Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, in spite of its relative brevity, makes each and every account of its heroine, Edna Pontellier, and the new, liberating universe to which she eventually awakens elegant, sparkling, and incandescent to the reader. What is most apparent in the novel is the role Edna’s closest relations play in her life, from helping her cope with the mistakes she made in her past to facilitating her embrace of her independent awakening in the present. However, Edna is ultimately unable to undo her domineering husband’s emotional abuse against her, his stuffy lifestyle, and her realization of her inability to transcend society’s limits on her.
At certain moments when her life is too burdensome to bear, Edna escapes from her mundane, pruned life in New Orleans with her husband, Léonce, and returns to one summer when she began a love affair with Robert Lebrun. Robert is the only one who reaches out to Edna and begins the healing process. He sees her trapped in her expensive prison of a cottage, sitting in her rocking chair all afternoon, needlepoint at the ready. It is almost as if she were a porcelain doll, positioned by a careful hand, and it is Robert’s duty to break her mold. Once she knows that he loves what he sees beyond her façade, she does, in fact, break free and metamorphoses from the obscure wife of a ‘big shot’ husband to one who grows in confidence and explores her true identity. Edna learns how to live for herself.
She believes Robert to be in love with the memory of her just as she was in Grand Isle, La. without the increasing guilt she feels coming to a head. She does not want true love to be a scandal and for herself to feel guilty in the process. If Robert was devoted to and understood Edna, he would not sneak around with her at night and shut them both in her cottage as if they were to be ashamed of themselves. Edna cannot be with someone who fears love and leaves her to suffer the societal restraints she wants to free herself from in the first place. It is not only the infidelity of which Edna is guilty. She is lying to Robert and herself in that she is not as awakened to passion as she claims to be, and thus she ends her sorrow once and for all.
On the other hand, Mademoiselle Reisz, another friend Edna makes on Grand Isle, does challenge Edna to be the fearless, independent woman she wants to be, but as Edna spends more time around her, Edna realizes that she does not want to end up like her after all. Mademoiselle Reisz is a cranky, old spinster. Even so, she goes on living in the marvelously independent fashion that Edna fancies for herself. Like Robert, Mademoiselle Reisz is one of Edna’s only confidantes. For instance, Edna tells her friend that she is moving into a little cottage by herself away from her family, and Reisz challenges Edna to admit the real reason why she is moving away from her husband. Mademoiselle Reisz concludes that Edna moves because she feels as if the money in her family is not totally hers. Edna can count on her friend to not sugarcoat anything, but to ‘tell it like it is.’
Even though she wants to live on her own like Mademoiselle Reisz, she can never be happy and divorce herself from the inhibitions she has accrued over the course of her married life. Even with such a desirable living situation as Mademoiselle Reisz’s, Edna can see that Reisz is not a happier person because of it. Edna desperately wants to believe she can be happy, but because Reisz is her only role model on this matter, she discovers that she might not be able to have it all. After all, Edna only goes to her when she is not even sad, but emotionless.
Edna could try to emulate Mademoiselle Reisz’s world as best she could, to earn money and obtain a room of her very own. However, Mademoiselle Reisz’s lifestyle and the things and people she has rejected allow her to makes Edna’s pain merely bearable rather than cured. They hinder Reisz from fully understanding Edna either as a married woman or a woman in the throes of passion with an enticing suitor.
Just as Robert is in love with the memory of Edna on Grand Isle, Edna finds herself in love with the idea of one Alceé Arobin, of feeling like a woman and not feeling as if she is a prisoner, no matter what gossip may arise as to her infidelity. She completely lets herself go to have fun with him, something she was never able to do with Léonce. Similarly, she embraces the excitement of being with a man who has the courage to love her, but soon grows tired of this game, snaps out of her delirium, and reflects on her tragic position in reality.
In reality, Edna does not want to live a lie of not being true to Arobin or herself. The reader must remember that Edna finds herself in a similar situation with Robert in that he loves her, but left his relationship with Edna without the passion that both ignites Edna’s sexuality and numbs her from the distress of her marriage. To Edna, true love requires a balance of these two emotions and is not meant to satisfy a particular desire that may flare up at a given moment, which leads her to realize that she will never find a man mature enough to satisfy many emotions at once. Above all, the point to keep in mind is that Arobin was not acquainted with her before she found herself, and thus he is not completely aware of her grievances and the factors in her life that haunt her underneath the image of confidence, beauty, and nonchalance that she projects. He does not know that the subservience and intense affection he shows her mirror the subservience she despises in her own marriage. Over time, Edna realizes that that he will never be able to love her in that passionate, primal sense she so craves and so she returns herself to her own nature at last.
Thurs, in The Awakening, As Edna journeys to discover herself as a mature woman and identify herself as an independent citizen of the world, much to her disappointment, she finds herself awakening only to limitations. In spite of Robert Lebrun, Mademoiselle Reisz and Alcée Arobin’s good intentions toward Edna, she cannot let all of her past and grow into the woman she wants to blossom into. As she finally throws in the towel to fate and acknowledges the failure of her awakening to womanhood, she plunges into the sea, making one of the only decisions she ever makes regarding the direction of her life: the decision to die.
