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Cr Review The Awakening

Gavin Krogius
Ms. Hoff
English 3 AP/IB
20 October 2008
The Pathetic Downfall of Edna
My uncle was an extraordinary man and yet, at age twenty-two, he looked out on life and did not see his purpose. He was empty and he took his own life because of it. As the night drew on in The Awakening, the author, Kate Chopin, writes about how Edna takes her own life in the final scene of the novel. The act of suicide that Edna commits demonstrates a defeat in her life representing that she does not have the strength or the will to live her life alone and she feels as though she has nothing to live for in her life. She has no control as she walks toward the sea and this ultimately leads to her downfall in the ocean.
The life of Edna Pontellier was out of the ordinary. As she grew older, she seemed to remain a child. She did not see her value in life to other people or to herself. As Suzanne Wolkenfeld states in her criticism, “Edna’s Suicide: The problem of the One and the Many,” that “Edna does not possess the strength to live her life alone and is therefore driven to seek the solitary security of death” (222). Edna does not fulfill what she needs to do as a human being. She looks at her kids as enemies and she holds with her a sense of emptiness. She hates her role as a mother and does not wish to be one. She feels as if her life was a waste. As she comes up into adulthood, she remains a child. She does not love Robert while he is with her but only while he is away and when she cannot have him. She thinks of her memories as dreams, and she does not know which of them she truly experienced. These childish acts illustrate that she has not matured into a woman and does not fully understand what is expected of her in the world. As she walks towards the ocean and as she takes her life, she experiences rebirth but not toward a new life. She experiences rebirth “backward to the womb” (223). She becomes a child again, which is where she is the most content. The last memories...