Edna's Suicide in Kate Chopin's The Awakening
At the end of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening" the protagonist Edna commits suicide.
The remaining question for the reader is: Does Edna's suicide show that she succeeded or failed in her struggle for independence?
Edna's new life in independency seems to be going well especially after Robert had returned from Mexico. The lover, who she met during her vacation at Grand Isle, told her that he loves her and he wants to marry her.
But her mood changes when her friend Adéle tells her that she should care more about her family as she does not spend enough time with her family because of her affairs.
Robert leaves Edna behind because Edna does not give a clear answer to his marriage proposal.
Afterwards she starts thinking about her life, her psychological and physical "awakening "and her children.
She invites her friends for dinner and returns to Grand Isle, where she pretends to go for swimming but never came back from the water.
In my essay, I would like to reflect upon Edna's options and decisions which she could have taken in order to avoid the suicide.
One way could have been to marry another man or remain married with Leonce and stay with her children. This option is not possible for her because she would be a man's trophy again and could not keep up her ideas of independence. Besides that, this would imply that she loses all that she has fought for or gained throughout the liberation process.
Man at that time would have wanted her to live as a " mother woman", "wom(a)n who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels" (Chapter IV).
Edna is no mother wo...
... middle of paper ...
...her anyone.
The novel ends very abruptly. That is why it is difficult to say whether the suicide is an act of desperation or to show the society that she is ready to die for her beliefs.
To my mind, it only shows that she couldn't see any way out of the misery and she chose the suicide to protect her kids from social problems.
There is no objective answer to the question: Edna's suicide, failure or success?
Both of the answers make sense and for both answers you will find reasons.
I think that her suicide shows that she failed. The society was simply not ready for her revolutionary ideas. She failed because she could not find people to support her ideas. In today's world, where the society is more liberal, she would have probably succeeded but not in the society of the 1890'ies century. And it was not a coincidence that the novel became famous 50 years later!
She no longer has a will to repress any untold secrets from the past, or perhaps the past. Since she has strayed far from her Christian beliefs, she has given in to the evil that has worked to overcome her. She believes she is finally achieving her freedom when she is only confining herself to one single choice, death. In taking her own life, she for the last time falls into an extremely low mood, disregards anyone but herself, and disobeys the church.
Edna Pontellier was on her way to an awakening. She realized during the book, she was not happy with her position in life. It is apparent that she had never really been fully unaware However, because her own summary of this was some sort of blissful ignorance. Especially in the years of life before her newly appearing independence, THE READER SEES HOW she has never been content with the way her life had turned out. For example she admits she married Mr. Pontellier out of convenience rather than love. EDNA knew he loved her, but she did not love him. It was not that she did not know what love was, for she had BEEN INFATUATED BEFORE, AND BELIEVED IT WAS love. She consciously chose to marry Mr. Pontellier even though she did not love him. When she falls in love with Robert she regrets her decision TO MARRY Mr. Pontellier. HOWEVER, readers should not sympathize, because she was the one who set her own trap. She did not love her husband when she married him, but SHE never once ADMITS that it was a bad decision. She attributes all the problems of her marriage to the way IN WHICH SOCIETY HAS defined the roles of men and women. She does not ACCEPT ANY OF THE BLAME, AS HER OWN. The only other example of married life, in the book, is Mr. and Mrs. Ratignolle, who portray the traditional role of married men and women of the time. Mr. Pontellier also seems to be a typical man of society. Edna, ON THE OTHER HAND, was not A TYPICAL WOMAN OF SOCIETY. Mr. Pontellier knew this but OBVIOUSLY HAD NOT ALWAYS. This shows IS APPARENT in the complete lack of constructive communication between the two. If she had been able to communicate with her husband they may have been able to work OUT THEIR PROBLEMS, WHICH MIGHT HAVE MADE Edna MORE SATISFIED WITH her life.
Edna misunderstands the situation and claims that she is the victim of Robert removing himself from her life. Robert solely wants to salvage her reputation and be a good man. He does not wish to become the man that ruined Edna’s even if it meant he could be with the woman he loves. She wholly disregards the things Roberts cares about when deciding that he is selfish for not only thinking of her. When Robert leaves her near the end of the book to protect her reputation, Edna still believed that she was the victim: “‘Good-by--because I love you.’ He did not know; He did not understand … it was too late”(125). Edna is a woman who leaves her husband, her children, and her friends all because she only cares about herself, and when she does not get what she wants, Robert, she decides that there was no more reason to live.
