Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

In her Lacanian analysis of The Awakening, Patricia Yeager sees the voice of the sea as "more than a sign of dark and unfulfilled sexuality" (1987, 219). She goes on to note how the end of the novel expresses "Edna's incessant need for some other register of language, for a mode of speech that will express her unspoken, but not unspeakable needs" (219).Yeager sees Edna's suicide as a positive choice, in which she deliberately "gives herself to the voice of the sea," rather than give in to the "magian powers" of Dr. Mandelet and her father (219). Her reading is especially useful in clarifying the metaphorical nature of the sea's voice.

However, to recognize this voice as metaphorical does not diminish its significance, nor does it distinguish it from those voices attached to particular speech communities. For Bakhtin, a voice is always "an image of an idea" (1984, 89), and therefore all voices are, in some sense, metaphorical. This quality is clearly expressed as Edna listens to the sea and attempts to understand it. Chopin tells us she is "beginning to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her" (1976, 15), and further explains that "the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic and exceedingly disturbing" (15). Although she grounds Edna's vision by twice referring to a "world," the vagueness about just what world Chopin means is fatal for many readers. Yeager has every right, for example, to suggest that a voice existing outside of the recognized speech communities might fail someone. But isn't it also possible for someone like Edna to find hints of a language outside of the existing systems, in reality itself?

In our attempts to hear a clearly articulated and easily recognized ideology in the voice of the sea, we may be missing Chopin's interest in ideas and attitudes just in the process of formation. Likewise, Bakhtin saw that ideas can exist apart from specific individuals or groups, as voices to be heard in "reality" And it is exactly those dimensions of reality dismissed or denied by the other voices in her novel that Chopin gives to the sea to express. Dostoevsky, Bakhtin tells us, "heard both the loud, recognized, reigning voices of the epoch, that is the reigning dominant ideas (official and unofficial), as well as the voices still weak, ideas not yet fully emerged, latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, and ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future worldviews" (1984, 90). To her credit, Chopin seems to have been another such writer.

Once we have begun to identify the various voices that contribute to The Awakening's heteroglossia, we have still to see how this sort of reading shapes our reaction to its last pages. A suitable place to begin that discussion is with the arrival of the messenger who summons Edna to Madame Ratignolle's bedside, just as she and Robert have declared their love for one another (Chapter XXXVI). Edna's witnessing of her friend's suffering during childbirth, the memory of her own similar suffering, along with the timing of Robert's decision to break with her, have all been cited as motivation for Edna's suicide. During the brief childbirth scene, Madame Ratignolle pleads with Edna to "think of the children" (Chopin 1976, 109), a reminder which encouraged the book's early critics to pass judgment on Edna and see her death as the proper result of her stricken conscience. After all, they could hardly afford to imagine her survival.