[In the following essay, Nelles argues that Edna's suicide at the conclusion of The Awakening is the result of her realization that she is pregnant.]

Virtually every critic (and certainly every classroom teacher) of The Awakening has felt compelled to address the problematic ending of the novel. The ending appears to be ambiguous in the strict sense, leaving the reader with only two opposed and mutually incompatible interpretive options. In Patricia Hopkins Lattin's formulation, “As she swims into deeper water, Edna is herself torn between the two possibilities of triumph and defeat, and the scrupulously objective narrator provides no solution to the ambiguity facing the reader.”¹ Such a fundamental interpretive challenge has, of course, contributed to the narrative's aesthetic (and pedagogical) lure in provoking a range of illuminating symbolic, thematic, and historical explanations of the ending. Oddly enough, none of these readings has yet marshaled a critical consensus about what would usually be the simplest levels of analysis. As Manfred Malzahn remarks in his recent survey of this problem, “it all may 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.”² Chopin simply does not provide, at the literal level, any clear or compelling reason why Edna commits suicide.³

Malzahn himself offers two suggestions. The first, “that Edna is just cracking up,” is merely circular, explaining irrational behavior by an appeal to the character's irrationality, and he seems to be offering it only to reject it himself.⁴ After noting the potentially significant proximity of Adèle Ratignolle's childbirth scene to that of Edna's death, he broaches the second line of analysis, that

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.”⁵

Malzahn limits his reading to these two sentences, perhaps because of his fear that it will indeed be dismissed as far-fetched. But I have heard this interpretation before (offered by students in a sophomore Introduction to the Novel course, to be specific), as, I suspect, other teachers have, and found it quite persuasive.⁶ In any event, the evidence and argument for the reading should be presented more fully than in Malzahn's version before being submitted to dismissal or approval.

The essentials of such a reading may readily be sketched. That Edna is having physical sexual relations with Arobin seems to be universally granted, though the precise point at which that begins might be located within either of two passages. Here, as so often in this novel, Chopin's daring subject matter can only be presented indirectly. The standard reading locates their initial intercourse in the gap between the last sentence of chapter 27—“It was a flaming touch that kindled desire”—and the first sentence of chapter 28—“Edna cried a little that night after Arobin left her” (139).⁷ It may be, however, that they have already become lovers in chapter 26: “They became intimate and friendly by imperceptible degrees and then by leaps. He sometimes talked in a way that astonished her at first and brought the crimson into her face; in a way that pleased her at last, appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her” (133). In this latter reading, her sexual activity may be seen as the otherwise absent precipitating motive for Edna's moving out of her husband's house. When Mademoiselle Reisz (along with the reader) learns of this momentous decision, her response underscores the need for an explanation: “Your reason is not yet clear to me”; Chopin adds, “Neither was it quite clear to Edna herself …” (135). If an extramarital sexual relationship is the reason, Chopin's repeated insistence that no explanation can be given might be as clear a signal as contemporary mores allowed.

The penultimate sentence of chapter 26—“It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded” (139)—might seem to flag the later point as the first intercourse. But Chopin's narrative idiom operates differently. In the most frequently adduced Awakening intertext, Chopin's own “Athénaïse,” the parallel phrase, “He felt her lips for the first time respond to the passion of his own” (261), is an index not of an initial sexual encounter, but of the onset of pregnancy.⁸ Only when Athénaïse was already pregnant had “the first purely sensuous tremor of her life swept over her” (258). Indeed, one collateral argument for this reading is the degree to which it strengthens the already striking parallels between the novel and the short story. A number of critics have noted these parallels in language that seems to all but demand that Edna be pregnant. Bernard Koloski notes that “Athénaïse” “shares … with The Awakening its structure shaped by a pregnancy,” without remarking that many of the examples he offers are truly parallels only if Edna is the one who becomes pregnant in the novel.⁹ Similarly, after listing numerous significant connections between the two works, Lattin acknowledges that “The most significant contrast relates to childbirth and motherhood. … Athénaïse's ‘awakening’ comes in a flash as soon as she realizes she is pregnant. … In The Awakening … the pattern is complex and includes no simple cause and effect.”¹⁰ Obviously, I am not disagreeing with Koloski and Lattin; both of their readings seem, rather, to call for this extension of their insights. Edna's final awakening comes at precisely the same moment as Athénaïse's, with the realization that she is pregnant; the key contrast lies in their opposite reactions to this knowledge, which does provide the realistic “cause and effect” that so many readers miss in the novel.

