Finally Awake

The last page of The Awakening by Kate Chopin is interesting and meaningful, an excellent conclusion to an extremely thought-provoking novel. At the end, Edna is naked and swimming into the ocean all alone. We don't know anything of Robert or her family, what she told them or how she got back to Grand Isle, but there she is swimming naked in the Gulf. On the last page she is just starting to feel exhaustion.
She is thinking of the note that Robert left for her. Her tone is desperate and frustrated as she thinks of him, et it drifts into peace as she drifts further into the ocean. She realizes now that he never had, and never could have, understand what she wants and needs. Just within her brief conversation with Doctor Mandelet Edna realized that he was thinking along the same lines as her, that to talk to him could have saved this situation. A talk with someone who understood her feelings and point of view could have prevented this. Yet Edna does not seem to show remorse for not speaking with the doctor. She seems at peace with herself, knowing that her infatuation with Robert would have only ended in heartbreak. They never would have really worked out. She appears to know this, and now that the "shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone" she has no way to turn back anyways (214). Edna rests confidently with her decisions.
When she looks ahead of her, "into the distance," Edna feels the terror that she felt during her first solo swim bubble up within her (214). Its as if she looks ahead into the wide ocean, and she looks ahead into her future. The latter is looking much shorter than the former, and this gives her a start. The terror of death that anyone would feel when looking straight into the face of it. And then her terror "sank again" and she was lost from the present (214).
Her mind goes back to a simpler place, where she was safe from men and marriage and water. It creates images of sound, it sounds like a summer with "the hum of bees" and "the barking of a dog" (214). Though what really makes it look like summer to me was "the musky odor of pinks" that filled the air (214). Summer is flowers and colours and relaxing sounds, exactly what Edna experiences in her last moments. The scene which she pictures as she dies is very vague and open to interpretation, yet I feel like it is a scene from Edna's childhood where she was with her family and everything was safe. She did not have to worry about everything that would come to affect her in the future. I believe she went back to being a little girl as she died, as she goes back to the ocean and to the beginning of where these ideas began.
As Edna goes back to the place where it all began in oder to end her life, one wonders if this is in an attempt to take it all back. Once these ideas entered her life she lost so many relationships with the people around her, she hurt her family and didn't even go to her sister's wedding. And in the end she could never be with the one she truly loved anyways. Going back to die in the gulf at Grand Isle could be an attempt to kill the ideas along with herself, as she does not reach the freedom of love with Robert as she had first wanted.
Yet then thinking back on what kind of person Edna Pontellier is, one must disregard that theory. Over the course of the novel, the year that she takes to change her life, Edna becomes fearless and confident in herself. She takes every action she wants to without a blink in the direction of the people it may hurt. She acted, thought and felt any which way she wanted to. I don't think she would have lost this quality of self respect and interest at the very end. Especially because it was society and the people around her keeping her from a life of love with Robert, I know she wouldn't think twice about hurting them in order to get what she wanted for herself. Then one must conclude that Edna returns to Grand Isle to die for reasons other than killing the ideas which set her free. This is the place where she truly fell in love, where she learned that she might become independent and where she discovered that she actually had the strength in her to work for this dream of freedom. Edna must have gone back to the gulf at Grand Isle to truly feel the freedom that she had been working towards. There, alone in the ocean, not restricted by a family, a society, or even a swimsuit, she was free to do whatever she liked with no judgement because there was no one to see her. She was just alone with the light that had taught her freedom and the sea which had shown her it was possible. Feeling more at home in the ocean than anywhere else, Edna decides to spend her last moments there and at peace with the things she has discovered about herself and the decisions she has made in order to make those discoveries.