Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

College Literature, Spring 2000 by Treu, Robert

For most modern readers, such an intrusive use of coincidence is likely to suggest determinism, either religious or behavioral. Whether we see Edna as the victim of a vengeful God (she was raised a Calvinist) or of a hostile environment, her suicide is inescapable. Some critics have pointed to her inability to resolve the conflict between her need to be free and her responsibility toward her children, which leads her to "revolt against the ways of Nature" (Chopin 1976, 109). When read simply as a rejection of her role as mother and of the limits of her biological situation, the line can seem almost petulant. However, the capitalization of nature suggests that Edna may be referring to a narrow conception of the term which has as much of reification as biology in it, one in which "Nature" is used to justify social arrangements and to dismiss challenges to them.

In arguing that Chopin's text points inexorably toward Edna's suicide, some critics have cited the following lines: "She understood now clearly what she had meant long ago when she said to Adele Ratignolle that she would give up the unessential, but she would never sacrifice herself for her children" (Skaggs 1985, 113). Rather than expressing Edna's despondency, these words place the strongest possible value upon freedom. As the passage indicates, Edna has actually made the statement earlier, before the introduction of the novel's major conflicts.

The lines that follow invite a similarly complex reading: "The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered her and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them" (Skaggs 1985, 113). What has been read as depression and defeat might as easily be read as rebellion.

Attempts to see the final paragraphs of the novel as a unified and logical presentation of Edna's motive for suicide have frustrated serious readers by asking them to choose a single strand from a complex skein of possible cause and effect connections. It has been argued that she kills herself because "she cannot sacrifice herself to the consequences of sexual activity and at the same time is not willing to live without sensuous experience" (Allen 1977, 237); because she discovers that her role as mother makes her continuing development as an autonomous individual impossible (Skaggs 1985, 111); because she is guilty of "succumbing to the promises of romanticism" (Thorton 1988); because she cannot hope for significant change in American social arrangements (Swell 1986,157); or because she has failed as an artist.This last point has been made in an especially interesting way by Michael Gilmore (1988, 65), who sees Edna's suicide as motivated by her inability to adjust to the historical change from impressionism to modernism. Susan Wolkenfeld is certain that "Chopin places Edna's suicide as a defeat, a regression, rooted in a self-annihilating instinct, in a romantic reality" (1976, 220). In a more recent reading, Joyce Dyer seems to vacillate on this issue, offering the intriguing notion that "the ambiguous sea supports the puzzling but wonderful possibility that we are to view Edna not as dead but, rather, as yet unborn" (1993, 114). Patricia Yeager sees Edna's death as a failure of her male-derived language to sustain her (1987, 446), while Priscilla Leder blames literature itself, in that "the suicide appears once more as both failure and triumph-the failure of 19th century literary forms to do justice to women's experience and the triumph of a work that at once evokes and exceeds those forms, swimming with its heroine toward the 20th century" (1996, 225). Dyer,Yeager, and Leder also share an important impulse, which insists that Edna must win something, even in death. Harold Bloom takes issue with the feminist readings and sounds rather more like the book's earliest critics when he claims that Edna's suicide could have been avoided had she acknowledged "that her awakening was to a passion for herself" (1999, 10).There is a rich variety to choose from in constructing Edna's will to self-destruction, and this very variety should encourage us to raise doubts about what we think we are reading in the novel's final pages.