Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

The ending of The Awakening contains a puzzle similar to that Foucault evokes with his contemplation of "Las Meninas," the painting which shows Velazquez himself pausing, brush in hand, and looking out at whoever is viewing the painting (1970, 3-16). There is a canvas standing in front of the artist, but we see only its back. We can not see what, if anything, has been painted on it.The fact that the King and Queen of Spain are seen reflected in a mirror in the background invites speculation that Velazquez is painting them. Another possibility is that he is painting the viewer. In the first of these interpretations, the subject is determined by inference and, that done, becomes unchanging. The second interpretation changes with the nature of the viewer. And I would add a third possibility, which is that the canvas is empty, and the painter as yet uncommitted to a subject, his wonderful smile a way of asking what we think. Edna's "suicide" is very much like this mysterious canvas. We can see ourselves reflected in it or something else entirely

Kate Chopin seems to have known there would be determined attempts to place a strictly ideological cast upon any resolution of Edna's predicament. By ending the novel at a moment of artistic opening rather than dialectic closure, she declines the privileged position of the author and allows the reader to contemplate possibilities rather than make final judgments. In so doing she anticipates the change of attitude toward texts celebrated by Roland Barthes: "We are no longer willing to be the dupes of such antiphrases, by which a society proudly recriminates in favor of precisely what it discards, ignores, mules, or destroys: we know that in order to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author" (1986, 55). In the end, we have mistaken the author for her creation by assigning to her work inferences that provide a sense of closure she did not necessarily intend to give us.This is not to say tht Kate Chopin could not have anticipated our bringing Edna's suicide into our readings. It is a compelling way of reading the text that is not likely to disappear. On the other hand, freeing the text from this assumption and putting it back in the hands of the readers has important implications for future discussions of The Awakening.

The strong differences among the arguments offered by critics of The Awakening to support their readings is a healthy expression of the dialogue that has gone forward since Kate Chopin's time about the roles of women and men and the nature of marriage, a dialogue which, in its more lucid forms, looks toward the future. Between us and them lies an ocean of possibilities, inviting us to take risks without the guarantee of happy endings or the luxury of despair.

Works Cited

Allen, Priscilla. 1977. "Old Critics and New: The Treatment of Chopin's The Awakening." In The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed.Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press