All acts are about making a decision for yourself. Whether it’s a positive or negative act is your decision, and your decision alone. Edna dies giving her life, but not herself. She chose, for the first time, her own Fate. That’s what makes her final act freeing, and not an act of despair. In The Awakening, the sea in particular is a critical factor in Edna’s awakening and death. The sea is full of uncertainty for many, but for Edna, it represents empowerment, opportunities, and freedom from social circumstances. Chopin uses sea imagery to represent Edna’s strength.
Edna’s inability to swim at the beginning of the novel illustrates the contrast between her and the rest of her social circle. All Creoles know how to swim, and she has to be taught how to do the same, just …show more content…
How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!” (VI). Edna’s awakening, a new world for her, was triggered by the sea, a chaotic, merciless, and often unpredictable entity. She was one of the few to be born from it, but also one of the many to die. The vastness of the sea is comparable to the vastness of freedom and independence, something that can be liberating or overwhelming.
Edna’s awakening had many manners of the sea: unpredictable, sweeping, free of responsibility. “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." Swimming is about staying afloat and not getting in over one’s head, something Edna ultimately fails in.
In both Chapter VI and Chapter XXIX, this same quote is repeated about the sea: “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soil to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude.” The water beckons for her to return to it, and in ending her life she forms an eternal bond
Edna’s inability to swim at the beginning of the novel illustrates the contrast between her and the rest of her social circle. All Creoles know how to swim, and she has to be taught how to do the same, just …show more content…
How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!” (VI). Edna’s awakening, a new world for her, was triggered by the sea, a chaotic, merciless, and often unpredictable entity. She was one of the few to be born from it, but also one of the many to die. The vastness of the sea is comparable to the vastness of freedom and independence, something that can be liberating or overwhelming.
Edna’s awakening had many manners of the sea: unpredictable, sweeping, free of responsibility. “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." Swimming is about staying afloat and not getting in over one’s head, something Edna ultimately fails in.
In both Chapter VI and Chapter XXIX, this same quote is repeated about the sea: “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soil to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude.” The water beckons for her to return to it, and in ending her life she forms an eternal bond