Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

Critics, whatever ideological position they argue from, have seen the novel's ending as part of a dialectic in which Edna's desire for freedom and society's condemnation of that desire are set against each other and the resolution provided by Edna's suicide. Bakhtinian analysis provides a more positive approach to this problem by seeing the last pages as a final chorusing of the book's complex heteroglossia, rather than as Edna's psychic confusion.

In the novel's final paragraphs "the voice of the sea" does reassert itself, using the language of Chapter VI in a powerful and poetic way, but it does not dominate these paragraphs. Indeed, it is the language of rebirth and rebellion that dominates here. From the moment Edna removes her swimming clothes, she feels "like a newborn creature" (Chopin 1976, 113). This image must be so totally spiritualized in order to serve a suicide interpretation that it loses much of its force. In fact it echoes a note struck in an earlier scene, where Edna removes her clothing in Madame Antoine's bedroom and feels a new freedom and a new interest in her own body (37). Little wonder, then, that the last four sentences of the book are a memory of a specific point in her youth (they are certainly not her life flashing before her eyes).While her father's voice, the chained dog, the officer's spurs, can be read to support the theme of male oppression, the last sentence, with its unexpected reference to the fertile smell of pinks, is lyrical and mysterious, suggesting the allurement that life on the shore still possesses for Edna.

The movement that Kate Chopin describes in The Awakening is difficult, leading as it does toward an undefined future. She could not point to an easy triumph for Edna because none was available in the world she knew. So, instead of writing a Utopian novel, she wrote one in which the contradictions of her social world are shown for what they are, and the door opened for discussions of the future.

In the last scene of the novel Edna wants no one near her but Robert, but then she recognizes that even "the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone" (Chopin 1976, 113). She knows Arobin will be replaced by someone as meaningless and that Le once doesn't matter to her (113). Loneliness, like the sea, might destroy her, but its other name is solitude, a condition necessary for liberation. Solitude also provides a space for the rebelliousness Mile. Reisz alluded to when she warned Edna that "the artist must possess the courageous soul" (63). Edna remembers that too in these final paragraphs, and she feels the irony of her situation. This is a language of rebellion and renewal, although the line between suicide and survival can be razor thin.

When Edna makes her first successful swim, Robert approves of her brave performance in a memorable way by declaring the event a sort of impromptu holiday:

"Yes. On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight and if the moon is shining-the moon must be shining-a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into the realms of the semi-celestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But tonight he found Mrs. Pontellier. Perhaps he will never wholly release her from the spell. Perhaps she will never again suffer a poor unworthy earthling to walk in the shadow of her divine presence." (Chopin 1976, 30)