Just Die Already!: A commentary on The Awakening and the merits of its "heroine"

[readingredhead]

Edna from The Awakening annoys me because she never commits to anything.

All of what she does is resopnse to a passing whim, and this makes me see her as a generally weak character. Compared to Nora of Ibsen's A Doll's House, Edna Pontellier can be seen as irresolute and flirtatious. While she does rebel agaisnt the social order within which she lives, there is no greater purpose for what she does. The only thing that leads Edna to commit acts such as her courtship of various men and her eventual death appears to be her "sudden urge" to do so. Possibly the only thing she contemplated before attempting was her own death!

Edna cannot make her own choices. She cannot choose between maintaining her marital fidelity and being with a man she feels strong emotion for. During the periods of time where she discards her husband, she cannot even decide upon who else it is she loves, and both Robert Lebrun and Alcee Arobin compete for this position. There are times when she feels she loves both of them at once! To put it into modern vernacular, Edna is just plain wishy-washy.

Nora, on the other hand, I have great respect for. Like Edna, she realizes that she does not love her husband. However, unlike Edna, who seems to never really care much for Leonce Pontellier, Nora truly loves Torvald until the moment when he failed to say he would have taken the blame for her forgery, had it come down to that. Edna disgusts me for the fact that she knew when she married her husband that she would never love him, but more than that, she disgusts me because once her thoughts crystallize and she decides to take action against her perceived oppression, she cannot decide upon what to do. She paints, she talks with other men, she listens to Madame Reisz's passionate music, she begins a life of her own in a house of her own, but none of this appears to do her any good. In the end, killing herself is the most decisive action Edna Pontellier ever takes.

(And, leaving insane-scholarly-writer mode, it bugs me a lot that Edna feels absolutely no remorse for her infidelity. I don't know why that bugs me so much, but it does. I think it's because I'm an idealist and I want everyone to just marry their true love and never have to divorce or have affairs or any of that stuff. Yeah. But that's my final note on this, I promise.)

Well, those were are few things I felt were necessary to say. There was something not right about The Awakening, to me, but now I have fully explored that and come to the conclusion that it's only because when Edna and Nora are compared, Edna isn't someone I could be proud of, and Nora is.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I never knew how much sex and feminism lurked around every literary corner until that class. ;)

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