maybe all Edna really needed was just a swim coach

"One of these days," she said, "I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think -- try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know."

If I had a nickel for everytime I've thought about how much of my identity I don't understand... well I'd probably have like 7 nickels.

I haven't taken as many English classes as I would like to have in the past few years, but this will be the third time I'm reading The Awakening. I'm not complaning though, it's one of my favorite books. And every time I reread it, it gets all the more ambiguous.

When I wrote my first essay on it, I read Edna's death as a suicide, as Chopin's commentary on how constricting society is upon women, so that the only way for Edna to rise above these female expectations is to go to her death. She refuses to lose her identity to her children and husband like Madame Ratignolle has, but isn't brave enough to live outside social conventions as a lonely but self-sufficient artist like Mademoiselle Reisz (talk about foils...).

I wonder if this problem is still applicable today? It seems like women can have it all, can't they? Being 40 and alone, or even 50 and single, doesn't really seem to carry such negative connotations anymore. Especially since the glamourization of characters like Samantha Jones.

I've always wondered if people who are constantly in relationships ever get a chance to develop their individualistic, independent "self". But then I guess reading Freeman's "A New England Nun", lacking a "relational self-identity" is also kind of disturbing. It's definitely not good to be alone forever, either. Is there a healthy balance for oneself, between being alone and being in relationships, and has anyone found that balance yet? And what do you do once you're married and you're permanently in a relationship? And then once you have kids and you're never alone again??

Come to think of it, Edna's dilemma is still applicable today... at least it's applicable for people who have the desire for freedom or a self that's beyond the social identity of "mother" or "wife". And then there are Madame Ratignolle-types that are blessed with never even having this time-wasting bullshit cross their minds, and can live perfectly contently in a little box.

Reading The Awakening for the third time, my professor brought up the possibility that it may not be so clear Edna's death really is a premeditated suicide. And if it was just an accident, isn't that just so much less poetic and heroic for the self-identity enthusiasts out there? That Edna didn't chose to make a statement about her individuality, but instead innocently became a martyr without knowing what she died for? But I wonder what would have happened to her if she didn't drown? Could she have fit back into her babies and minced pies mold? Highly doubtful.

So was it an innocent death or an intended suicide? I guess it depends how optimistically you want to read it, and how much faith you put into the whole wistful-yet-exhilarating idea of giving up your life before you give up your "self".

People say Chopin wrote her novel 40 years too early. But more than a century later, I guess we're still dealing with a similar female-role dilemma, if not universal self-identity dilemma. Chopin ended the story so that drowning is even more tempting than living in a suffocating society... and if that's so, then maybe I'd better get a swim coach too?