Edna Pontellier's Death In The Awakening

Deaths in pieces of literature are rarely mere devices to remove no longer relevant characters from the plot; deaths often contribute to overarching themes. Therefore, readers must not overlook death scenes, lest they miss key points of a work. In Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening, the ambiguous suicide of the protagonist Edna Pontellier comprises the very end of her story. The circumstances of Edna’s untimely death, the positioning of the death scene in the story, and ambiguity of the implications of her death all endorse Chopin’s belief that an individual cannot live apart from both society and nature.

Edna’s death, although sudden, is not entirely unexpected considering the lack of fulfillment Edna feels in her newly awakened being. The

experience of life on Grand Isle taught Edna that she has worth as an individual, but her surrounding society views her not as her own person but in connection with her family. The vacationers at grand Isle refer to Edna as “Mrs. Pontellier”, thus associating her with her husband and not her own merits. However, Edna’s interactions with Robert cause Edna to feel less like Léonce Pontellier’s wife and more like Edna. As Edna’s relationship with Robert grows more intimate, she feels more restricted by society and the expectations linked with the titles of “wife” and “mother”. Therefore, Edna attempts to break free from society to become her own individual. Chopin repeatedly uses the motif of confining clothing to emphasize Edna’s emergence by showing Edna take off layers of clothing and loosen layers of clothing until finally, in her final scene, she stands naked before the sea.
Edna believes she is making progress toward her end goal of becoming a full individual when she abandons her Tuesdays at home, abandons her home on Esplanade Street, and abandons her husband in favor of relationships with Arobin and Robert, but she confuses individualism with independence. Edna truly desires individualism – the quality of being known for herself and not her relations within her social interactions – which she demonstrates when she admonishes Robert for desiring to make her his wife exclaiming, “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose” (The Awakening, page 142). She does not want to be defined by relationships, but she does want a relationship with Robert – a concept that Robert, stuck in the mindset of traditional roles, cannot fully understand. In coming to the understanding that her society is not prepared to drop the roles assigned to women, Edna instead chases after an independence in which she separates herself from society. However, independence fails to bring her happiness, and when Robert abandons her for good, leaving her without anyone whom she truly cares for, she falls prey to despondency that brings her back to Grand Isle in an attempt to relive the first passions that awakened her soul.
Edna’s breaking point comes with the remembrance of Adele’s warning to “think of the children.

Remember them” (The Awakening, page 146). Edna realizes society’s inability to separate her from her socially assigned roles stems from nature’s inability to separate her from her biologically assigned roles. As a mother, Edna’s children are not just a part of her life, they are a part of her body. This biological connection cannot be broken, and even if Edna could break free from her marriage to Léonce to no longer be considered Mrs. Pontellier by society, she will always be her children’s mother as assigned by nature. Edna comes to see her children as “antagonists who had overcome her” (The Awakening, page 151). No matter how hard she tries to escape them, her children are a part of her – the strongest bond keeping her from becoming an individual. To Edna, death is the only way to evade their eternal grip. To return to civilization is to return to the roles of wife and mother. To die is

freedom.
Just as the circumstances surrounding Edna’s suicide outline the inevitability of her decision, the positioning of Edna’s death scene in the novella highlights the finality of her death. As the subject of the conclusion of Chopin’s novella, Edna death scene is the image that sticks in the mind of readers when they close the covers of the book, trapping Edna, along with all her faults, inside. As the most memorable scene of the story, the conclusion is intentionally potent and rich with thematic elements. The repetition of the description of the sea as “seductive, never ceasing, whispering…” (The Awakening, page 152) recalls the danger of Edna’s awakening. The image of “A bird with broken wings… reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (The Awakening, page 152) suggests the improbability of success. And Edna’s death itself, which Chopin alludes to in the final few lines of the novella, signifies the failure of Edna’s attempt to free herself from society’s expectations and associations and nature’s requirements. The combination of the death and the conclusion indicates the impossibility of any other outcome. Had Edna seen a way to be Edna – just Edna, not Mrs. Pontellier or Raoul and Etienne’s mother – and still live, she would have taken it, but her society cannot permit her to reject the role of wife, and nature cannot allow her to separate herself from her biological connection to her children. Therefore, the only method Edna has of succeeding in escaping roles, expectations, and associations to become an individual is to give herself up to death, which is no success at all.
As negative as death and failure seem to be, Chopin uses much positive diction in the death scene to make Edna’s death, in a way, hopeful.

In the last scene, Chopin describes Edna as feeling “like some new-born creature” (The Awakening, page 152), and she describes Edna’s final sensations as being “the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks” (The Awakening, page 153). Both descriptions correspond to the new beginnings and hopefulness of springtime, suggesting that Chopin believes in a hopeful future for women and their roles in society. In Chopin’s time, women had yet to receive the political and social equality they deserve, so Edna’s death is inevitable. Although Edna fails to escape the confining social constructs of her time, Chopin’s use of positive and hopeful imagery indicate that she is hopeful for a time when women will not be defined by their husbands or their children and they need not be afraid to find their own individualistic place within society. In this future, women need not attempt to escape from society, a pursuit that Chopin believes will always be unsuccessful, but society will not expect women to fit into any one mold. For Edna, this hopeful future will come too late, but hope still remains for the rest of

humanity.
Edna Pontellier’s story is one of confinement based on social rules and roles and the associations one makes to define individuals by category, but when she attempts to break away from society she cannot survive. Edna’s death serves as a reminder that although society is flawed, separations from society does not equate to a full life. Edna needs relationships just as much as any other human being, but she feels that relationships are much too confining, and so she tries to break free from society only to succumb in the end to the incompatibility of relationships and individualism of her society. Edna Pontellier’s death as the final scene in Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening contributes to Chopin’s belief in the need for social roles as well as her hope for a future in which those roles will not be predetermined.