Chopin, Kate - Cristina Giorcelli (essay date 1988)

Cristina Giorcelli (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: Giorcelli, Cristina. “Edna's Wisdom: A Transitional and Numinous Merging.” In New Essays on The Awakening, edited by Wendy Martin, pp. 109-48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Giorcelli argues the Chopin's ambiguities in The Awakening support both her own and her protagonist's “cyclical view of existence.”]

The human being who has a soul does not obey anyone but the universe,”1 wrote the French poet Gabriel Germain. Readers of Kate Chopin's The Awakening keep asking themselves whether the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, abandoning herself to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the book, obeys the universe and therefore the needs of her soul; or whether, “idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided”—as she has lived for twenty-eight years—she simply lets herself be carried into the unknown “rapt in oblivious...

[The entire page is 16014 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass