The Last Page
Does Edna die at the end of The Awakening? Here is what I found when I checked. The word drown never appears in the last chapter. The word dead never appears either. The book simply stops, mid-memory.
This is the Awakening ending explained, and it spoils everything, so close the tab if you haven’t finished Kate Chopin’s novel. I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred sixty, novel only, thirty-nine chapters. I’ll walk through the last three chapters, then the last swim line by line, then the clues that were planted early, and then the readings people argue about. Where I give my own view, I’ll say so.
The Night Before
Let’s set the scene. In chapter thirty-six, Edna is eating alone in a quiet suburban garden, with a sleepy cat, when Robert walks in. He has been back from Mexico for a while and has kept away from her. They talk, they walk home, and in the little pigeon house she kisses him.
He tells her why he left. Because she was not free, and she was Léonce Pontellier’s wife. In Mexico he dreamed of a wild idea, that her husband might somehow set her free. Edna calls that a foolish dream. She says she is no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of. She gives herself where she chooses, she says, and if Léonce told Robert to take her, she would laugh at them both.
Robert’s face grows a little white. Then a servant knocks. Adèle is in labor. Edna promises to come straight back, begs Robert to wait, and goes.
Think of the Children
Chapter thirty-seven is the labor, and the book does not look away. Edna sits beside Adèle, remembers her own labor, the chloroform, the waking to find a new life added to the great multitude of souls that come and go, and the narrator says she witnessed the scene of torture with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature.
As she leaves, Adèle whispers, think of the children, Edna, remember them.
In chapter thirty-eight, Doctor Mandelet walks her home. He says youth is given up to illusions, a decoy, as he puts it, to secure mothers for the race. Edna answers that it may be better to wake up, even to suffer, than to be a dupe all your life. She tells him she wants nothing but her own way, though she shouldn’t want to trample the little lives.
At home Robert is gone. He left a note. I love you. Good-by, because I love you. Edna lies on the sofa all night, awake, until the servant comes in to light the fire.
What She Decides
So why does Robert leave? The text does not say. In my reading, he can’t accept a woman who says she belongs to no one, and she has just told him to his face.
Now the key passage, at the start of chapter thirty-nine. Edna has done all her thinking on that sofa. To-day it is Arobin, she tells herself, to-morrow it will be someone else. It makes no difference to her about Léonce. But Raoul and Etienne. She finally understands what she meant when she told Adèle she would give up the unessential, but not herself.
She expects Robert too will melt out of her life, leaving her alone. The book says there was no human being she wanted near her except him, and no one thing in the world she desired. The children appear like antagonists who have overcome her, and who would drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. Then the line that matters: but she knew a way to elude them.
Walking to the Water
Now the last chapter. Edna arrives at Grand Isle by lugger, alone, with the sun beating down. Victor is patching a gallery, and Mariequita is handing him nails.
Look at the name. In the opening of this chapter, the narrator calls her Mrs. Pontellier six times, as Victor and Mariequita talk about the grand dinner and she appears like an apparition. She is the lady of the city, a rumor. Then she speaks, and from that moment on, she is only Edna. Not once more Mrs. Pontellier. The last chapter runs about fourteen hundred seventy-five words, and the old name is gone as soon as she speaks.
She asks for dinner, but nothing extra. Hopes for fish. Asks for a couple of towels and walks down to the water. She says it is only for a wash and a little swim before dinner. They tell her the water is too cold. The book says she is not thinking of what she settled on the sofa. Not yet.
Into the Gulf
At the beach, she sees a bird with a broken wing, beating the air, reeling and circling down, down to the water. Hold that thought.
She finds her old bathing suit still hanging on its peg, and puts it on. Then, alone, she throws off even that, and for the first time in her life stands naked in the open air. The narrator says it is strange and awful and delicious, and that she feels like a new-born creature opening its eyes in a familiar world.
She walks in. The water is chill, and she walks on. It is deep, and she strikes out. The book calls the touch of the sea sensuous, enfolding the body in its close embrace.
She remembers the night she swam out far, and the terror of being unable to regain the shore. This time she does not look back. Her arms and legs grow tired. She thinks of Léonce and the children, a part of her life, but they need not have thought they could possess her body and soul. She imagines Mademoiselle Reisz sneering at her pretensions, and then Robert’s note. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have, but it is too late. The shore is far behind and her strength is gone. The old terror flames up for an instant, then sinks.
What She Hears
Now the last four sentences of the book. Edna hears her father’s voice, and her sister Margaret’s. She hears the barking of an old dog chained to a sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clang as he walks across a porch. There is the hum of bees, and the musky smell of pinks fills the air. And that’s it.
Notice how many of these tie back to chapter seven. The cavalry officer is the one she fell for as a very young girl, in chapter seven, a sad-eyed man who visited her father. Margaret is her older sister from the same chapter. And the blue-grass meadow she remembers in the water is the one she told Adèle about at Grand Isle. She said she walked through grass higher than her waist, swinging her arms as if swimming, a little girl in a field as big as the ocean.
In my reading, the book ends by sending her back to a field where she was a child, with no edges in sight.
The Bird With the Wings
Now the clues. In chapter twenty-seven, Edna tells Arobin something Mademoiselle Reisz said to her. Reisz felt her shoulder blades, to see if her wings were strong. The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice, she said, must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle, she added, to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.
Then, in the last chapter, the bird with a broken wing, circling down to the water.
And the swim itself echoes the first one, in chapter ten. That night she swam out farther than she should, and when she looked back the water behind her became a barrier. A quick vision of death smote her soul. She fought her way back, and told her husband she thought she would have perished out there alone. He said, you were not so very far, my dear, I was watching you. This time, nobody is watching.
Does Edna Die
So, does she die? The text never says it. The last words are about sound and smell. But look at what comes before. Her strength is gone. The shore is far behind her. She does not turn back. In my reading, she drowns, and I don’t think the book leaves much room for another answer.
But here is the question people actually argue about. Is it a choice, or a defeat?
Some readers say defeat. Reisz’s weakling with the bruised wings is Edna, who cannot find a life that fits, and goes under. Others say choice, the one decision that belongs to her, the book’s last act of refusing to be possessed. The children are “antagonists” in her mind, and the sea is the one place no one can follow.
There is also a third reading, which is that the book does not want you to settle it. Chopin hands you the sea, a bird with a broken wing, and a handful of sounds, and then stops. I think that is deliberate.
My Reading
Here is mine, and I mark it as opinion. I don’t think the ending is a punishment for Edna waking up. The book never says she was wrong to want a life of her own. The trouble is that every life on offer asks her to give herself away. Léonce wants a possession. Robert wants a woman who is free, and then runs from one who is. Arobin wants nothing. Adèle wants her to think of the children.
If she can give up the unessential but not herself, then every door in her world closes on the self. The sea is the only room left. I find that both beautiful and terrible, and I think Chopin means us to feel both.
Was the last swim a defeat or a choice? Tell me in the comments, and tell me which of those last sounds hit you hardest. If this helped, subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and watch the characters guide if you want to see who’s who.
