The Seductive Language of Death

Chopin’s The Awakening is rich in material. Each page is impregnated with meaning. At times, the writing has a wistful, haunting, existential quality to it. The novel is beautifully conceived and well executed. This is exemplified in the novel’s final pages depicting Edna Pontellier’s last moments of existence:

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water. (115)

Rather than have her life defined for her by others or by societal convention, Pontellier decides to end her life by drowning: “How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! How delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (115).  The Gulf is simultaneously a womb for birth and spiritual awakening, but it is also a repository for souls. It is the site for the completion of Pontellier’s metamorphosis.

As the novel concludes, the mood becomes highly existential. The Gulf and death is personified into a lover, an intense sensual experience that describes an awakening of higher consciousness. Chopin describes Pontellier’s entrance into the beckoning water:

The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. (115)

Chopin’s imagery is both masterful and evocative. Was she thinking of her literary career when she wrote the closing pages of her novel? Was Chopin the metaphorical bird with the broken wing descending into the abyss? Was it her who stood naked under the burning sun? Is death a metaphor for the ultimate awakening? Dr. Hanrahan has pointed out that Chopin was not canonized until the radical 1960s. She might easily have been lost in the abyss because of her perceived literary transgressions.