolutionary act is the desire that precedes the sex. Edna, awakened by the natural world, invited by art and sisterhood to be wholly alive, begins to notice what she wants, rather than what her male-dominated society wants her to want. Edna’s desire is the mechanism of her deprogramming. The heroine’s sensual experience is also spiritual, and political. Political intuition begins not in a classroom but far before, with bodily sensation, as Sara Ahmed argues in her incendiary manifesto “Living a Feminist Life”: “Feminism can begin with a body, a body in touch with a world.” A body in touch with a world feels oppression like a flame, and recoils. For gaslit people — women, nonbinary and queer people, people of color — people who exist in the gaps Cauley describes between the accepted narrative of American normal and their own experience, pleasure and sensation are not frivolous or narcissistic but an essential reorientation. The epiphany follows the urge. Feeling her own feelings, thinking her own thoughts, Edna recalibrates her compass to point not to the torture of patriarchy but to her own pleasure, a new north.

Like Edna, Kate Chopin did what she wanted with her mind, whatever the cost, and it cost her almost everything. In 1899 “The Awakening” earned her a piddling $102 in royalties, about $3,000 in today’s money. Shortly after its publication the now unequivocally classic novel fell out of print. Chopin’s next book contract was canceled. Chopin died at age 54 from a brain hemorrhage after a long, hot day spent at the St. Louis World’s Fair with her son. Her publishing career lasted about 14 years. And yet she established herself among the foremothers of 20th-century literature and feminist thought. She showed us that patriarchy’s prison can kill you slow or kill you fast, and how to feel your way out of it. She admired Guy de Maupassant as “a man who had escaped from tradition and authority,” and we will forever argue whether Edna is allowed this escape, whether she shows us not the way but a way to get free. As for Chopin, there is no doubt that she was free on the page, free to let her mind unfurl. None of this is accident or folly, not caprice nor diary. She knew what she was doing. She was swimming farther than she had ever swum before.

CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS is the author of the story collection “Battleborn” and the novel “Gold Fame Citrus.” This essay is adapted from her introduction to “The Awakening: And Other Stories,” forthcoming from Penguin Classics.

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English literature essays, kate chopin's the awakening.

A study of the extent to which Edna Pontellier marks a departure from the female characters of earlier nineteenth-century American novels

by Emma Jones

The Awakening was published in 1899, and it immediately created a controversy. Contemporaries of Kate Chopin (1851-1904) were shocked by her depiction of a woman with active sexual desires, who dares to leave her husband and have an affair. Instead of condemning her protagonist, Chopin maintains a neutral, non-judgmental tone throughout and appears to even condone her character's unconventional actions. Kate Chopin was socially ostracised after the publication of her novel, which was almost forgotten until the second half of the twentieth century. The Awakening has been reclaimed by late twentieth-century theorists who see Edna Pontellier as the prototypical feminist. A woman before her time, Edna questions the institution of marriage, (at one point she describes a wedding as 'one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth') [1] has sexual desires of her own, and becomes completely independent of her husband. The central purpose of this essay is to assess to what extent the figure of Edna Pontellier marks a departure from the female characters of earlier nineteenth-century American novels, such as the character of Hester Prynne, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter , Cora Munro from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans , and the unnamed protagonist (and narrator) of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper . How does society, and its effect on women change throughout nineteenth-century American literature? Society of the nineteenth-century gave a heightened meaning to what it means to be a woman. According to the commonly known 'code of true womanhood', women were supposed to be docile, domestic creatures, whose main concerns in life were to be the raising of their children and submissiveness to their husbands. Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper capture, in their respective works, two women who have turned down these expected roles, and, consequently, suffer because of it. The husbands of these women, entirely because they stand to represent patriarchal society, are a great deal to blame for the "condition" of their wives. In the first scene of The Awakening , after being scolded by her husband about not being a good mother, Edna responds by crying, and later with defiance, refusing to come in to sleep, according to her husband's wishes. This behaviour, as well as the journey into the sea at the end of the novel suggests that she has become awakened to the oppressive nature of her husband, and that of the institution of marriage in general. The very act of Edna's struggle, her resistance, suggests her awareness that there is a way of speaking and thinking that will accurately reflect her desires, her worldview and her 'self'. She muses on the gap between what she feels and what society decrees must be:

