THE END... Freedom

“Perhaps Doctor Mandalet would have understood if she had seen him-but it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone. She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father´s voice and her sister Margarete´s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”

Edna is not the same woman we meet at the beginning of the novella her actions, thoughts and beliefs change throughout a series of events that happen to her. Even though she transforms into a woman that is far more mentally advanced than the rest of her society she manages to reach a place where she is able to make her own decision, love who she wants to love, do make and transform whatever she wants to. She also departs from the skin the label of being the property of her husband and thinks of herself as a new person that lives only for herself.

The last page of the book however send out a message that the only freedom a person can be able to achieve is death. I would say I viewed Edna’s death as a suicide but reading the text twice I realized she is not trying to kill herself. She only seeks to swim far out and meet death which at the end of the day is the only way of escaping the society in which she lives. Death is the only aspect of life (ironic right) that brings you freedom and all the feelings Edna seek to achieve in her life. I think of Edna as a woman that did not fear anything in her life and she saw death as the only way of reaching freedom at a 100%. At the end before she unites with death she feels herself being in a memory somewhere in her childhood which for her is the only aspect of life that in some sense gives her some peace of mind, it’s an escape from the adult world that takes hold of the woman and bring them to be someone’s property. Childhood is the place where you can be free and naïve but society quickly takes that away.

For Edna despite her struggle to find what she wanted in life and create mayhem around her she finally understood that society and the world in which she lived in is not yet ready for her and death despite bringing agony to others it’s her only way of finally managing to achieve what she truly wanted. Despite killing herself she stated before that she would never sacrifice herself for her children stating that her children even if they gave her happiness they would never be the reason to kill herself, her reason once again was to finally achieve what she had always been missing “freedom”. The book The Awakening in some way seeks to awaken the people that read it. I think it seeks to achieve some sort of impact on the reader to awaken him of make him find something that awakens him, for Edna her awakening was death.