[In the following essay, Malzahn examines the narrative of The Awakening for an explanation of Edna's motives for committing suicide.]

For a long time, critics have been puzzled by the self-inflicted death of Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899). At the end of her process of awakening, which begins with a summer infatuation and leads to a breakaway from the family home and from the role of wife and mother, Edna is not a victorious New Woman, leading an independent life of spiritual and sensual fulfillment. She is quite simply dead, to the relief of contemporary commentators such as the unnamed author of the “Book Reviews” column in Public Opinion of 22 June 1899, who presents himself as the representative of the general reading public when he asserts that “we are well satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf.”¹

The reason given is that Edna comes across as an “unpleasant person,”² a selfish, adulterous woman for whom the author has failed to secure the reader's sympathy. This is a view based on a moral judgement about Edna's actions rather than a close reading of the novel. The fact that the heroine of the book is the one focal character whose thoughts and emotions are described at great length is proof enough of “an undercurrent of sympathy for Edna,” which the more perceptive, though still disapproving, reviewer of the New Orleans Times-Democrat of 18 June detects.³

Besides, does Edna Pontellier really kill herself deliberately? The narrator suggests possible reasons in the final chapter, describing the heroine's thoughts in one of the moments of gloom to which she has been prone; however, there is a disclaimer following close upon the one phrase that definitely seems to hint at what is to follow. One would have expected a new paragraph to begin, as the narrative moves from flashback to actuality, from the preceding night to Edna's last day: the lack of such a caesura makes the juxtaposition all the more striking:

Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night, and had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near except Robert; and she even realised that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them. She was not thinking of these things when she walked down to the beach.⁴

From this point onwards, there is no indication that Edna is acting with deliberate intent to end her life there and then. She puts on her swimming costume and leaves her clothes in the bath-house, just as if she were going for “a little swim, before dinner,”⁵ as she declares she will. Previously she has announced that she is hungry and stated her preference for the evening meal. This is perceived as a sign of an undiminished healthy appetite by the same critic who plainly states two pages earlier that “Edna resolves to commit suicide,” failing to remark upon her paradoxical behavior.⁶ Is she intentionally deluding her addressee?

I would suggest another explanation for the contradiction. In the final chapter, Edna Pontellier is described as acting “rather mechanically.”⁷ The thinking is over and done, though after all the reflections of the previous night, Edna is not consciously carrying out a plan but, rather, absent-mindedly walking towards her death. She is like a somnambulist, mesmerised by her ultimate seducer, the sea, of which she would have been more wary if she—like the reader—had been made aware of the satanic quality in its voice by the plethora of sharp “s” sounds in the description:

The water of the gulf stretched before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.⁸

There is no way around it: Edna Pontellier was misled, her awakening ends with the Big Sleep, whether this be Suzanne Wolkenfeld's “union with the One,”⁹ or Christina Giorcelli's “absolute fulfillment.”¹⁰ Such recent evaluations of the novel's end, motivated by feelings diametrically opposed to those which early reviewers had towards the heroine, are equally prone to be blinkered. Ultimately, Edna's rebellion is a failure: she does not find a new place in society, having given up her old one for good. She is not an Adèle Ratignolle, who can content herself with being a leisured housewife and mother. Neither is she a Mademoiselle Reisz, capable of sublimating her desires in search for artistic achievement. She wants to follow her impulses and to be independent: the people around her, including her husband, let her have her way to an extent that shows an exceptional amount of tolerance, given the time and the place of the story. Still, she fails to find a new life worth living, and dies in a way which Dorothy Dix's Women's Page in the Daily Picayune of 8 October 1899 describes as a “coward's deed,”¹¹ and a typically male one at that.

I think that it is not the failure to see the duplicity inherent in the symbolic significance of the ending—after all, the symbolism is very hard to miss in any part of the book—which caused George M. Spangler to say that “Mrs. Chopin provided a conclusion for a novel other than the one she wrote.”¹² Underlying this evaluation is the simple fact that he did not find a convincing reason for the suicide on the level of the narrated action. Edna's symbolic union with the elements is indeed suggested by the narrative, but it takes place in the mind of the reader and the critic. Edna herself does not think in such categories any more than Huck Finn is bothered by the metaphorical meaning of his journey down the river. In The Awakening, it is the narrator who interprets the heroine's thoughts, ever at pains to show the reader the limits of Edna Pontllier's understanding.