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story which shows the anatomy of an oppressive marriage. Simply because the narrator does not cherish the joys of married life and motherhood, and therefore, is in violation of the rigid code of true womanhood, she is classified with a nervous condition, and sentenced to passivity. Under the cover story, the compliance of a woman to her husband, is the story of a heroine rebelling against the social constructs that deny her. In The Awakening , Edna Pontellier also rebels against the social constructs that confine her, especially the notion of 'true womanhood'. She tells Robert:

This outburst tells us how Edna predicts the society around her will react to her ability, and need, to express her feelings, and relate her thoughts to others. The opinions of others are of little concern to Edna. She refuses to change herself in order to fit into the restrictive mould that society has created for her. The novel is an account of Edna's rite de passage - her movement out of ignorance into knowledge - the account of her quest to discover self; the moment when she begins to loosen and unfetter all her repressed desires. It is interesting to compare the character of Edna with that of Cora Munro, from The Last of the Mohicans . Cora is the elder sister of Alice, and the voice of reason and strength. She is one of the most admirable characters, with a mothering, selfless nature that cares only to keep her sister safe. Cora's relationship with Alice demonstrates a distinct mother-daughter pattern that manifests itself in every interaction between the two women. Throughout the novel, Cora continuously hides her sister's face in her bosom as an indication of undying protection from the ravages of the American frontier. Alice depends on Cora as her champion and defender, but, most unmistakably as a mother figure. When Alice shows doubt and fear, Cora immediately rushes to protect and soothe her. Cooper writes:

Her motherly feelings towards Alice verge on the saintly; Cora often rises above common human sensibility and takes on the role of a martyr in the manner that a mother would for her child. Edna, on the other hand, neglects her children throughout the novel. She sees them as a hindrance to her freedom, feels "relief" when they are away and irresponsibly leaves them in the care of the pregnant Madame Ratignolle so that she can be with Robert. She almost seems to have an 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude when it comes to her children. In a significant conversation with her friend Adele Ratignolle, Edna declares:

Edna is unwilling to give up her individuality for her children, although she would give her life for them. She finds it difficult to express how she feels about this, she seems unable to put her finger on it, which reminds of us a novel written by Betty Friedan, about "the problem that has no name" [6] which confined women to the sphere of domesticity and consequently, an unbearable feeling of emptiness. Edna is not satisfied with devoting her life to her husband and children, she craves more, she needs to be her own person. She wants to be Edna, a woman, instead of merely a mother, or a wife. Whereas, in The Last of the Mohicans (published in 1826), it is implied that a maternal nature is instinctive to women, even, in the case of Cora, when the younger dependent is not actually one's offspring. Cora is willing to do anything for Alice, yet there are things that Edna would not do for her children. Cora reinforces the stereotype of the doting mother, whereas Edna refuses to conform, and questions the codes of the society in which she lives. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies the character of Hester Prynne, protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter . The novel, which was published in 1850, yet set in seventeenth-century Puritan New England, tells the story of Hester, an adulterous woman who is punished for her 'crime' by being made to wear a scarlet letter 'A' on her bosom. Hester harboured an intense love for her child Pearl although the child's mischievous and imp-like qualities brought nothing but pain to the child's mother. This is demonstrated as Hester, after having her talents as a seamstress publicised, began to change the attire of her family. For example,

This demonstrates that although Hester herself would dress only plainly in order to redeem her lost purity, she wished to make her child stand out. She had such an intense love for the child that she wanted only the absolute best for Pearl. Also, Hester was simply astounded and horrified at the idea of Pearl being taken away from her when this question was brought to the governor. This is demonstrated in the lines,

Hester's speech demonstrated that her only true reason for life was the child, and that if that the one richness of her life was devoured by Puritan thought and society, she would have lost all. Her child was her heart, love, and life. It was all that she had left to lose, and she would do anything to protect her Pearl. Hester seems to love Pearl to a greater degree than Edna loved her children, and in that respect, in her devotion to little Pearl, Hester could be seen as fitting the mould of a stereotypically 'true woman' more accurately than Edna does. Yet Hester does not fit this mould perfectly. There is the obvious discrepancy of her adulterous affair with Reverend Dimmesdale, but Hester also secretly disobeyed the codes of her society by harbouring visionary thoughts:

These forbidden thoughts were of social reform, especially concerned with the role of women in society. Hester believes that,

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Edna’s Suicide in Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” Essay (Book Review)

Introduction, works cited.

