SOURCE: Nelles, William. “Edna Pontellier's Revolt against Nature.” American Literary Realism 32, no. 1 (fall 1999): 43-50.

In the following essay, Nelles argues that Edna's suicide at the conclusion of The Awakening is the result of her realization that she is pregnant.

Virtually every critic (and certainly every classroom teacher) of The Awakening has felt compelled to address the problematic ending of the novel. The ending appears to be ambiguous in the strict sense, leaving the reader with only two opposed and mutually incompatible interpretive options. In Patricia Hopkins Lattin's formulation, “As she swims into deeper water, Edna is herself torn between the two possibilities of triumph and defeat, and the scrupulously objective narrator provides no solution to the ambiguity facing the reader.”¹ Such a fundamental interpretive challenge has, of course, contributed to the narrative's aesthetic (and pedagogical) lure in provoking a range of illuminating symbolic, thematic, and historical explanations of...