The “Athénaïse” intertext also suggests the parameters of an approach to the chronology of Edna's pregnancy. Does the novel allow enough time for her to have become aware of her situation? Athénaïse only learns of her own condition as “The fourth week of Athénaïse's stay in the city was drawing to a close,” by which time unspecified symptoms—“she was not well; she was not herself …” (257)—lead the naive young woman to consult with her more sophisticated landlady, Sylvie, who quickly enlightens her. While “Athénaïse was very ignorant” of such matters (257), Edna herself has already had two children, and would need only the passage of time, not outside advice. The chronology—specifically, the duration—of The Awakening is often imprecise due to the frequent use of the iterative mode. In chapter 33, for example, between the beginning of sexual relations with Arobin and the discovery of her pregnancy, we are told that “It happened sometimes when Edna went to see Mademoiselle Reisz …” and that “Edna had neglected her much of late” (152, 153; my italics). Such unspecified passages of time, quite common in the book, would seem to automatically allow for the time needed to learn of her pregnancy. Even setting all of these iterative passages aside (though remembering that Chopin may well have included them for this very purpose), those parts of the chronology that are specified would still fit the timetable. The latest plausible terminus a quo for the initiation of sexual relations with Arobin is between chapters 27 and 28. The next day she tells Arobin that the dinner party will be “Day after to-morrow” (141); then, “After a little while, a few days, in fact,” Edna “spent a week with her children in Iberville” (151). Following a number of iterative passages suggesting the lapse of an unspecified length of time, she meets Robert again, then does not see him the next day, nor “the following day, nor the next”; after still more iterative passages, she then spends another night with Arobin (163) before meeting Robert again. The minimum possible span of time covered here is about three weeks, and a somewhat longer span is suggested by the iterative passages. Recalling that Athénaïse, despite the “bewildering” “extent of her ignorance” (257), figures it out in something less than four weeks, one can safely conclude that Chopin has been careful to allow Edna enough time—but, significantly, only enough—to come to the same realization.

Of course, Chopin, who invented the pregnancies, is aware of them before either of the two women realistically could be, and provides the reader with clues to that knowledge well before the characters realize it for themselves. Running parallel to this realistic level of chronology and biology we have been scanning is a symbolic level along which Chopin strews signs of Edna's condition, most in the form of cultural clichés of pregnancy. If Edna and Arobin have indeed begun sexual relations during chapter 26, then the first clue may be the otherwise odd observation that her chin “was growing a little full and double” (138). Immediately after the “first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded,” a phrase which serves as a marker of pregnancy in “Athénaïse,” the experience is described as “this cup of life,” (139; my emphasis) which may be read as both a euphemism for sexual excitement and as a reminder of one consequence of sex. The next day Arobin finds her “upon a high step-ladder” (140), a stereotypical site of danger for pregnant women, and immediately gets her to come down. She is on the ladder, of course, because she is making preparations to move into the “pigeon house” (140); Mademoiselle Reisz has just called Edna a “bird” and checked her wings (138), calling forth the cultural cliché “nesting.” At the dinner she even exhibits the stereotypical “glow” of pregnant women, “the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in living flesh,” a description followed by Edna's first, still unconscious, premonition of her condition, “something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed” (145). The uterine imagery, together with breath and wailing, as well as the concomitant discord, certainly fit and extend this analysis. By chapter 31 Edna “seated herself with every appearance of discomfort,” prompting Arobin to ask if she was tired, to which she replied that she felt as if “something inside me had snapped” (149). Mr. Pontellier's orders to add “an addition—a small snuggery” (150) to the house, presumably, in the terms of his “cover story,” for a new baby, may also be a (dramatically ironic) strand of this same pattern. Again, let me emphasize that these are semiotic markers provided by the author for the reader, not mimetic indications that should alert any of the characters to Edna's pregnancy. While realistically Edna would not yet be putting on weight or glowing, these indexes function as symbolic foreshadowing.¹¹ Recall that all of the patterns gathered here would normally work in conjunction with explicit narrative exposition and character development. Because of Chopin's risky subject matter, however, indirection and connotation must tell the entire story of the pregnancy; given this rigorous constraint, it is perhaps not surprising that so many readers have recognized that the novel never really explains Edna's literal motive for suicide.

