The final page of The Awakening finds Edna stripping off the clothes that are a symbol of the shackles that bind her to her pre-awakened existence. With these shackles removed, she feels free: “How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (1102). Yet, while this sensation is novel and “delicious,” it is also “strange” and “awful.” Edna has cast off the only role that she has ever known to embrace new sensuousness and its only concomitant destiny (in this case), i.e. death. She is no longer Edna, property of Léonce, mother of Raoul and Étienne, plaything of Arobin, untouchable goddess to Robert, but a newly born “creature” who, tragically, wants to live according to its, not “masculine” or “feminine,” own impossible desires (1098). Edna’s awakening has only brought with it a desire to break the confines of her life, yet, in so doing, she must pay the ultimate price. Why, one might ask, is death the outcome for Edna when she tries, as Hamlet did, “to take arms against a sea of troubles?”

The novel begins with the symbol of a confining milieu, a caged bird uttering a warning: “Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!” (993). This symbol, as it turns out, is apropos to Edna’s present situation: a caged bird that is looked upon as ornamental and amusing; Léonce looks at her as “one looks at a valuable piece of property,” for she has acquiesced to that role after the “accident” of their marriage (995, 1009). She appears to be a caged bird, who is not as “delicious in the rôle” of mother/society woman as is, e.g. Adèle Ratignolle, “the heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams” (1000). Edna fails, in the eyes of her husband, to accomplish adequately the nurturing and decorative functions that a proper Creole, upper-class woman and mother should embody. In the novel’s first chapters he finds fault with her sun-burnt skin and her lack of “interest in things which concerned him” and his place in society (997). Indeed, Chopin informs the reader, “Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman” like those specimens that are dominant at Grand Isle (1000).

Edna is seemingly caught between two influences: a strong desire for individuality and autonomy, as exemplified by Mademoiselle Reisz, and the societal conformity and comme il faut that she sees in Adèle Ratignolle. She admires the figure of Madame Ratignolle, “Mrs. Pontellier liked to sit and gaze at her fair companion as she might look upon a faultless Madonna” (1002), yet the “musical strains, well rendered,” by the artistry of Mademoiselle Riesz’ piano playing, “had a way of evoking pictures in her mind” (1016). These “pictures” are the “very passions themselves . . . aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body” (1017). Her impulses, emanating from her passions, begin to direct her actions and thoughts; she is “beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” [italics mine] (1005). Her recognition of “the outward existence which conforms, and the inward life which questions,” is like a voice that speaks to her from the sea; this voice is awakening her sensuality and desire for a higher truth and freedom from the confines that she sees in her society: “The voice of the sea speaks to her soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (1005). This voice urges her to “swim far out, where no woman had swum before;” this she does, swimming “out alone” both literally and figuratively, “reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (1018, 1019). This is terrifying at first because she is leaving behind the secure world on Grand Isle; yet, simultaneously, it is exhilarating in the glimpses of freedom it affords.

Unlike the society women and their conformity to propriety, Edna has an inner sensitivity to her art and passion that progressively dominates her actions as the novel unfolds. Edna is initiated into a spiritual quest for freedom led by her primordial passions that have awakened with her baptism in the sea and her admiration and sensitivity to the art of Mademoiselle Reisz. She begins to become aware of the fact that she is a sexual creature who longs for something more than what a comme il faut family life can provide; and concomitantly her societal responsibilities and consciousness begin to wane in the light of her recent epiphany. She no longer yields to the commands of Léonce, initially in her refusal to quit the hammock and come indoors, thus forsaking the conventions that had always governed her life (1021-2). The church at Chênière Caminada is stifling and oppressive, so that she removes herself from the representation of dogmatic orthodoxy, to the healing “voice of the sea whispering” (1026). In New Orleans, Edna begins to shy away from the customs and obligations of society life by being absent on the day in which she should be at home to receive visitors; this lack of pragmatism precipitates Mr. Pontellier’s reaction on purely financial concerns: “You can’t afford to snub Mrs. Belthrop. Why, Belthrop could buy and sell us ten times over” (1041). Edna is more and more drawn to the company of Mademoiselle Reisz who iterates that the true artistic spirit must soar above convention, that “the artist must possess the courageous soul … that dares and defies” (1052). Another time she conceits that the individual, like “the bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice[,] must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth” (1071). Yet, this is just what happens to Edna at the end of the novel, but is it because she is weak?

A naturalistic interpretation of Edna’s suicide is viable taking into account the above examples of Edna’s milieu, with the addition of her romantic, childhood dreams of a knightly figure coming to rescue her from mundanity. She is also accosted with romantic novels that are passed around the Grand Isle society (later, she is also seen reading Emerson), the persistence of the coquettish Robert’s insinuations into her life, and constant exposure to the blissful lovers who are always hovering on the periphery. This environment coupled with her responsibilities as a Creole wife and the chance awakening of her new sensitivities, in addition to the influence of the regimental Colonel who “coerced his own wife into her grave,” Edna faces a challenge that she has never before faced, nor, perhaps, has been created to withstand. These forces have crippled Edna like the bird that she espies standing on the edge of the abyss: “a bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (1102).

Under the influence of the sun, which is ever-present and even necessary, Edna feels secure and creative. Traditionally a masculine symbol of power, the sun remains the driving force in Edna’s life: “When the weather was dark and cloudy Edna could not work. She needed the sun to mellow and temper her mood to the sticking point” (1062). It is under the heliotropic gaze of the sun that Edna finally takes her life, like Icarus, who also attempted to fly too high. She is never truly able to free herself from the views of Léonce’s Creole society while she lived; even Robert is a victim of his surroundings, for he has a “wild dream” of taking Edna for his wife. Edna is devastated at this notion; Robert, the object of her love, she realizes, is just as much a Creole as is Léonce. She did not want another husband to shackle her again as private property, she wanted a person to share her newly acquired passion: “Nothing else in the world is of any consequence” (1096). Indeed, if Robert’s imagination conceives of marriage as a “wild dream,” then he too would be unfit for Edna. Yet she remains trapped under the gaze of the sun, for she can not soar the heavens with the object and instrument of her desire because his feet are still planted solidly upon the earth; Robert, she comes to realize, “would never understand” (1102).

The Awakening would seem to fit the essential criteria of the naturalistic novel, basically: environmental and hereditary influences determine characters’ actions and reactions; false values are attacked; the chance meeting of two variables; a vision of higher truth is glimpsed at least by the reader. However, a crucial element is lacking that is necessary for this novel, and Edna’s suicide, to be utterly deterministic, i.e. the means of salvation is unavailable, or out of reach, to the protagonist. The possible means of Edna’s salvation could have been in empathy, in the understanding that she lacked from Robert; yet she does not realize this until too late—but she does realize it. Her benefactor could have been Mandelet: “Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him — but it was too late” [my italics] (1102). In her only discussion with Mandelet, a confused Edna affirms that it is “perhaps better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life” (1098). Mandelet replies, “Perhaps I might help you. I know I would understand, and I tell you there are not many who would — not many, my dear” (1098). With Mandelet’s help, perhaps Edna might have come to terms with her enlightened state, yet she chose the only path she felt was open to her, i.e. death in the place where Aphrodite was born and where Edna had first awakened: the sea.

A realistic, rather than a naturalistic, interpretation would be more apropos to The Awakening however one would choose to construe the significance of Edna’s suicide. Edna did have at least one option open to her awakened consciousness. She chose to remain obdurate and faithful to her desire for complete individuality; though she could have found someone that understood her, “her strength was gone” (1102). Edna was strong enough to begin soaring, yet she did not have the strength sufficient enough to transcend eternally in life.