Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

College Literature, Spring 2000 by Treu, Robert

Werther and Edna may subscribe to the same romantic philosophy, but he is a single man in love with a married woman, while Edna is the married partner in Chopin's narrative. She also has an identifiable injustice to confront in rejecting the subservient role she has been offered. But perhaps the most striking difference is Chopin's use of heteroglossia and a point of view more encompassing than what we find in Werther's letters. By choosing August 28th as the date of Edna Pontellier's "awakening," she was surely celebrating Goethe the survivor rather than Werther the suicide.

If Goethe survived through the ritual of writing, Edna Pontellier discovers a way of her own. The structure of The Awakening reveals a sort of ritual pattern in Edna's swimming and the risks associated with it. In the first such scene (ChapterVI) she has been recently driven to despondency and tears by her situation and the anguish she feels at having to stifle, to a large degree, her creative impulses in favor of her duties as a wife. When she swims successfully for the first time she experiences panic at the possibility of drowning, but she persists. Chopin tells us Edna "wanted to swim where no woman had swum before." Soon after, as she sits alone on the porch of their cottage, Leonce commands her to come in. For the first time in the novel, she defies him. Her swimming experience has been liberating, partly because it involves a vision of death.

Chopin composed with the kind of symphonic structural skill that invites us to notice a similar pattern when it asserts itself at the end of the book. Edna swims farther out in the last chapter as a measure of how much she has changed in the course of the narrative. She will not settle this time for a short swim under Leonce's supervision. She now has the strength to take greater risks and she does so. Robert's leaving has hurt her, certainly, but she can imagine a future in which she will not be dependent upon any man. A little earlier, when Robert declared his desire to make Edna his wife, she laughed at him (1976, 117). As she approaches the beach she hears the commands, the warnings, and the imprecations of the other voices. She silences them by swimming to the point of panic, and, passing through that, to a state something like Werther's "cold consciousness." Seen this way her actions are not necessarily suicidal; they may even be a form of psychic survival. Chopin stops short of showing us how Edna comes out of this final crisis because the risks are real. But then so are the stakes.

Those who see Edna's suicide as a logical extension of their dialectical readings have a right to do so. But not every reader has been in such a hurry to accept Edna's suicide as the only way to read the novel's ending, and their discomfiture often has its own ideological connections. Lizzie L., a Louisville friend of Chopin, wrote that she had been "so deeply interested, so absolutely absorbed in "The Awakening" that I could not realize the denouement. It seemed so impossible that Edna should sacrifice her life, although I understand how her nature had become completely metamorphosed under the influence of an infatuation she was powerless to control" (Toth 1990, 345). Lizzie L's reading can represent the reactions of many readers who feel bound to accept, however reluctantly, the suicide ending as if it existed in the text.