They show that her physical life is something unessential to her. She actually has to choose what to give up in the situation she finds herself in by the end of the novel: She lives in a society that dictates her how and what to be, namely a so called mother- woman, described as following:. The mother - women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle.
It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.
Edna does not love her husband Leonce Pontellier. To him, she is more like a piece of property which has to be kept undamaged and beautiful to fulfil its task of being a status symbol to him. In the Creole society sexual contact outside of marriage is not only frowned on but a taboo which makes people who are discovered considered criminals. In contrast to men, women play a submissive role, their personal independence is linked with discomfort and exclusion.
The affair she has with Alcee Arobin gives her the sexual satisfaction she has never achieved before. But this is not all she wants from a man. She does not love Alcee, but feels guilty towards the man she really does love and whom she feels like betraying: Robert Lebrun. With him she dreams of sailing away to live an unconventional, independent life. But although Robert shows a certain interest in Edna as a person and seems to understand her he reacts by leaving, almost escaping to Mexico after Adele Ratignolle says:.
She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously. If your attention to any married women here were ever offered with any intention of being convincing, you would not be the gentleman we all know you to be, and you would be unfit to associate with the wives and daughters of the people who trust in you.
He is not strong enough to discard the restrictions of his society, declare his love to Edna and take the resulting responsibilities. Therefore he might be considered a victim of the Creole society himself. Be that as it may, when he returns from Mexico, he turns out to be nothing like Edna has imagined him but just as conventional as anybody else.
In this situation Edna has to discover that she has only a limited number of options to go on with her life: she could go back to her husband Leonce who would probably take her back dismissing her behavior as a morbid condition.
This, however, would mean to give up all the independence she has achieved and continue her life as it was before her awakening: being an obedient, husband-worshipping, silent mother-woman. Over the course of the novel, Edna wears fewer and fewer layers of clothing, symbolizing her casting off the role society has placed upon her. In this earlier chapter, Edna stops and panics only when she sees how separated from the others on shore, representative of society, she has become.
In her final swim, Edna actively wants to leave the shore, metaphorically escaping society. As she swims out into sea, she specifically thinks of the ways she rejects the prescriptive ideas of who she should be. Slowly, she frees herself from all the duties and refuses the world she has been living in. She lets go of everything around her: her friends and family, but also the security and support from them. She brakes free from financial as well as domestic domination, and even leaves her children to seek for her desires.
In the 19th century the supremacy of a woman was motherhood, and they were judged by their qualities as mothers and wives. Edna, however, does not want to be possessed by her husband and children, and she refuses to self-sacrifice herself for them.
She feels that not only the duties of caring for her children, but also motherhood itself limit her independence to become an individual. As Edna sees no future in combining motherhood and selfhood, the only possibility for her is to commit suicide, which offers her the only way of eluding her children. As Edna swims out to sea, she becomes overwhelmed by the elements.
So, Edna dies, but does she do so intentionally? Does she commit suicide or is it the accidental death of an inexperienced, overwhelmed swimmer? It depends on what you think is going on in Edna's mind as she swims out to sea. Here are two options:. Edna does not intend to commit suicide. Instead, she embraces, a little too enthusiastically, Mademoiselle Reisz's feeling that the artist needs the "courageous soul that dares and defies," lines she remembers as she swims out.
She wants to push herself, do something extreme, in much the same way that people bungee jump or skydive for kicks. By flouting social convention and starting up life as a sexually and artistically independent woman, she has already experienced a kind of social death. To the rest of society, she no longer exists because she doesn't conform to any social roles, like wife or mother.
This "death" has enabled her rebirth into the free woman she now is.
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