Sad women are the prettiest

There was a great divide in my women's literature class when it came time to discuss Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening.  My classmates felt Edna Pontellier, the book's heroine, was not only justified in her final decision to drown herself in the ocean, but enlightened and somewhat brave in her valiant resignation from the confines of Victorian society.  As for myself?

...I felt that I had just encountered the most self-centered, ungrateful brat in the history of literature.

When I consider the strife of Edna Pontellier, I am reminded of a scene in the 2007 film Little Children. Played by Kate Winslet, Sarah Pierce has begun to privately retaliate against her less than honorable husband and the other dutiful housewives in her neighborhood by taking up an affair with a restless married man.  When she attends a book discussion at a neighbor lady's home, she presents an interesting defense for another scandalous heroine of Victorian literature, Emma Bovary:

"She's trapped. She has a choice: she can either accept a life of misery or she can struggle against it. And she chooses to struggle."

My classmates would certainly praise Edna for her attempts to struggle against her unhappiness as well.  However, while I sympathize with Winslet's troubled character, I find that she and her Victorian counterparts are wildly mistaken to pursue self-confidence and inner peace through a dreamy, sexual relationship with a man. 

Though the modern woman has many external advantages over the Victorian woman, I feel that this fact alone gives modern readers a skewed perception of a woman like Edna Pontellier; assuming that we are incapable of understanding how truly oppressed women were in the early 20th century, 'Edna sympathizers' tend to argue that Victorian society left Edna with no choice but to cooperate, or resign completely--through suicide.

I feel that this argument reduces a woman's entire existence to nothing more than her role in society.  Edna, Chopin's lazy, uninteresting heroine in The Awakening, plays the worst kind of woman: a sad, inconsolable damsel in distress. 

Lackluster Laments

Within the first few pages, a fact about Edna Pontellier becomes very clear: she is in great emotional pain. She feels a great and “indescribable oppression, which seem[s] to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, fill[ing] her whole being with a vague anguish” (8); such descriptions resemble the conditions of anxiety and depression.  Understandably, Edna would have trouble describing and recognizing her feelings in a pretentious Victorian world, and readers are inclined to feel sympathy for her.

However, as the story progresses, less attention is given to these complicated feelings Edna experiences, and the descriptions of Edna’s pain never breach vague, flowery language: 

“[it] was like a shadow, like a mist passing over her soul’s summer day” (8).  

Readers are never provided a firm, solid clue as to a potential source for Edna's Pain, primarily because Edna never bothers to explore this herself. As the empty, whimsical plot of Edna's life unfolds, the descriptions of her pain occur only as a reason (excuse) for her recklessness.  Edna Pontellier takes no action whatsoever to try to improve or even understand her situation.  Instead, she allows her emotions to dictate every decision she makes, as though her mind is no match for this shadowy mist of sadness in her soul.

What a brave gal.

Reckless abandonment...in an orderly fashion

Once Edna faces the fact that she is hopelessly depressed, she resigns to this fact and completely gives up on trying to be a reasonable person.  She becomes impulsive and extremely selfish. With money that she has not earned herself, her husband's money, money that she greatly enjoys (8), Edna purchases a new home for herself “[w]ithout even waiting for an answer from her husband regarding his opinion or wishes in the matter” (80).  As a celebration for her success in purchasing for herself such a gift, she decides to throw herself a lavish party for the occasion: “I’ll let Leonce pay the bills.  I wonder what he’ll say when he sees the bills.” (81)

Her husband is actually more patient and lenient than one would expect of an oppressive Victorian man. The only request he asks of Edna: “don’t let the family go to the devil.” (54).  Edna, who would simply prefer not to deal with such a responsibility, is very brilliant and capable when she sets her mind to it; her children are absent from her life for a majority of the book, as she has dumped them off to stay with relatives.  Edna reveals time and time again that she is exceptionally capable of acquiring things that she wants as well as avoiding what she does not want.  She has the capacity to understand her feelings, as she reveals:

“One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for candidly, I don’t know…I must think about it.” (79)

Edna is able to recognize and understand herself as a human being, but she simply prefers not to do so.  She opts out.

Mistaken for awakened

Edna’s detachment from reality causes her to fail not only as a woman, but as a human being.  She tosses herself to the side as an individual and trades herself in for some sort of Princess—she happily disposes of her time on what amounts to be nothing.  In place of what could be a phenomenally huge conquest for a human being, and certainly an empowering experience for a troubled Victorian housewife, Edna instead adapts absolute indifference as a way of life—indifference towards everyone around her, aside from her distant fantasy of Robert.  The book completely places focus on the most trivial ins and outs of Edna’s new uninhibited lifestyle, with a few descriptions of her apparent anxiety/depression strategically sprinkled here and there to somewhat justify her behavior, and yet it recurs in spite of her fruitless antics as though its attempting to urge the reader to egg her on for more outlandish stunts.


When considering the means by which Edna seeks to alleviate her troubled emotions, one cannot help but realize that she is destined to fail.  The reader endearingly turns each page, however, hoping for that awakening to take place within Edna; readers want to see Edna triumph.  One finishes the story only to find that, though the entire story were some sort of sick joke, Edna was in fact ‘awakened’ within the first ten pages--her discovery of this 'vague anguish' was her awakening.  Every frivolous kiss, every impulse, every whim, is a conscious indulgence.  Robert awakens within Edna the realization that she feels a heavy emotional burden; after she faces this, she willingly abandons herself to fate and her warped idea of freedom.

A dainty death

Ultimately, The Awakening offers no tangible evidence that attests to Edna being a considerate person, which ultimately might have established her in some way as sympathetic, admirable, and perhaps some sort of heroine.  This book offers no shadow of an explanation for Edna’s behavior, some idea for the source of her pain, or her final decision to end her life.  I suppose it is up to the reader to see the silver lining of her heart of gold?

No.  Her suicide is the ultimate rebellion against the world because she couldn't get her way.

Keep in mind, this is somebody's mother--two young boys, in fact.  Does that make it alright that she abandoned young men, because they too will grow up to be oppressive?  Is that not sexist, and oppressive as well to assume that a man is incapable of learning of the patriarchal pressure women experience?  Or was Edna's suicide her "gift" of enlightenment to her boys?  All these arguments you could make on her behalf, to which I'd imagine she'd appreciate if she were around to hear them.  But the fact is, her suicidal gesture was the ultimate dismissal of all that women have worked to prove--that we are equal. 

I am not oblivious to the possibility that given the time which it was written, perhaps Edna’s whimsical resignation from the confines of Victorian aristocracy served as a great and inspiring fantasy among Chopin’s female audience.  Perhaps the gaping holes in the development of one of the most self-indulgent characters in literature were filled in by Victorian readers, who could have very quickly formed an intimate bond with Edna’s character.  Over a century stands between the modern reader and Edna Pontellier, and not even the most thorough history book can retrieve the lingering feelings shared among the people of a different era.  As far as the evidence I have as a reader, Edna Pontellier makes her thoughtless choices for one reason: she felt like it.

Pontellier's ghost

Your ghost saunters into our classroom, laced up 

to the neck in Victorian grace. You take your seat 

in the back, wearing an air of despair that fills the room

like some floral perfume,

and you watch with wide eyes as thoughtful students lament

that you had no choice; you, a pretty prisoner, cooped up in her Creole mansion,

suffocated by her husband, trapped in her dress--

don't they see you back there?

Basking in your sorrowful scent?

-Lucy Biebel

Thank you, and to all the little people...

"Pontellier's Ghost" by Lucy Biebel


"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin