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From its earliest publication, Kate Chopin's The Awakening has provoked controversy, but the nature of these discussions has changed dramatically over the course of the century, along with the ideological concerns that have driven them. In retrospect the early attacks on the book seem blessedly simple, a matter of moral condemnation of its main character that was supposed to represent important American values (Toth 1990, 338-44). Edna Pontellier's adulterous behavior was clearly reprehensible and her offstage suicide an emphatic piece of narrative punctuation, a moral period to the sentence which ends her life. These attacks were also harsh enough to effectively end Chopin's career as a writer and, incidentally, end serious discussion of the book for half a century. More recent readings frequently approve of the novel for its artistry while condemning Edna's "romantic yearning" as a character flaw which contributes to her death. Moral condemnation has been replaced by a gentler sense of correcting the moody and the muddle-headed. Many of these interpretations come out of what Suzanne Wolkenfeld calls "the feminist fatalism of presenting Edna as the victim of an oppressive society" (1976, 221), and others, more positively, see her as "a solitary, defiant soul who stands out against the limitations that both nature and society place upon her, and who accepts in the final analysis a defeat that involves no surrender" (Binge 1976, 206).
In these critical discussions the one area of substantial agreement seems to be about what the text does not say, which is that Edna commits suicide. I hope to show, with the help of some ideas from the Russian theoretician and critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, that these readings are related in a rather patchwork manner to various official or unofficial ideologies, and that other readings are possible.
In fact, the novel ends with Edna swimming in the gulf waters off of Grand Isle and closes with this enigmatic paragraph:
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 Margaret'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,...