This post, as with all literary analysis, will contain spoilers if you have not read the story. The novella is available online through the Gutenberg Project. –Tyler
In The Awakening, Kate Chopin paints a masterpiece of the Creole culture, and one woman’s struggle to survive in it. Edna Pontellier, the story’s protagonist, undergoes an awakening. She is transformed from the confused, soft, delicate, little flower of LeoncePontellier into an independent, artistic, free woman of the world. Almost. Edna, even when she asserted her freedom, was powerless, unable to overcome her culture. In her desperation, she takes the only action she feels that she has left: She swims way out into the ocean to drown. Her suicide depicts the hopelessness of the whole struggle, of her inescapable powerlessness. What if, however, Edna wasn’t so powerless after all? Edna’s position as a woman afforded her great power, not a dearth of it. She held sway over men more than she was aware, and her suicide was a rash decision, which ultimately made Edna her own greatest foil. Chopin goes to great lengths to impress upon her audience the stark hopelessness of the woman of that culture, but the text unravels around the assumed helplessness of women, showing Edna to be, in fact, a woman of great power, even if she never realizes it.
