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The Awakening was published in 1899 and is regarded as Chopin\'s most controversial and scandalous work. The novel deals with the emotional, mental and sexual awakening of Edna Pontellier, the wife of a Creole businessman, and mother of two sons. In the course of the story she breaks through social conventions, questions the role of women in society and neglects restrictions and limitations laid upon her as a woman. Edna\'s struggle for individualism and selfhood results in her suicide, as there is \'little possibility for self-determination for women in a society where legal and economic practice and social custom prohibit female autonomy\' (Martin, 17). Whereas the suffrage-movement, spawned by the Civil War, was growing in some parts of the U.S., Louisiana and most Southern States openly expressed their antagonism toward female emancipation, as an excerpt from a publication by Wilbur Fisk Tillet from 1891 shows:
So far as this movement may have any tendency to take woman out of her true place in the home, to give her man\'s work to do and to develop masculine qualities in her, it finds no sympathy in the South. The Southern woman loves the retirement of home, and shrinks from everything that would bring her into the public gaze. (Tillet, 16)
Edna is quite the opposite of a woman who finds true fulfillment in the role of a loving wife and mother. Her liberation from social conventions, suppression and restrictions in the setting of conservative Southern Catholic society makes her suicide inevitable as there is no other way to break out of the social boundaries that were present in almost every domain of life.
Edna\'s suicide can be seen as her ultimate awakening because she refuses to return to the life of restrictions. She rather sacrifices her own life than her individuality and freedom, because \'nothing less than a transformation of social reality would enable [Edna] to go on living\' (Gilmore, 63). Through suicide she expresses her disapproval of her role as a woman and mother, as a possession of her husband and her children. This is reflected by her thoughts shortly before she drowns herself:
Her arms and legs were growing tired.
She thought of Léonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought they could possess her, body and soul. (Awakening, 176)
Edna\'s awakening, i.e. her suicide, results from a process of self-realization that the protagonist experiences in the course of her life. It is not a surprising awakening, as the story gradually describes her development in three stages, respectively a sleeping phase, a phase of dreaming, and the final phase of awakening that goes hand in hand with the realization that Edna\'s attempt to be truly free within the present social conventions is futile.
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