Awakening or Suicide

Awakening or Suicide The Awakening opens in the late 1800s in Grand Isle, a summer holiday resort popular with the wealthy inhabitants of nearby New Orleans. Edna Pontellier is vacationing with her husband Leonce Pontellier, and their two sons at the cottages of Madame Lebrun. Leonce is a kind and loving husband, but is preoccupied with is work. His frequent business related absences ruins his relationship with Edna. “Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely …

…her first moments of emotional, sexual, and intellectual awareness, and, in a final escape, gives herself to the sea. As she swims through the soft, embracing water, she thinks about her freedom from her husband and children, as well as Roberts’s failure to understand her, Doctors Mandelet’s words of wisdom, and Mademoiselle Reisz’s courage. The text leaves open the question of whether the suicide constitutes a cowardly surrender or a liberating triumph.