The one hypothesis that Spangler has to offer for the ending of the novel drags in not only the narrator but the author herself. The wish to fend off the condemnation by narrow-minded moralists, he claims, may have led Kate Chopin to mete out a kind of “poetic justice”¹³ that would drown all objections in a sea of tears, thus diminishing the figure of her heroine and her own artistic achievement while failing to achieve the desired effect on reviewers. It is possible that Chopin herself felt she had swum out too far in writing The Awakening, and that she was not just talking tongue-in-cheek when she wrote that by the time she had found out where the story was going, “the play was half over and then it was then too late.”¹⁴

The writing of the novel proved to be, ultimately, the rebellious author's literary suicide. The parallels between Kate Chopin and Edna Pontellier are, however, limited. Most importantly, there is the question of artistic ambition, something Edna does not possess to a sufficient degree. In view of this, the identi-fication of the heroine with the author can only go as far as seeing Edna the free giver of love as one side of Chopin's personality, with Adèle Ratignolle the faithful wife, and Mademoiselle Reisz the celibate recluse representing the other two mutually exclusive roles. But even so, Edna Pontellier as a fictional character stands alone, and her actions must be explained in terms of her own mind.

The mind is largely dominated by instinct and impulse, messages from the center of her being, that elusive “self” which according to Edna is the only thing she will never give up. In her awakening, she does indeed become a more natural being, but her growing freedom from social restraints is accompanied by a growing subjection to moods changing with the weather and the time of day. “The weather [is] dark and cloudy,” and she finds herself unable to paint;¹⁵ her lover, Arobin, finds her in an exceptionally happy mood, sitting in front of the fire with the mere prospect of a barometric improvement. Her highs get higher and her lows get lower; she becomes as changeable and unpredictable as the elements, even acquiring a “seductive voice”¹⁶ like the sea itself.

Now, we all know that the sea does not speak, and at the same time we are all too accustomed to metaphors which give it a voice. But this voice exists in the mind of the user of the metaphor, in our case, the narrator of the novel. The voice of the sea is described as the alluring, tantalizing, persistent utterance of a potentially dangerous natural force. If Edna has herself acquired such a voice at last, is not the suggestion even stronger that it was something within her which spoke to her in the first place? As a parrot will only reflect such language as it has been taught, the sea will only tell the listener what he or she wants to hear, and the message is ultimately that from a human being. In the case of the parrot, with which the story begins,¹⁷ it may be one from another person; in the case of the sea, it can only be from oneself, or one's self. Edna begins indeed to become one with the elements: she can be the sea, her own destroyer, as well as she can be “the sunlight” to Mademoiselle Reisz.¹⁸

Edna's progressive identification with nature comes with the progress she makes toward the center of her being. But there seems to be a self-destructive force there, which is released as the heroine frees her self in freeing herself. When she takes that last swim in the ocean, she abandons herself to this force, whereas before, fear of death had intervened and kept her within reach of the shore as well as within reach of society.¹⁹ Her liberation from fears of moral disapproval coincides with a liberation from the fear of death: in her striving for self-fulfillment she loses the instinct of self-preservation and follows another, darker impulse. She casts off her clothes and then even the swimming costume which she had put on out of habit. Standing naked in the sun, she feels like a completely natural being for the first time, “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.”²⁰

The image is of the animal kingdom; Edna has become “some … creature,” an “it” rather than a “she.” Consequently, she goes to drown herself with as much determination as a lemming, and with only marginally more awareness of the significance of her act. Her thoughts are kaleidoscopic recollections governed by childish logic that makes the ocean shrink to the size of the “bluegrass meadow”²¹ of one of her early memories. Her satisfaction at the notion of escape from the tyranny of husband and children, and from the scorn of Mademoiselle Reisz, has an equally infantile ring. Only the thoughts of her beloved Robert and the sympathetic adviser Dr. Mandelet reawaken her for a moment, reintroducing the possibility of salvation, if not through love then through understanding. But the natural fear of dying returns too late and subsides as Edna's thoughts return to earlier memories.

