There Is No Beauty in the Breakdown

There is No Beauty in the Breakdown

Suicide has been defined as “the act of self-destruction by a person sound in mind and capable of measuring his (or her) moral responsibility" (Webster 1705). Determining one’s moral responsibility is what all of humanity struggles with and strives to achieve. Many forces act toward the suppression of this self-discovery, causing a breakdown and ultimately a complete collapse of conventional conceptions of the self. So then the question presented becomes whether or not suicide is an act of tragic affirmation or pathetic defeat. Which argument is more strongly supported by evidence found in Kate Chopin’s late 19th century novella The Awakening? Most analyses of the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, explain the newly emerged awareness and struggle against the societal forces that repress her. However, they ignore the weaknesses in Edna that prevented her from achieving the personal autonomy that she glimpsed during her periods of “awakening”. Kate Chopin chooses to have Edna take a “final swim” as evidence of her absolute defeat as an insightful study of the limitations that prevent any woman from achieving the ultimate goal of self-actualization. Simply put, Edna’s awakening leads to her suicide. Newly aware of the meanings her life could take on, the awakened part of herself presents Edna with a command to take action. When Edna is unable to rationalize her old and new selves, she surrenders her life to the sea as an escape from domestic compliance and solitary freedom.

Edna did not experience her awakening at Grand Isle, but instead a “re-awakening” of childlike passion which allowed for “impulsive,” “aimless,” and “unguided” decisions (Chopin 38). Although Edna believes her awakening took place at Grand Isle that night on the porch, this is actually a false awakening. Edna’s first problem stems from this event, the mislabeling of her awakening. Her true awakening in fact occurs shortly before her suicide, when she “grew faint” after returning home to find Robert gone (106). When all seems to be lost with Robert’s going away, Edna has nowhere to turn but inward. It is at this precise moment she discovers her failure, her lack of true individuality. Her feelings of individuality, her feelings of solitude, stem from her inability to reconcile her inner and outer selves. Her outer self is that which she displays to society, the acceptable mother-woman, conventional in every way. After her initial awakening (the false awakening), she sheds off the world and its effects on her in its entirety. However, she is unable to define a world into which she is able to enter. This leads ultimately to Edna’s realization that she does not belong in either of the extremes displayed in the work; the expected mother-woman with no individuality whatsoever or the social outcast with too much individuality. Edna begins to realize that “there was no one thing in the world she desired” (198). Coming to this understanding is jarring to Edna’s perception of the world as she has known it all her life because there is nowhere to find affirmation of self. Rushing forward in the chapters leading up to her realization that there is no one and nowhere to turn to, Edna ends up in limbo. Incapable of establishing a place for herself in the world, Edna seeks the only solace she can find: the freedom of sexuality she feels with men.

The first aspect of Edna’s life that she discards is her emotional attachments to the people in her life, namely her husband and children. This release of connections gives way to Edna’s subsequent “experimentation” with other members of the opposite sex. Her newly awakened passionate and ruthless self believes that it can be fulfilled with the pursuit of alternate relationships. However, after a while, Edna recognizes that these new relationships mean nothing, and are completely unfulfilling. She realizes that “‘Today it is Arobin; tomorrow it will be someone else. It makes no difference to me, it doesn't matter about Leonce Pontellier...’” (188). She says as she realizes “There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone” (189). Leonce Pontellier, Robert Lebrun, and Alcee Arobin are all objects of Edna’s apparent affection. This affection later comes to be seen not as affection at all, but as a more animalistic attachment, as seen in her relationship and eventual affair with Alcee Arobin. Each man seems to satisfy a part of Edna: her husband, Leonce, represents Edna’s self before her awakening. Mr. Pontellier is the classic gentleman of the era, a good husband and father, very structured and very precise. He does not satisfy Edna after she awakens to the world around