Edna's own realization of her condition may only come as she is brought literally face to face with it during the scene of Adèle's delivery. In any event, she has her own pregnancy on her mind during the conversation she has immediately afterward while walking home with Dr. Mandelet.¹² Chopin has carefully established Mandelet's sensitivity to the stages of Edna's awakening and the accuracy of his assessment of these stages in two previous scenes.¹³ In the first, Mandelet learns from Pontellier that he and Edna have suspended sexual relations—“you understand—we meet in the morning at the breakfast table” (118).¹⁴ While Mandelet adopts a self-deprecating stance during their conversation—“ordinary fellows like you and me … needn't try to fathom” Edna's changed behavior (119)—the narrator allows the reader enough access to his unspoken thoughts to establish that he is in fact far more acute than Pontellier: “The Doctor would have liked during the course of conversation to ask, ‘is there any man in the case?’” (120). In this economical scene Chopin shows the reader that the Doctor is not only perspicacious, but circumspect; the reader can trust his conclusions, while both Pontellier and Edna can trust his ability to keep his mouth shut. Both points are reemphasized in the subsequent dinner scene, which allows Mandelet to observe Edna first hand. When we are told that “She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun” (123, my emphasis), the echo of the very title of the book lends him an echo of authorial reliability. The privilege accorded his observations is nailed down securely by his final thought of the evening, “I hope it isn't Arobin” (124), which demonstrates knowledge well in advance of the reader's (or at least narratee's) at this point. Despite his evident certainty that Edna is embarking on an affair, his advice that Pontellier let her do as she likes remains unchanged, and he continues, if reluctantly, to keep “the secrets of other lives” (124).

In the first of these two scenes, Mandelet's relation to Edna's story is through hearsay from Pontellier; in the second, he “observed his hostess closely” at first hand (123); Chopin then completes the progression with the third scene, in which the two finally converse directly. The placement of the scene could hardly be more crucial for the narrative: their conversation is the only event between Adèle's childbirth scene and Robert's farewell note. Most readings take one (or sometimes both) of these scenes as the key to Edna's motive for suicide, but both are subordinate to Edna's pregnancy, which is the true catalyst for her actions. Adèle's scene has its power for Edna precisely because she now realizes that she will have to go through that “torture” herself (170). Robert's scene carries the attack from biology to society when his cowardly flight before the prospect of her independence allows us to extrapolate how much more she will have to face when he (and everyone else) learns the truth about her pregnancy. The final scene with Mandelet, then, links and explains the Adèle and Robert passages. Indeed, any interpretation that fails to tie this scene to the obviously crucial ones that precede and follow it must raise perplexing questions about Chopin's artistic competence: why insert a pointless interruption at the very climax of the narrative?

Given that Edna is pregnant, their conversation becomes so rich in interpretive consequences that it is tempting to simply quote it in full. A few highlighted passages, however, might suffice for purposes of exemplification: “‘I want to be let alone. Nobody has any right—except children, perhaps—and even then, it seems to me—or it did seem—’ She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts, and stopped abruptly” (171). The Doctor, “grasping her meaning intuitively,” offers her the odd assurance that “Nature takes no account of moral consequences.” He then tells her that “you seem to me to be in trouble. I am not going to ask you for your confidence. I will only say that if ever you feel moved to give it to me, perhaps I might help you. I know I would understand, and I tell you there are not many who would—not many, my dear” (my emphasis; the expression “in trouble” was already established as a euphemism for a pregnancy outside wedlock—the OED citations with this meaning are both dated 1891). She finishes her next “incoherent” speech with “still, I shouldn't want to trample upon the little lives. Oh! I don't know what I'm saying, Doctor. Good night. Don't blame me for anything,” and he responds, “Yes, I will blame you if you don't come and see me soon. We will talk of things you never have dreamt of talking about before” (171-72).

Mandelet is offering not to listen to a confession of adultery, but to perform an abortion. The risqué book that circulates over the summer establishes early in the novel that sex is not a thing that people “never have dreamt of talking about,” but rather a topic “openly criticised and freely discussed” in this society, and we know that Edna quickly “gave over being astonished” by such matters (53). Chopin is careful to overdetermine this point of characterization, putting Edna through a parallel initiation with Arobin, whose racy talk “astonished her at first” but “pleased her at last” (133). But abortion, especially in this Catholic milieu, would constitute the one taboo topic even for an Arobin. Chopin's portrayal of Mandelet as a shrewd judge of human nature, particularly of “that inner life which so seldom unfolds itself to unanointed eyes” (124), and as the confidant of its secrets, is derived from Maupassant, her avowed literary mentor, who presents precisely this figure of the physician in story after story.

As Angela Moger has remarked, Maupassant's frequent inclusion of a physician in his tales is a “logical choice” in part because his professional identity marks him as “someone who accepts everything and does not make moral judgments (moral judgment is here replaced, in fact, by the doctor's apparent detachment).”¹⁵ Maupassant's disciple and translator, Chopin, relies on Mandelet not only because he is the only person who could talk to Edna about an abortion, but for the further excellent reason that he is the only one who could perform one. In a final attempt to underscore the doctor's role and to focus our attention on their necessarily veiled conversation, Chopin has Edna's final articulate thought before drowning return to Mandelet: “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” (176).

Mandelet serves throughout to guide the reader's perceptions and judgments, not only with cues to infer the taboo subject, but also with his advice to suspend traditional moral strictures and to forgive her behavior, advice ostensibly given to Edna but also (perhaps primarily) meant for the reader. The failure of her contemporary readers, especially book reviewers, to heed this advice has, of course, become part of the Chopin legend.

Notes

1. Patricia Hopkins Lattin, “Childbirth and Motherhood in The Awakening and in ‘Athénaïse,’” Approaches to Teaching Chopin's The Awakening, ed. Bernard Koloski (New York: MLA, 1988), p. 44.

2. Manfred Malzahn, “The Strange Demise of Edna Pontellier,” The Southern Literary Journal, 232 (Spring 1991), 36.

3. Sandra M. Gilbert has asked, I'm not sure how seriously, “And how, after all, do we know that she ever dies? What critics have called her ‘suicide’ may be simply our interpretation of her motion, our realistic idea about the direction in which she is swimming” (“Introduction: The Second Coming of Aphrodite,” The Awakening and Selected Stories [New York: Penguin, 1986], p. 32). Granting Gilbert's emphasis on a subtext of mythic patterning does not, however, seem to get the reader off the “realistic” hook here; for other points she discusses in the novel, her reading requires explanation at both “realistic” and mythic levels. Gilbert herself doubts whether Chopin “consciously intended” the mythic parallels (32), which would seem to underscore the call for a realistic explanation whether or not the mythic parallels are convincing.

4. Malzahn, p. 36.

5. Malzahn, p. 38.

6. Lisa Starr, a student in my sophomore Introduction to the Novel class in spring 1997, suggested this reading in the course of a class discussion, and also wrote her term paper on the topic That was the first time I had ever heard the idea, and while her paper and mine share little beyond the thesis, I want to take this opportunity to give her, along with the other students in that class, full credit for setting me on this problem. I only encountered Malzahn's comments later.

7. This quotation and all subsequent quotations from The Awakening are taken from The Awakening and Selected Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986).

8. This quotation and all subsequent quotations from “Athénaïse” are taken from The Awakening and Selected Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986).

9. Bernard Koloski, Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 36.

10. Lattin, p. 41.

11. Michael Riffaterre's concept of the hypogram provides a theoretical framework for this type of reading, in which a central descriptive system generates semiotic rather than strictly referential meaning: “a transformation of a minimal sentence, the cliché … is given in reference to time. Not to real time, however, but to certain, already established, familiar signifiers of the signified ‘time’” (Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983], p. 45).

12. An earlier possibility for this epiphany comes at the end of chapter 35, when Arobin has detected “the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom” (163). Such sensuality, as noted above, is a marker of pregnancy in Athénaïse, and this loaded description of Edna's blossoming is immediately followed by the phrase “nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning”: an allusion to the continued suspension of her menstrual cycle? The cultural requirement that Chopin work by indirection in exploring such unspeakable subjects justifies looking between the lines. One thing Chopin could not possibly do was to say anything openly about pregnancy or menstruation.

13. Mandelet is often dismissed as just another Léonce, the obtuse spokesman for what Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls the “confident weight of received opinion,” a “fettering force” (“Un-Utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in The Awakening,” Studies in American Fiction, 24 [Spring 1996], p. 14). My own take on Mandelet aligns him with Edna and Mademoiselle Reisz (and, in Wolff's analysis, Arobin) as one of the free-thinking characters not ruled by received opinion, who “hold out the possibility that Edna might resolve her dilemma” (Wolff, p. 15).

14. This key piece of information also establishes Arobin as the father and eliminates a possible “realistic” plot option for Edna, who could otherwise solve at least part of her problem by presenting the child as Pontellier's.

15. Angela S. Moger, “Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire,” PMLA, 100 (May 1985), 322.