Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

Much later, in 1987, Jill McCorkle suggested an alternative ending, one based upon the liberating work of a couple of generations:

At the end of Kate Chopin's novel "The Awakening," Edna Pontellier, who is swimming out into the ocean with every intention of drowning, realizes she has made a terrible mistake. She thinks of her husband, and how dull and controlled her life with him has been; she thinks of Robert, her young lover, who awakened her sexually and then left with his brief"Goodbyebecause I love you.."What an easy line. She imagines the two of them discovering her drowned body Her husband would say, "How could she have gone swimming without anything on? What will everyone say? (McCorkle 1987, 52)

Another example of this sort of"heresy" can be found in Sandra Gilbert's important article, "The Second Coming of Aphrodite," in which Edna dies, only to be resurrected as Venus:

For in swimming away from the beach where her prosaic husband watches and waits, Edna swims away from the shore of her old life, where she had lingered for twenty-eight years, hesitant and ambivalent. As she swims, moreover, she swims not only toward a female paradise but out of one kind of novel-the work of Eliotan or Flaubertian "realism" she had previously inhabited-end into a new kind of work, a mythic/metaphysical fantasy of paradisiacal fulfillment and therefore adumbrates much of the feminist modernism that was to come within a few decades. (Gilbert 1983, 52)

She goes on to explain: "Defeated, even crucified, by the `reality' of nineteenth-century New Orleans, Chopin's resurrected Venus is returning to Cyprus or Cythera" (58), where she becomes "the regal woman, the one who looks on, who stands alone" (56). This is an inventive way of reading the book, and Gilbert has the courage to at least ask the question: "And how, after all, do we know that she ever dies" (58)? Elizabeth LeBlanc picks up on Gilbert's doubts and offers another symbolic interpretation in which Edna and the ocean join in "the `ultimate' lesbian moment" (1996, 306). Both of these interpretations share in a very real contemporary desire to rescue Edna from defeat, if not from death. They also suggest that a stance outside of the conventional defense of "normal" family and sexual configurations may be useful in dealing with Chopin's ending. Both deserve credit for respecting the text and making room for future readings.

The Awakening looks critically at some of the deepest and apparently most unassailable assumptions of American society. But is there any need to hurry the questions generated by this narrative to an ideological formulation that demands Edna's suicide? Kate Chopin had every right, I think, to deny her readers the pleasure of an easy ending. Had she wanted to, she might have ended the novel with a funeral scene, complete with ideological clarification in the form of weeping friends. Goethe added such a note to the end of Werther. Or she might have handled the scene with devastating irony, the way Crane did the funeral scene at the end of Maggie.