SOURCE: Giorcelli, Cristina. “Edna's Wisdom: A Transitional and Numinous Merging.” In New Essays on The Awakening, edited by Wendy Martin, pp. 109-48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Giorcelli argues the Chopin's ambiguities in The Awakening support both her own and her protagonist's “cyclical view of existence.”

The human being who has a soul does not obey anyone but the universe,”¹ wrote the French poet Gabriel Germain. Readers of Kate Chopin's The Awakening keep asking themselves whether the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, abandoning herself to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the book, obeys the universe and therefore the needs of her soul; or whether, “idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided”—as she has lived for twenty-eight years—she simply lets herself be carried into the unknown “rapt in oblivious forgetfulness.” The question of whether Chopin intends Edna's disappearance to be regarded as...