Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

Robert's joking aside, the choice of August 28 as the date of this event seems not to have been accidental. Kate Chopin was likely celebrating her admiration for Wolfgang von Goethe, and particularly for his Die Leiden Des Junge Werther (for a quick summary of her interest in Goethe, see Toth, 1990, 84, 87, 110). August 28 is not only Goethe's birthday, but Werther's as well, and the torments of the young hero were, in important ways, based upon Goethe's experience. Goethe had been hopelessly in love with Lotte Buff, a woman engaged to one of his friends, and, according to his own version, was so torn by the situation that he seriously contemplated suicide and was saved by hearing of the actual suicide of an acquaintance involved in a similar affair. Goethe then wrote Die Leiden Des Jungen Werther in a few weeks in the spring of 1797, a creative act which he said left him "as after a general confession, again happy and free and justified for a new life" (Vietor 1949, 30). Nonetheless, in spite of its popularity, the book was ultimately condemned by its critics for setting off a series of imitation suicides (34). While it is possible to stop short of seeing The Awakening as part of a genre of suicide novels, it certainly invites comparison with the story of Werther. It is true that Edna, like the poet Werther, seeks release in artistic expression, and at times they seem pursued by similar demons, haunted by voices of similar resonance. In Werther's letter of December 6 we find the following language:

When I close my eyes, here, in my brain, where my inner vision is concentrated, her black eyes are before me. Here, I can't express it to you in words. If I close my eyes, they are there; like an ocean, like an abyss they lie before me, in me, fill my inner senses.

What is man, that vaunted demigod? Do not his powers fail him precisely where he needs them? And when he soars in joy or sinks in suffering, is he not arrested in both, brought back to empty, cold consciousness just at the moment when he yearned to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite? (Goethe 1962, 207)

Like Werther, Edna is responsive to this "ocean" of undifferentiated feeling and its compelling voice. Werther's moment of "cold consciousness" might also describe the awareness Edna has achieved at the end of The Awakening. Edna's vision, however, is of more than a pair of eyes. She does not allow Robert or anyone else to dominate her thinking as Werther allows Lotte to dominate his. Edna's vision is larger and healthier than Werther's.

Gothe felt lucky to live through what he called the "sickness of the century," but he did not pretend he knew a cure for it. What he knew were the symptoms: "Here we have to do with men living in the most peaceful of circumstances whose lives have been spoiled for them by want of deeds and by their exaggerated demands upon themselves" (quoted in Vietor 1949, 29). A century later Goethe's sentence would describe a great many women who, like Edna, were allowed every comfort but denied any meaningful way of acting in the world.