The Awakening published in 1899, was a controversial book. In this book, Kate Chopin depicts Edna, her main protagonist as a woman with active sexual desires who dares to leave her husband and have an affair. What is significant about the writing of Kate Chopin In “The Awakening” is that instead of condemning her protagonist for overstepping the boundaries set by society, Chopin maintains a neutral, non-judgmental tone throughout and appears to even condone her character’s unconventional actions. The novel can be seen as an account of Edna’s progressive journey from ignorance into knowledge – the account of her quest to discover self.

Thesis: Edna’s journey to the end of the sea at the end of the novel can be interpreted in two ways: the simplistic one being that Edna commits suicide and a deeper interpretation being it’s an expression of her ‘awakening’ to the oppressive nature of her husband and her own feminist side seeking freedom.

Different critics have interpreted the ending in different ways. Joseph Urgo maintains that by the end of the novel she has discovered that her story is “unacceptable in her culture” (23) and hence decides to “extinguish her life than edit her tale” (23). Here, her suicide is interpreted in terms of societal pressure. Edna’s life has become inseparable from the role her husband, lover, and society choose for her. Peggy Skaggs’ reading of Edna’s suicide is one of despair as Edna faces the hopeless situation that she can have all her needs satisfied only at the cost of her individuality. She could have her dream life with Robert only through the societal cage of marriage that she resented. Skaggs points out that her role of wife and role of mother adds to her conflict making it impossible for Edna to continue her quest for individuality.

As she walks into the water and swims away from the shore she thinks of “Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.” She could not be the mother to her children if it meant the cost of her individuality (p. 53). Portales contends that Edna wants an undefined, unexpressed, ineffable life that she cannot articulate or shape. Rather than live a life of compromise Edna chooses to die (Portales 436). Elaine Showalter points out in “Tradition and the Female Talent” that drowning conjures up similarities between “femininity and liquidity”. Women’s bodies are “prone to wetness, blood, milk, tears, and amniotic fluid; so in drowning the woman is immersed in the feminine organic element” (52). By choosing to drown herself Edna seeks to go inside herself and find liberation.

Edna battles with her innate sensuality and social conventions on the exterior level. Chopin portrays her as a woman whose sexual nature is unleashed and wishing to escape the enslavement of marriage. But then, her affairs with Arobin and her romantic dream of a life with Robert Lebrun do not adequately satisfy her. To Fox-Genovese, “They are loves that partake of, even as they mask, the longing for the lost mother” (p. 280). Edna is ambivalent in her reaction to the charms to the Arobin. She does not experience intimacy with Arobin. With Robert, there is only the dream of an unattached attachment. She is not ready to enter into marriage with him. She speaks in terms of an all-consuming attachment: “We shall be everything to each other. Nothing else in the world is of any consequence” (p. 103). The love she imagines is only an illusionary dream state that will protect her from estrangement or engulfment. Edna is thus torn between her own desires to overcome loneliness through a relationship with Robert and her desire for absolute freedom – to be left unhindered in her quest for an individual identity. In the ultimate choice Edna makes, she resigns herself to a sense of hopelessness.

Chopin’s description of the “seductive” power of the sea is sexual. As Edna disrobes and walks into the wavelets that “coiled like serpents about her ankles” (p. 127) her association of the sea with her sensual awakening and fulfillment creates a vision of the sea as her lover (Ryan 253). But then, the sensuality of Edna in her nude state and the sea that was “enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (p. 25) also carries Edna back to her childhood, to “the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end” (p. 109). The final dream of Edna Pontellier is not only of the lover’s embrace but also of the mother’s embrace – the longing to attain an intimacy that she cannot hope to have in real life and what she has not had in her past (Ryan 253). According to FoxGenovese, “Various psychoanalytic schools concur in recognizing the ocean as a maternal symbol. It is, accordingly, relatively non-controversial to suggest that Edna returns, at the novel’s close, to the maternal womb for the repose and nurture she cannot find in the human world” (p. 272).

