feminaw Suicide as the Only Alternative for Edna Pontellier in The Awakening :: Chopin Awakening Essays

Suicide as the Only Alternative in The Awakening In Kate Chopins The Awakening, the principal character, Edna decides to kill herself rather than to live a lie. It seemed to Kate that the time of her own death was the only thing remaining on a lower floor her cook since parliamentary procedure had already decided the rest of her life for her. Edna was a womanhood of the wrong times she wanted her independence and she wanted to be with her sexual lover, Robert. This type of behavior would never be accepted by the society of her time. Ednas relationship with Robert, and her rejection of the role dictated to her by society, resulted in her perceiving suicide to be the only solution to her problems. Critics of Kate Chopins The Awakening tend to read the novel as the dramatization of a womans struggle to achieve selfhood--a struggle doomed also-ran either because the patriarchal conventions of her society restrict freedom, or because the ideal of selfhood that she watch over is a masculine defined one that allows for none of the physical and indisputable claims which maternity makes upon women. Ultimately. in both views, Edna Pontellier ends her life because she cannot have it both ways given her time, place, and notion of self, she cannot be a mother and have a self. (Simons) Edna Pontellier could not have what she wanted. There are many arguments about Edna cosmos selfish for ending her life and leaving her children behind. Edna does indeed dread being trim back to her biological function, but this is what the Creole culture does to women , as Priscilla Leder suggests (Simons). She could not offer the love that children deserve from a parent. I do not feel that she was selfish, she did not love her children the way a mother-woman would. A mother-woman is someone who puts her children before anything else in her life. Edna is not one of those mother-women who esteemed it a holy privilege to rub out themselves as individuals and grow wings as minis tering angels she is, rather a twenty-eight-year-old woman who hears the voice of the sea, which seduces the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of purdah to lose itself in inward contemplation. (Toth) Edna needed to be in control of her life. As long as she was married and a mother she would never have total control.