Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

College Literature, Spring 2000 by Treu, Robert

From its earliest publication, Kate Chopin's The Awakening has provoked controversy, but the nature of these discussions has changed dramatically over the course of the century, along with the ideological concerns that have driven them. In retrospect the early attacks on the book seem blessedly simple, a matter of moral condemnation of its main character that was supposed to represent important American values (Toth 1990, 338-44). Edna Pontellier's adulterous behavior was clearly reprehensible and her offstage suicide an emphatic piece of narrative punctuation, a moral period to the sentence which ends her life. These attacks were also harsh enough to effectively end Chopin's career as a writer and, incidentally, end serious discussion of the book for half a century. More recent readings frequently approve of the novel for its artistry while condemning Edna's "romantic yearning" as a character flaw which contributes to her death. Moral condemnation has been replaced by a gentler sense of correcting the moody and the muddle-headed. Many of these interpretations come out of what Suzanne Wolkenfeld calls "the feminist fatalism of presenting Edna as the victim of an oppressive society" (1976, 221), and others, more positively, see her as "a solitary, defiant soul who stands out against the limitations that both nature and society place upon her, and who accepts in the final analysis a defeat that involves no surrender" (Binge 1976, 206).

In these critical discussions the one area of substantial agreement seems to be about what the text does not say, which is that Edna commits suicide. I hope to show, with the help of some ideas from the Russian theoretician and critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, that these readings are related in a rather patchwork manner to various official or unofficial ideologies, and that other readings are possible.

In fact, the novel ends with Edna swimming in the gulf waters off of Grand Isle and closes with this enigmatic paragraph:

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (Chopin 1976,114)

Of course the inference of Edna's suicide has more to support it than this passage, as the book's critics have pointed out, but the supporting evidence has often been contradictory, as we shall see.

For some readers Edna's suicide presents an aesthetic problem. Death has been brought in as an easy way of resolving the action of so many narratives that it can seem predictable and unconvincing. Furthermore, what Kate Chopin intended by ending her narrative where she did is obscured by the lack of strictly delineated literary conventions to guide us in reading novels like The Awakening. Certainly the sort of "unfinished" ending we find there is more familiar in our era than it was in hers, especially in films, and the novel has also learned to avoid giving itself over to predictable conventions. It is exactly this quality that prompted Bakhtin to give it preeminence in our century:

The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply more essentially more sensitively and rapidly reality itself in the process of unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process. The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making. . . . (Bakhtin 1981, 7)

To insist that there is only one acceptable inference to be taken from the ending of The Awakening is to deny much of the genre's historical importance.

Inferential readings invite us either to deduce the intentions of an author or to predict what is most likely to happen next, based upon the likelihood of such events occurring in sequence in real life, with some attention, one hopes, to the laws of nature. It is worth pointing out at the beginning that it is not at all clear that Edna's death is the most likely outcome of the sequence established in the text. It is too likely to be disregarded, obviously, but no more likely than a reasonably strong real-life swimmer becoming tired, panicking, and then finding the strength to reach the shore safely No rules of nature or probability are breached by making an inference other than Edna's drowning. Even if we do infer Edna's drowning, it does not follow that her death is necessarily a suicide. Most teachers will remember how frequently university students argue that Edna's death is not consciously intended. They see it rather as something between an accident and a suicide.

There is, of course, precedent for authors giving readers alternative conclusions to a narrative. Charles Dickens not only supplied a second ending to Great Expectations for those who were not satisfied with the novel's original one, but then had both endings published together (clearly identified) in subsequent editions. Now most readers would feel deprived if either one of the endings were suppressed, as if, in violation of logic, both endings must occur for the novel to have its effect. Similarly, anyone who has taught Frost's "Home Burial" will remember the certainty with which some students "see" Amy leave her husband, even though the poem ends abruptly with the husband threatening to come after her if she does leave. Frost clearly wanted the reader to consider more than one possibility. A similar aesthetic strategy may have caused Kate Chopin to end where she did, allowing her readers, if they choose to accept it, a similar privilege.