I can’t believe she kills herself. I seriously can’t believe it. When I compare Edna’s situation to Anna’s, Anna’s is by far the worst: her child has been taken from her, she has left her husband, Society holds her in contempt. Edna has a supportive husband, loving children, and even friends like Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz. The only common denominator in their cases is that they lose love—Edna from Robert and Anna (she thinks) from Vronsky.
This makes me wonder about women. Do women get so attached to love that if it is lost they kill themselves? Like I said in class, maybe women instinctively want to kill themselves, but when they think about it they realise they don’t want to. Anna, for certain, would not have killed herself if she had thought it through. Edna is the same. She has so much to live for: she can watch her children grow old, see her grandchildren, travel the world, study painting in Paris, read books and become intellectual etc. This leads me to the conclusion that she is not thinking (even though I know I would be thinking) when she swims out to the sea. It seems to me she’s not thinking long before that, when Robert comes to visit her. I was deeply confused by Edna’s choice to go visit Madame Ratignolle when she and Robert finally get together. When asked about her decision by Dr Madelet, she mostly says “oh well!”, and even realises she can’t explain her thoughts: “She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts” (105). It seems that as soon as she kisses Robert her mind and body turn on auto-pilot. She has planned to go see Madame Ratignolle, so she goes. She comes back with the plan of seeing Robert, but he isn’t there, so the auto-pilot is temporarily interrupted. When it comes back on the circuits in the brain are fried, sending the body on a crash course to Grand Isle and subsequently to the depths of the ocean. This is not normal, so she must either actually have a mental breakdown or she’s just spoiled. I’m inclined towards the spoiled option. She even says, “But I don’t want anything but my own way” (105), showing us that she’s self-indulgent and naive, not realising that her problems are insignificant compared with others’.
I don’t have any connection with this novel. Before Edna’s suicide it was boring and pointless. I found the writing unimaginative, overusing the word “delicious” to a disturbing extent, and using too simple sentences like “Mr. Pontellier wore eyeglasses”. There are many simpler sentences—even entire paragraphs—, especially when describing characters, that completely blew my mind but I can no longer find. (Shun Yang: Hey! That rhymes!) She uses the word “is” too much, and her adjectives always repeat themselves, making me unimpressed with her writing ability, especially in comparison with Hardy or Tolstoy. Moreover, this novel doesn’t raise any profound questions for me. All of the potential questions like “how does one’s society affect one’s actions?” or . . . no that’s it . . . are overshadowed by Edna’s inexcusably self-centered and useless suicide. That one question is raised by nearly all the books we read anyways, so The Awakening is therefore a complete waste of paper. If The Awakening and To the Lighthouse got into a Worst Book in the IB Curriculum competition, To the Lighthouse would still win. But the contest became more interesting with the entrance of The Awakening.
1. “Anna’s is by far the worst” —> Anna’s is by far worse. 2. “Like I said in class” —> As I said in class. 3. It’s always wiser to write as if the author of the work you are criticizing were in the room. Less fun, perhaps, but wiser. 4. Although you found the story ‘boring and pointless’, clearly others have had a much more positive response. The questions, in such a case, should be ‘What are they seeing that I’m missing?’ and ‘What does my response to this story tell me about myself?’