Novel

The Awakening

As its title suggests, Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening is a book about renewal and rebirth. Edna Pontellier, its central character, is a young wife and mother whose life and outlook transform while she spends a summer vacation at Grand Isle, a resort off the coast of Louisiana, not far from New Orleans. During that vacation, she meets Robert Lebrun, an attractive and attentive young man whose mother owns the resort where Edna is staying with her middle-aged husband, Léonce, a staid and conventional businessman, and their two small boys. Thanks to her contact with Robert and also to the influence of her changed surroundings (including, especially, the impact of the seductively beautiful ocean), Edna begins to realize how dissatisfied she has become with her married life, which she finds increasingly predictable, constraining, and oppressive. With Robert's help she learns to swim, and as she finds herself more and more attracted to him, she also becomes more and more frustrated with—and resistant to—Léonce's influence on her existence. Just as she begins to realize that she has fallen in love with Robert, however, he departs abruptly for Mexico. He fears his own deepening feelings for her and the destructive impact that his growing closeness to Edna may have on her relations with her husband and children (Kamara, Gibreel, 2001).

Edna's dissatisfaction with her old way of life, however, continues to grow even after Robert leaves and she returns to New Orleans with Léonce and their boys. She begins to neglect her social obligations, she devotes herself increasingly to her interest in painting, and she grows obviously distant from Léonce, both emotionally and sexually. When he departs for New York City on an extended business trip, she not only begins an affair with a notorious rake named Alcée Arobin but also moves out of the imposing home she and Léonce have shared. Establishing herself in a small cottage nearby, she enjoys her newfound independence but also keenly regrets Robert's absence. When she unexpectedly discovers him in New Orleans one day, they briefly resume their earlier emotional intimacy. When Robert once again quickly departs because he is convinced that Edna can never be his wife, Edna impulsively returns to Grand Isle, walks down to the beach, strips off her clothes, and swims into the Gulf of Mexico, from which she never emerges.

Clearly Edna, in some senses, is renewed and reborn during the course of this novel, but just as clearly her renewal and rebirth are complicated and perhaps even ironic. Edna, after all, is either a drowning victim or a woman who commits suicide; thus whatever "renewal" she undergoes leads to her physical destruction, and whatever "rebirth" she enjoys also results in her literal death. The final chapter of the book, in fact, has always been highly controversial; many of Chopin's contemporaries condemned the ending as morally scandalous, and more recent critics have often strongly disagreed about the significance of Edna's death. At the end of the book, many questions remain unanswered: Is Edna ...