The suicide of Edna can be seen as the ultimate outcome of depression caused by a deep longing for love. Chopin’s use of the words “despondency” and “delirium” is quite consistent with twentieth-century theories on the mood swings of many depressives. The “despondent moods” (p. 100) are noted after Robert’s return from Mexico, and Edna explains to Doctor Mandelet that “there are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me” (p. 105). The “despondency” sets in again on a decisive night before the suicide (p. 108). The mood swings are discussed after Mr. Pontellier wonders if his wife is “a little unbalanced mentally” (p. 55). As Edna becomes more herself, “casting aside that fictitious self” (p. 55), she becomes extremely unstable in her moods. Chopin describes Edna as a person with intense feelings that swayed from one extreme to another. Edna’s periods of elation were “days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day” (p. 56).

But such days were followed by others “when she was unhappy, she did not know why,–when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation” (p. 56). The depressive mood swing is best described during Edna’s birthday dinner party: “she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition” (p. 84-85). Edna also behaves in erratic ways like a mentally disturbed person. She is found in one instance stomping on her wedding ring and in another, feeling sorry that her husband is leaving for New York. She behaves in an inappropriate manner at the dinner party when she practically falls apart when Victor sings Robert’s song. There are also several passages where she contends she has inner thoughts or secret ideas, which when viewed in this manner, could be construed as a step toward mental illness.

Chopin uses psychologically suggestive language in describing Edna’s feelings towards Robert: “an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her” (Chopin, p. 52) and “her infatuation” (p. 52). The terms “obsession” and “infatuation” indicate that Edna was experiencing a reawakening of her youthful sexual fantasies in her responses to Robert: “she recognized anew the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman” (p. 44). Justus concurs and offers the following analysis of Edna’s regression: “… a return to the protective, self-evident identity of childhood” (p. 112). Like a child, Edna’s reactions are frequently found impulsive. Early she is described as “blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she has placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility” (p. 32).

When she breaks from her conventional role of wife and accepts Arobin as her lover, “A quick impulse that was somewhat spasmodic impelled her fingers to close in a sort of clutch upon his hand. He felt the pressure of her pointed nails in the flesh of his palms” (p. 73). She carries a childhood memory of when she fled her father’s Presbyterian service, “just following a misleading impulse without question” (p. 17). Throughout the novel, Edna is shown as a woman who is restrained and self-contained, yet is subject to impulsiveness. This impulsive nature adds to her vulnerability as a depressed person. Even the novel’s central motif, sleep, and waking has clear connections with depressive behavior. According to Lewin, sleep is related to elation in the depressive’s regressive denial (p. 101). After Edna refuses to leave her hammock and join her husband, she eases into a deep slumber: “the physical need for sleep began to overtake her ” (p. 31). Edna experiences strange drowsiness during the service when she is with Robert at the Grande Terre. When she is taken to the home of Madame Antoine, she falls into a deep sleep and when she awakens, she asks Robert, “How many years have I slept?” (p. 37). Edna reminds Doctor Mandelet “of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun” (p. 67). These references to sleep add weight to the argument that Edna’s final swim to the sea was an outcome of depression.

Thus, the ending of Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” can be interpreted in many ways. The fact that Edna was a complex character with obsessive-compulsive tendencies and a fragile psyche might have contributed most to the drastic choice she makes in the end.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth (1979). Kate Chopin’s Awakening. Southern Studies. Volume 18, 1979.

Lewin, Bertram David (1961). The Psychoanalysis of Elation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly Inc. New York, 1961.

Portales, Marco A. (1981). The Characterization of Edna Pontellier and the Conclusion of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Southern Studies. Volume 20, Issue 4, 1981. 425-436.

Ryan, T. Stephen (1998). Depression and Chopin’s ‘The Awakening. The Mississippi Quarterly. Volume: 51. Issue: 2. 1998. Page Number: 253+.

Showalter, Elaine (1993). Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book. Ed. Walker, A. Nancy. Bedford Publishers. Boston. 1993. 33-55.

Skaggs, Peggy (1974). Three Tragic Figures in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Louisiana Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South. Volume 4, 1974. 345-64.

Urgo, Joseph R. (1987). A Prologue to Rebellion: The Awakening and the Habit of Self-expression. The Southern Literary Journal. Vol. 20, Issue 1, 1987. 22-32.

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IvyPanda. (2021, October 13). Edna's Suicide in Kate Chopin's “The Awakening”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/ednas-suicide-review-in-chopins-the-awakening/

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Bibliography

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