Viewed in this light, the ending makes perfect sense within the symbolic structure of the novel. Edna sees a “bird with a broken wing … circling disabled down, down to the water,”²² before she herself performs a similar motion. Though she lives in a “pigeon house,”²³ she is not the bird with strong wings, the one “that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice,”²⁴ who could succeed against the odds, according to the pianist Mademoiselle Reisz. But again, it may all look meaningful enough from a critic's point of view; however, that does not mean that the internal narrative logic of the story is explained. Why did she do it? remains the question that still demands a satisfactory answer.

One possible answer is that Edna is just cracking up, that her husband in his well-meaning superficiality and naiveté has actually come fairly close to the truth when he tells the old family doctor that his wife is somehow “peculiar.”²⁵ At least there are plenty of instances of behavior which may be regarded as evidence of a psychological disturbance. There is a quick succession of radically different moods with Edna, and at least one occasion when such a change is perceived by those in Edna's company as an embarrassment. This is the dinner party which she gives in the family home on the occasion of her twenty-ninth birthday. It is a fairly conventional affair apart from the absence of the husband, the atmosphere is jolly, the wine has been flowing, and then Robert's brother Victor is coaxed into singing a song:

“Ah! si tu savais!”

“Stop!” [Edna] cried, “don't sing that. I don't want you to sing it,” and she laid her glass so impetuously and blindly upon the table as to shatter it against a carafe. The wine spilled over Arobin's legs and some of it trickled down upon Mrs. Highcamp's black gauze gown.²⁶

It is not only Edna's rebellion against social conventions but also her erratic conduct that contributes to her growing isolation, and Doctor Mandelet, the physician who knows “that inner life which so seldom unfolds itself to unanointed eyes,”²⁷ comes to see the connection during another dinner party. Edna is a changed person, exuberant, radiant, but losing touch with reality, and thus the high flight foreshadows a long fall. On the night when Mandelet realizes this, Mrs. Pontellier presents herself as a capable inventor and teller of stories. She enthralls her audience, but at the cost of getting lost in her own inventions: it is certainly legitimate to see this as a reference to the dangers of Kate Chopin's own chosen calling, especially when one considers the number of times the word “fictitious” is used in a pejorative sense in the novel. As much as the author of her story, Edna is treading on thin ice. Her doom is sealed when “all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.”²⁸

But her death is not brought on by fate, and neither is it merely the inevitable consequence of her own actions. The final departure of Robert, the man she loves, obviously has a lot to do with it, but equally important is the event which is reported in Chapter 27, the birth of a child to Edna's friend Adèle Ratignolle. Before venturing an explanation of the significance of this episode, I would like to quote a comment by Lewis Leary on the symbolic structure of the novel, which appears to me an adequate assessment: “Almost every incident or reference in The Awakening anticipates an incident or reference that follows it or will remind a reader of something that has happened before.”²⁹

There are plenty of prior references to children in the book, but only one to childbirth in an early chapter, when Edna is shocked by the frankness with which Creole women talk about pregnancy and birth even in the presence of men. Edna finds it hard to comprehend the “entire absence of prudery”³⁰ concerning matters of procreation. She is also, self-avowedly, extremely squeamish about blood and wounds; even touching a scar on Arobin's wrist is too much for her to bear.³¹ When she is persuaded by Adèle to be with her at the birth, she stays and watches “with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature,”³² finally being admonished by her friend to “think of the children.”³³

The births of her own two sons are by that time only dim memories of pain, the occasions almost devoid of meaning:

She was seized with a vague dread. Her own like experiences seemed far away, unreal, and only half remembered. She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go.³⁴

