April 14th 2020
“She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.” (Chopin 62)
“But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! (Chopin 17)
“She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility.” (Chopin 42)
I chose these three passages because these three points and oppositions are what both problematize and give cohesion to Chopin’s novel. We are left at the end with the question “Why?”: why did Edna need to kill herself? Why was she driven there?
Could it be that the author wanted to highlight the position of having the ultimate agency over one’s life, even to the point of choosing death and when and how to die? I think that is part of it, although I don’t think it goes deep enough. The answer is in the middle quote. She had shed her layers and was thrown into a world where we start from zero. The moment she accepted Robert’s kiss was the moment that she shed convention and all of the connections that convention holds within not only society, but within herself: all meaning for her had been lost at that point. She had reached “the beginning of things”. Unfortunately, her psyche and I would argue, also, her body were not prepared for this shaking off of ties to the world and society.
The first quote talks off our soul, and Edna’s inability to express her soul through voicelessness. Her voicelessness stifled her agency. Because she was left in silence, and therefore unable to act upon her words, her life became not hers. The end result was that she was being led by “alien hands”. Her soul became utterly disconnected from her life at all. She could not act, she could not speak, she regressed into infancy where all that existed were her basic needs. She regressed so far “into the water” as to become one with it. My theory is that this ending scene is her regression back into the primeval beginning, or metaphorically back into the womb where she would achieve the ultimate sense of safety and free expression.
I do think Chopin is asking us to think hard about what happened to Edna: to consider “why”. Because if we as the readers don’t consider Edna’s why then the only conclusion would be that she killed herself over Robert. We have no proof that she was distraught or overwrought by his leaving her “because he loves her”. What we do know is that it appears that Robert could not stop thinking about her and loving her. It was his own guilt acting against himself that promoted his final letter to her. Could Edna have expected this? Probably she did. It didn’t take much for her to make the choice of walking into the water. Almost like she was already on that trajectory. I think it was her feeling so utterly alone that caused her to continue to follow that path. Alone as an infant in the womb, caressed by the water and shielded from pain. The third quote signifies her relinquishing of agency to fate. It was as if she was saying “Let faith, or the water, take me and decide what it will do with me.” Edna had lost all agency in the end, and she gained all agency in the end. We are left only with that paradox. I don’t think we can make that choice as readers.
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