I devoured The Awakening that spring, and returned to it that summer after I ended my relationship with Chris. I also wanted something I could not name. I imagined her carrying around the same dull ache that thrummed in her solar plexus, pulsing with the want of something unnamed. I was certain Edna, too, had swallowed against that recurring hot lump of rage and sadness, her throat tender from the effort. Besides, drowning was a fear of mine, the remnants of myriad small childhood traumas collected at swim lessons and neighborhood pools.
![the awakening book the awakening book](http://www.jackcavanaugh.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Storm-large1.jpg)
How can I explain my connection to this character? I was not suicidal. In the end, Edna cannot bear the burden of being someone she is not she sheds her clothes and, in the middle of the night, walks into the ocean and drowns.
![the awakening book the awakening book](https://www.getabstract.com/summary-img/32516-JUDSJVPK.jpg)
She wants more of her own life: time spent away from her family, who leave her depleted, and more time with Robert, with friends, with art - the things that restore her, with people who make her feel truly seen. Outbursts become her mode of communicating she stops caring that her husband finds her petulant. She cannot bear the confines of her life an instant longer for fear of suffocation. Her transformation - slow as a summer in the deep south commands - is one I recognized, and latched on I had found my new anchor.Įdna’s restlessness is a bedsheet to be kicked off in the middle of an oppressive August night. It’s not until Edna begins spending time with young Robert Lebrun, whose mother owns a hotel on the island, that the fissures in her happiness begin to surface. At first introduction, Edna Pontellier lives an idyllic existence: married to wealthy businessman, Léonce, and the mother of two sons - whom she loves but has little interest in mothering - Edna summers on Grand Isle with a group of friends while her husband commutes from New Orleans on the weekends. Reading The Awakening was a salve the slow pace of Grande Isle and its summer inhabitants served as an escape from my gangrenous relationship, deadlines, and homework assignments. His answer, always the same, landed like a closed fist to my sternum. He would look at me, dimples indenting his cheeks, and say, “Because you’re beautiful.” In stolen quiet moments, I would ask him why he loved me, my throat tightening around the question, loathing myself for the unadorned need that it implied. When we weren’t discussing where to meet up or how our mutual friends were faring, our conversations often slid into silence. I couldn’t untether myself from the anchor I had deemed him to be, unmoored as I was in my own college experience. Or at least, he was swept up, and I was treading water behind him. Though Chris and I had been friends for years before we started dating, we now found ourselves swept up in the excesses of college life: freedom, time, partying. Time together lately meant time with his roommates and other friends, which meant drinking. My boyfriend of two years was attending a private university half an hour away and had taken so well to its culture that his friends half-jokingly called him “the mayor.” Chris and I had “survived” our freshman year - as some magazine articles I had read called it - with our relationship intact, though I wasn’t completely sure what harrowing experiences we could have encountered that would constitute a “survival.” Increasingly, I wasn’t completely sure the relationship we shared was much of a relationship. Now, I found myself an English major at a school I didn’t love, part of a student body to whom I felt no particular allegiance.
![the awakening book the awakening book](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/b33c12c1-34d7-4d31-83e1-10cb74b7a69f.e55e2da7d94084ce34c9524b2859c1f9.jpeg)
I had chosen it for its renowned special education program and affordability, but after my freshman year, I knew I wanted to change my major. I was attending college in my home state of Connecticut. The smell of books had comforted me since childhood I felt a visceral pull toward this one. It had cost me less than ten dollars at the student bookstore, but when I folded back the cover, the mustiness of its well-worn pages enveloped me and I held them up to my nose, inhaling the slightly sweet, dank aroma. A stoplight yellow “USED” sticker covered a third of its spine. The book, its cover an anemic green, was fraying at the corners. After weeks of bumbling through my Southern Lit class, chafing against Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (would it have killed the man to use some punctuation?), opening the ear-marked pages of my used copy of The Awakening felt like a homecoming of sorts. It was my second semester of my sophomore year of college when I first encountered Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
![the awakening book the awakening book](https://hachette.imgix.net/books/9780349426365.jpg)
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.