Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

College Literature, Spring 2000 by Treu, Robert

Edna, with a motion or two, dragged herself on her knees before Mademoiselle Reisz, who took the glowing face between her two hands.

"Why? Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing, because he has two lips and a square chin, and a little finger which he can't straighten from having played baseball too energetically in his youth. Because . . ."

"Because you do, in short," laughed Mademoiselle. "What will you do when he comes back?" she asked.

"Do? Nothing, except feel glad and happy to be alive." (Chopin 1976,81) Edna leaves feeling quite cheerful. Mile. Reisz does indeed ask difficult questions, but she does not dictate or proscribe. She acts very differently from Leonce, whose demeanor Edna will no longer tolerate, and her questions encourage her friend to clarify her situation. Edna goes to her because "that woman, by her divine art, seemed to reach Edna's spirit and set it free" (78).

It is also in Chapter III that we hear for the first time another voice, a voice strangely disturbing to Edna and even more disturbing to some of the book's critics. After Leonce accuses Edna of neglecting the children, she is finally alone in the darkness: "There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of the wateroak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like mournful lullaby upon the night" (Chopin 1976, 8). This is no longer the noise of socially constructed voices repeating whatever is proper or conventional; and it stands for a good deal that realism tries to reject. It is subjective, and tends to humanize nature as if it spoke for the individual's deepest yearnings. This voice comes into the work intermittently and in muted tones, in the midst of the realistic scenes, as when Edna hears Mlle. Reisz play the piano, or again when she refuses Robert's invitation to go swimming: "Her glance wandered from his face away toward the Gulf, whose sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty" (14).When it dominates, as it does in Chapter VI, it does not do so for long.

But where are we to locate this voice? Is it in Edna's mind, or is it a voice that Chopin gives legitimacy by assigning it to a larger consciousness? While the passage is justly praised for its sensuous quality, its rhetorical structure is descriptive, and it never pretends to be completely the voice it represents. Instead it makes a statement about that voice:

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace (Chopin 1976, 15).

In the lines following these Chopin takes pains to contain the incantatory effect of her style with rational explanation: "This may seem like a ponderous weight to descend upon the soul of a young woman-perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman." If Edna seems to be caught between "contradictory impulses" (1976, 14) or somewhat uncertain of what path to take this early in the narrative, we are not required to read this as a serious flaw Instead, Chopin suggests that this is an expression of something essential in Edna's character: "At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life-that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions" (15). Indeed, before we attribute too much to the dire influence of the sea's mysterious voice, we would do well to note that it is silent for much of the novel and returns only in the last few pages. Back in New Orleans, Edna gives up her Tuesday open houses, starts an affair with Arobin, keeps in touch with friends, throws parties, and works on her painting. She struggles to overthrow much of what her husband considers to be her responsibilities, but she does not find much solitude.