The Awakening

In Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, the heroine kills herself at the end of the book. Edna Pontellier is disappointed in her life. She feels trapped and she does not care to live with her husband and children any longer. She also fell in love with another man who rejected her and she is unhappy being among people who live in a way that seems strange to her. There could be many ways of interpreting Edna's suicide. It is easy to say that she was depressed, angry, insane, jealous, hurt, desperate or many other things. But Edna's suicide was not meant to be a completely negative action -- it was not just a response to her depression over being trapped in an unhappy life. Chopin did not intend that the readers understand it this way and the character of Edna wanted to do more than just escape when she killed herself. Edna was using suicide as a form of communication. This is not an uncommon situation and many writers on suicide have noted how important it can be to the person who kills herself. The problem with this is that people are not very likely to come to the conclusion that the suicidal person meant something by her actions. The person she is communicating with may just want to continue to look the other way -- he did not understand when she was alive and he will not understand when she is dead. Edna wanted to escape her life, but she wished that everyone could know exactly why she thought she had to escape.

Suicide is an important issue in today's society,

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Kerkhof believes that suicide is the result of serious depression but it is also a response to real conditions in the person's life. With their view of Edna's pleasant life, Mr. Pontellier and Robert would not understand her problem even if they took a more modern view of suicide. Edna's failure to communicate worked both ways. She did not understand that other men could flirt with her but did not mean anything by it and she could not make her husband understand what made her unhappy. But Chopin says that Edna was "becoming herself" and getting rid of the "fictitious self" that was all her husband could see (Chopin 55). Menninger said that this kind of behavior was taken for insanity but, among people who later commit suicide, the kind of things Edna did were really "sacrifices offered to avert suicide and the dreadful decision that there is nowhere else to go" (71). Edna would have chosen to live if she could figure out a way to do it. And this fits with the descriptions of real-life suicide. A suicide attempt is "a pleading" in which the person says, "I want to live; help me find a way to live" (Menninger 71). But Edna is not a person who only attempts suicide while hoping to be rescued. She knows she can turn aroun

Category: Literature - T