The Awakening

The Awakening:

Aloneness, Independence and Suicide

The aim of this essay is to determine, from the given text, if Edna’s suicide is a consequence of life-experience lived by the late-nineteenth-century women generation in the face of the turn of the 20th century. These women were trapped between the raise of the New Women Culture and centuries of Cult of True Womanhood tradition. Edna Pontellier can be seen as a pioneer on the painful process of women crossing the turn of the century into a new world with a different perspective of what feminine gender means. According to Joyce Dyer, the novel is about the beginning of awakening, not the resolution of such complex process (1993, p. 166). The response given by Kate Chopin in ‘The Awakening’ is Edna’s suicide as the only way out, paradoxically, to preserve love and to dignify her full identity. According to J.A Gurpegui, women of the nineteenth century in the process of being awakened to a new conscience and identity had to face many obstacles in the pathway to freedom and self-reliance (2001, p. 181).

In the last lines of the novel we read: ‘Exhaustion was pressing upon and over-powering her’ (xxxix, p. 121). Edna must be exhausted of fighting society. It is too much to bear. She tried to cope on her own, she tasted the shore of independence but it proved to be an endless struggle. She liberated herself from the suffocating duties imposed on her by society as a wife of an upper class Creole businessman, and a mother of two children. As Joyce Dyer points out: ‘Edna embraces the truth she chooses to die with or, perhaps, die for’ (1993, p.107). It is not a desperate suicide but the final pronouncement of her will and the only possible zenith of her ‘Awakening’. Edna never achieves the full identity of self-reliance. But in rejecting life without freedom and independency she paradoxically preserves her identity to eternity.

According to Elaine Showalter, the Awakening may be read as an account of Edna's evolution from romantic fantasies of affective-dependency to self-definition and self-reliance (1991, p. 66). We must thus refer to the novel as a ‘bildungsroman’ story, since the main character goes through the distinct stages of aloneness, independence and suicide. Nonetheless it is also important to consider the Epiphany that develops such distinct stages in her, clearly illustrated in the opening lines of chapter VI: ‘A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her—the light which, showing the way, forbids it” (VI, p. 16), and “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamouring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation” (VI, p. 18). The sea provokes the epiphany in Edna’s soul viewing ‘her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her" (VI, p. 17).

The Awakening is a novel about a process of maturation rather than its completion (J. Dyer, 1993, p. 116). Applying the Encyclopaedia Britannica definition of bildungsroman, we could therefore say that the novel displays Edna’s maturation process; with how and why she develops the way she does, both morally and psychologically. Edna’s process of self-discovery can be labeled in a series of stages that will lead to the final outcome when she eventually meets her end. These stages are disclosed and arranged in ‘Epiphany’, ‘Solitude’, ‘Independence’, and Suicide.

“During the 19th century bildungsroman novels traditionally end on a positive note though its action may be tempered by resignation and nostalgia” (Encyclopaedia Britannica definition). However at the end of 19th century and especially from the 20th century onward, the bildungsroman more often ends in resignation or death.

The reason of this ending pattern in novels is explained from the ideals prior to the Civil War, wherein feminine definition of psychology and creativity were based in presupposition of difference and inferiority (Elizabeth Ammons, 1991, p. 10). The awakening was written and published in the transition from Victorian to Modern period. During that stage these ideals were being openly challenged with the dawn of so called 'New Woman’ culture (Joyce Dyer, 1993, p. 116). Hence the resolution of self-freeing suicide in ‘The Awakening’.

Good bye - because, I love you. He did not know; he did not understand’. He would never understand’ (xxxix, p. 121). One of Edna’s regrets before leaving this life is that she will probably never be understood. Edna Pontellier is struggling for her independence and self-control. Edna rejects Robert’s wild dream of Edna somehow becoming his wife. Her response of Robert proposal of marriage is blunt: “You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose xxxiv, p. 113)”.

‘Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him—but it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone’ (xxxix, p. 121). On the Last conversation of Edna and Doctor Mandelet, he understands her mind set, and empathetically explains that her state of mind is Nature’s decoy to secure motherhood for the race. ‘The trouble is…,’ ‘that youth is given up to illusion. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mother for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost'. At the end of nineteenth century Social Darwinism ideology (1870, s) prevailed in social convention. Doctor Mandelet is a clear example on how Darwinist theory can be manipulated to constraint women within the limits of Cult of True Womanhood.

In this last sentence, there is a clear symbolism referred to the society conventions and restrains, that of the ‘shore’. The counterpart would be the symbol of the ‘ocean’, that of independency and freedom. When Edna feels that’ it was too late’ and ‘her strength was gone’ is clearly implying the impossibility to turn back to her oppressive life.

At the end of the story Edna stands alone, naked on the beach, just as the solitary man from her vision. This is the utmost confirmation of her individuality and the adequate frame to perceive herself as a person.

To achieve the crest of this process, Edna has gone over a steady approach. In the beginning and beyond, Like Emerson’s man of solitude (Emerson, 1841) , Edna is often unwilling

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