The explicit use of the word “awakening” in this context is crucial. The awakening is not only a return from a sleeping to a fully conscious state, but a return to a changed reality, a different “little new life.” In Edna's case, this may be herself, a rebirth of her as the “little unthinking child … walking through the green meadow,”³⁵ unconscious of danger. However, another possible meaning is that this “little new life” is another child to which Edna will give birth. She has been sleeping with Arobin, and there is at least the possibility that this has resulted in pregnancy. Before dismissing this as a far-fetched interpretation, one should consider that it would ultimately make sense of the ending: Edna revolts against Nature itself by destroying herself as a means of procreation, but ironically by following another natural impulse that is directed at self-destruction, the impulse that drives a lemming, or, in the vision of Edna herself, “humanity like worms struggling blindly towards inevitable annihilation.”³⁶

As an authorial comment, it appears to prove that Kate Chopin was indeed one who had chosen to “pluck from the Darwinian tree of knowledge and to see human existence in its true meaning.”³⁷ From Edna's point of view, though, this is an instinctive vision coming from within. Edna has not read Darwinian theory, but half-consciously played with fire, half-conscious of the dangers of breaking social rules, but not of those incurred by tapping into forces hidden deep within her self. By doing so, she has taken on something bigger than she, something elementary, connected with the beyond into which she finally drifts. In the light of Kate Chopin's obvious interest in psychology, demonstrated in not only her fiction, but also her essays,³⁸ consider the following description by her contemporary William James:

There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our “normal” consciousness is circumscribed for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the otherwise unverifiable connection.³⁹

To me, there is a commensurability between James's explanation and Kate Chopin's demonstration of the attraction and the danger of the “mother-sea.” James locates this sea, the root of the danger, in the “beyond,” in a manner that reminds one of ancient folk beliefs about werewolves and moonstruck people, as well as of H. P. Lovecraft stories. A Jungian might substitute “generic memory” for “cosmic consciousness,” but in any case, it is clear that we are talking of the normally hidden depths within the human psyche. As a psychological novel, The Awakening is the story of an exploration of those depths by an explorer ill equipped for the journey. It is a tale of terror, all the more effective because it operates within the realm of the credible; the story of a woman who tries to discard a “fictitious self,”⁴⁰ only to find that she has unleashed forces beyond her control, as, in another sense, the author herself did by the publication of the novel, which ended her literary career in an environment where social and artistic freedom were particularly difficult to attain for a woman, even for one stronger than Edna Pontellier.

Notes

1. In Kate Chopin, The Awakening: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), 151.

2. Culley.

3. Culley, 150.

4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening: Introduction by Helen Taylor (London: 1978), 188.

5. Taylor, 188.

6. Michael T. Gilmore, “Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening,” in Wendy Martin, ed., New Essays on The Awakening (Cambridge: 1988), 62.

7. Taylor, 188.

8. Taylor, 189.

9. “Edna's Suicide: The Problem of the One and the Many,” in Culley, 223.

10. “Edna's Wisdom: A Transitional and Numinous Merging,” in New Essays on The Awakening, 126.

11. “Women and Suicide,” in Culley, 134.

12. “Kate Chopin's The Awakening: A Partial Dissent,” in Culley, 187.

13. Culley, 189.

14. Author's note on The Awakening, in “Aims and Autographs of Authors,” in Culley, 159.

15. Taylor, 123.

16. Taylor, 179.

17. Taylor, 5.

18. Taylor, 131.

19. Taylor, 48.

20. Taylor, 189.

21. Taylor, 190.

22. Taylor, 189.

23. Taylor, 142.

24. Taylor, 138.

25. Taylor, 110.

26. Taylor, 150.

27. Taylor, 118.

28. Taylor, 172.

29. “Kate Chopin and Walt Whitman,” in Culley, 197.

30. Taylor, 19.

31. Taylor, 127.

32. Taylor, 182.

33. Taylor.

34. Taylor.

35. Taylor, 30.

36. Taylor, 97.

37. Per Seyersted, “Introduction,” in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Edited and with an Introduction by Per Seyersted. 2 vols. (Baton Rouge: 1969), vol. 1, 23.

38. Seyersted, vol. 2, 691 ff.

39. “A Psychical Researcher,” in John J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James: A Complete Introduction (Chicago: 1977), 798 ff.

40. Taylor, 96.