Essay Analysis: “Surviving Edna: A Reading of the Ending of The Awakening.”

In Robert Treu’s essay discussing Kate Chopin’s famous work, he played with the idea that perhaps Edna did not in fact die at the end of the novel.  Treu spends most of the paper criticizing readers’ general conclusion that Edna has committed suicide even though the book never directly says so.  It is of course reasonable that someone’s train of thought would lead to that end, but it’s much less reasonable to completely dismiss any other possibility.  Treu is not the first critic to have gone with this idea; he quotes the Russian theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin at several times and basically explains that Edna’s actions throughout the book do not really add up to her committing suicide.  The author of the essay also offers that if she did die, than it was less suicide and rather a sort of accident.  One of the main arguments Treu goes with is that The Awakening has built such a (as Bakhtin calls it), “heteroglossia”.  This has to do with the style in which we are not limited to a single perspective but instead Chopin manages to embody a few without necessarily yielding too much to a single idea.  This allows for the prospect of Edna’s survival to become much more believable considering the irregularity.

                Death is a predictable and simple way of closing such a story which Chopin would’ve had no reason to do and the author of this essay does not think she would take such an easy way out.  She certainly proves that she hasn’t done so by leaving out any confirmation in the story such as a funeral scene or something to that effect.  This leads me to imagine what it would be like if in The Great Gatsby, the book had simply ended after the scene where they heard gunshots and discovered a bloody scene at the pool from which they took (the murdered) Gatsby to the house.  In class, I recall there was some slight debate over whether he was really dead or what exactly had taken place (until those who had read ahead solved the issue).  This is the kind of discussion which brings about the idea that authors are no longer in control of their stories. 

When I first read through the article I thought it seemed kind of silly and perhaps the writer wasn’t very convincing.  However, for some reason upon my return to its text I’ve grown much attached to Treu’s message and all the suggestions mentioned in the article.  I don’t quite agree that Edna has survived the ending of the book but I also don’t think Treu necessarily believes that either.  The fact that he is mostly just trying to keep every idea open makes this something I can certainly get behind.  It can be dangerous to make inferences about a story or an author’s intentions. 

Chopin ends the book with a memory of Edna’s past and the vagueness this scene should allow for all possible theories to be considered.  At one point, Robert Treu mentions the painting “Las Meninas” by Velazquez which depicts an artist who is working on a canvas that the viewer can only see the back of.  The artist has paused from his work and is looking directly at the viewer.  This creates the question of whether the artist is painting the people who are in the reflection of a mirror in the background, or the viewer themselves, or perhaps nothing at all.  This open-endedness is very similar to what Kate Chopin created with her novel and is no doubt an important part of literature and its ability to be criticized.

  “The birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author.” (Barthes 1986, 55)

" Las Meninas"