Edna Pontellier's Values In The Awakening

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Many characters of literature show what they value by what they give up. But, when they give up their life, it is something much bigger than themselves that they desire. In the case of Edna Pontellier, from The Awakening, she values complete control over herself and over the image of herself and women, and the only way she can obtain those things is through suicide. Now, for most people this would warrant a second thought and possibly finding different goals, but for Edna, she will give up anything for them and her values will far outlive her. In Edna’s marriage, her husband and family have all the control over her life—where she lives, what she does, who she talks to—and to just walk away from them would have her cast out by society never to live a free life. Edna values more than being controlled by her family or being outcasted by society, and it shows through her final decision in the novel—to walk out into the sea and drown herself. All Edna receives from this while alive is the short lived liberation of having no one on top of her telling her what to do. She is completely alone in the ocean and has all the control over this last act of defiance that will soon lead to her death, and she feels at peace because …show more content…
Of course this is an unfair compromise but Edna is not concerned with this in her final moments. Instead, she is thinking about all the people she knows and how they doubted her. She turns over in her mind ideas of how they will react and how they were so wrong about her when they find out what she did. It is difficult to comprehend the idea of taking one’s own life just to prove people wrong, which is likely not the only thing Edna was thinking about here. Edna values the liberation of all women from the cage of marriage and feels that with a sacrifice such as her own, she will awaken others of her ideas and pass down a legacy of what she values

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