This "shock" on the part of her husband is supposed to show that Edna has uttered her freedom and upset the world of male domination, notwithstanding Edna's "doing as she liked" is more the act of a child interrogation the limits of her father. Being free is not simply doing what one likes, particularly what one likes is invariably self-centered and superficial.
The preceding moving-picture show and analytic thinking argon important because they illustrate the fact that Edna's experience of " waken" seems terribly dated today, although at the time of its writing in the previous century the novel may have been seen as some sort of ground-breaking feminist or pre-feminist work. At that time, the unblemished suggestion that a meek wife might unawares defy her husband even in such a childish way was revolutionary. Today, however, Edna's character seems less like a woman beginning to find herself as a spring up human creation than a teenage daughter responding to her father's rules and regulations with bursts of contrarious refusal to obey.
Of course, the second part of Edna's " change" is her apparent suicide by drowning. This is no awakening at all, but a permanent flight from her self-centered worries. In her final act, her awakening is revealed as an unadulterated sham. She has fled her pain---the first glimmer of pain in her life, in fact---and left those who love her---including her
The effervescing wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents to the highest degree her ankles. . . . The touch od the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. . . . She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the mulberry fig tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged. . . . There was the hum of bees, and the musky aroma of pinks filled the air (Chopin 190).
children---with barely a thought of the trauma she has caused them. She is as shallow and selfish in death as she has been in life. Certainly a major part of the awakening of a human being is her growing awareness of her relationship with other human beings and the fact that life and love are difficult. Edna shows no such awareness in her final act.
The knowledgeable description of Edna's suicide gives the reader not the impression of a woman coming to any kind of an enlightenment but that of a child imagining a romantic act, oblivious to the woefulness she is bringing to others:
A certain light was beginning to cut across dimly deep down her. . . . In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her point in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a fleshy weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a issue woman of twenty-eight (Chopin 25).
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Avon, 1972.
It is a preposterous guide that a flicker of self-awareness, with respect to going to the beach or not, might be "a ponderous weight of wisdom." This line of achievement barely makes sense even when the reader realizes later that the scene is meant to foreshadow Edna's suicide by drowning.
Then Edna sat in the library after dinner and read Emerson until she grew sleepy. She realized that she had unattended her reading, and determined to start anew upon a course of better studies, now that her time was completely her own to do with as she liked (Chopin 122).
. . . , Edna hastened her prepara
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