This study will argue that the last act of Edna Pontellier, in Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, is typical of her hysterical behavior throughout the book. Edna has lived a superficial, romantic and elitist life, and her death by suicide is little more than an act of would-be romantic tragedy, the last act of a spoiled, self-centered child incapable of love or true participation in the reality of human life. She does not achieve freedom in that final act, but instead raises a white flag of surrender to the forces that would keep her a little pouting child among men.
The suicide which ends the book and the life of Edna fits perfectly into the pattern of acts which makes up Edna's life. She shows throughout the book that she is capable of whining and protesting at the smallest inconvenience in her spoiled life, but she is not capable of anything resembling a true feminist rebellion from a place of strength and self=esteem. The novel's title suggests that Edna experiences an "awakening," but that awakening consists of, first, little more than a childish foot-stamping against the traditional role of the woman in relation to the dominant male, against the social standard for the husband-wife relationship:
Edna could not help but think that it was very foolish, very childish, to have stamped upon her wedding ring and smashed the crystal vase. . . . She began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked. . . . Mr. Pontellier had been a rather courteous husband so long as he met a certain tacit submissiveness in his wife. But her new and unexpected line of conduct completely bewildered him. It shocked him (Chopin 95).
This "shock" on the part of her husband is supposed to show that Edna has expressed her freedom and upset the world of male domination, but Edna's "doing as she liked" is more the act of a child testing the limits of her father. Being free is not simply doing what one likes, especially what one likes is invariably ...