The Awakening and Its Limits

The Awakening That Cannot Be Completed

Edna Pontellier’s awakening is organized around a series of genuine perceptions: that she has been living a life shaped entirely by the expectations of others, that she has desires and capacities that her marriage and her society have suppressed, that she is made for something more than what her world offers. These perceptions are correct. The problem is not that she wakes up but that she has nowhere to go when she does.

The Louisiana Creole society she inhabits offers her two models of womanhood: the mother-woman, who gives herself entirely to husband and children, and the artist-woman, who gives herself entirely to her art. Edna cannot be the first and cannot sustain the second. What she needs — a framework in which her full humanity can find genuine expression and genuine rest — the novel cannot provide.

What the Sea Reveals

The sea in The Awakening is the novel’s most theologically loaded image. It calls to Edna with a voice that speaks to the soul, promising a freedom and a dissolution that her ordinary life cannot offer. She learns to swim in it; she ultimately walks into it.

The sea is the image of the transcendent in the novel — the reality that is larger than the self and that the self both longs for and fears. But Chopin’s sea is not God; it is oblivion. The dissolution it offers is not the dissolution of the self into something complete and great, as Cather’s Jim Burden experiences, but the dissolution of the self into nothing. The transcendent that Edna reaches for cannot hold her.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a world in which the full humanity of the woman — her dignity, her freedom, her capacity for genuine selfhood — is suppressed by the serpent’s work in its cultural forms. Edna’s awakening is a genuine response to this suppression: a refusal to accept the reduction of the human person to a social function.

What the novel cannot provide is the God in whose image the self is made and in whom it finds its genuine freedom. Edna’s longing is real; her perception of her own suppression is accurate; her refusal of the inadequate is courageous. What she needs is not oblivion but liberation — not the sea that swallows her but the God who made the sea and who made her in his image and calls her, by name, to freedom.

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