At last, she thinks so much about escaping Gilead by burning the house with the match, or hanging herself. (Atwood 292) She can do anything to escape the society, but all she did was sitting and waiting for the van to come. She only think about herself, she didn’t even try to escape, rebel. That’s the symbol of non heroine, she doesn’t think of others. Above all, she made no changes for this society. She was trying to stay alive through her time in Gilead, not to rebel or make changes for women. There wasn’t any performance from her that recognizes the signs
Essentially, Edna is not able to fulfill any of the roles that are presented by Chopin in the novel: mother, sister, daughter, wife, friend, artist, lover to either man, and finally the traditional role of a woman in society. She does not quite fit into any niche, and thus her suicide at the end of the novel is the only way for Edna’s story to end. Chopin must have Edna die, as she cannot survive in this restrained society in which she does not belong to. The idea of giving yourself completely to serve another, Edna declares “that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for any one” (47). However, her awakening is also a realization of her underprivileged position in a male dominated society. The first sign that Edna is becoming comfortable with herself, and beginning to loosen the constrictions of not being an individual is when she asks Robert, her husband, to retrieve her shawl: "When he returned with the shawl she took it and kept it in her hand. She did not put it around her" (30). Edna is trying to establish herself as an artist in a society where there is no tradition of women as creative beings. For any woman to suggest a desire for a role outside the domestic sphere, as more than a mother or housewife, was perceived as
The irony in Robert’s desire to make Edna his wife is that Robert left to be way from Edna because she was married to Mr. Pontiellier, but now Robert is back with even deeper emotions for her. For example, Robert states, “There in Mexico I was thinking of you”, which leads to the conclusion that Robert does demonstrate deep feelings for Edna and her hand in marriage.
She desperately wanted a voice and independence. Edna’s realization of her situation occurred progressively. It was a journey in which she slowly discovered what she was lacking emotionally. Edna’s first major disappointment in the novel was after her husband, Leonce Pontellier, lashed out at her and criticized her as a mother after she insisted her child was not sick. This sparked a realization in Edna that made here realize she was unhappy with her marriage. This was a triggering event in her self discovery. This event sparked a change in her behavior. She began disobeying her husband and she began interacting inappropriately with for a married woman. Edna increasingly flirted with Robert LeBrun and almost instantly became attracted to him. These feelings only grew with each interaction. Moreover, when it was revealed to Edna that Robert would be leaving for Mexico she was deeply hurt not only because he didn’t tell her, but she was also losing his company. Although Edna’s and Robert’s relationship may have only appeared as friendship to others, they both secretly desired a romantic relationship. Edna was not sure why she was feeling the way she was “She could only realize that she herself-her present self-was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored
have realized that Edna, because of her different upbringings, would not know how to deal with Robert's actions. In one way or another he was the one that helped start their feeling towards each other.
Edna’s first action that starts off her route to freedom from her relationship is when she fell in love with Robert. Edna had already married a man that she had not loved but he has not been treating her a...
Unfortunately Edna has no clue that she is being treated so poorly in the beginning of this story. With Mr. Pontellier being absent from home so often she finds plenty of time to spend with Robert. Through the whole summer she does not realize the feelings she is developing for Robert and only sees him as a friend. She enjoys spending all of her free time with him and gets along with him much better than her husband. It is not until she is back home and Robert leaves for Mexico that she starts to "awaken" and realize her true feelings not just for Robert but also for life in general.
Looking at the end of the work and going backwards (I read it this way so I could retrace the steps that lead up to Edna’s suicide, I saw this first time an ambiguity between the seeming freedom she got from transcending the bonds of ...
	There are definite signs of Edna Pontellier's depression, from the beginning of the novel and all the way to the end when she commits suicide. If there had been someone who had seen this, Edna might not have been driven to death, but she felt that no one could understand her wanting to be on her own. She thought of Doctor Mandelet, that he might have understood, but it was already too late, she was too far from shore and her strength was gone. So in the end there was really no one that could have saved her from this fate.
Her mood is vitally important in evaluating her death. We are told that during her thoughtful night, she came to realize that there was, “no one thing in the world that she desired,” (p 108) and that eventually she would be alone. She then remembers her children, but not fondly. They are “antagonists who overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days.” (Chopin 108) Her children are a burden, not a joy, for they anchor her to “soul’s slavery.” “But she knew of a way to elude them.” (Chopin 108) She knew of a way to elude her children? Certainly there are other possibilities than suicide, but coupled with the oth...
Edna’s recognition of herself as an individual as opposed to a submissive housewife is controversial because it’s unorthodox. When she commits suicide, it’s because she cannot satisfy her desire to be an individual while society scorns her for not following the traditional expectations of women. Edna commits suicide because she has no other option. She wouldn’t be fulfilled by continuing to be a wife and a mother and returning to the lifestyle that she led before her self-discovery.
It is this selfishness that makes it hard for the reader to be empathetic towards her later in the play, as it is evident in this scene that her hardships were brought on by herself. If she hadn’t insisted on the murder, she would not be driven insane by guilt, which would eventually lead to her death.... ... middle of paper ... ... As we saw, it was plaguing her dreams, and taking a heavy toll on her mental health.