Justification of Edna Pontellier's Suicide in the Awakening

Childhood trauma has been found to have lasting psychological effects on an individual well into their adulthood. Childhood trauma can result from parental neglect. Neglect can come in emotional or physical form. Those affected by emotional neglect often wonder about their self worth and value. As a child matures, their brain develops to the child’s environment. The main character, Edna Pontellier, of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening is an example of childhood trauma presenting itself in adulthood according to Marina Roscher. As a child Edna was starved of love which led to the damage of her mental health, then later to her immaturity and inability to create emotional bridges and eventually her suicide.

Roscher interprets Edna’s suicide from a Jungian point of view. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, believed in the “complex” and founded analytical psychology and advanced the idea of introvert and extrovert personalities and the power of the unconscious (Carl Jung Biography). Jung believed that the psyche was a self regulating system that seeks to maintain balance while continuing to strive for growth. He called this process individuation. Individuation is the journey that the human psyche takes to become conscious of himself as a unique human being, but unique only in the same sense that we all are, not more or less so than others (Journal Psyche). As a child Edna was starved of love from her father. His neglect led to the damage of her psyche. When a child is not taught how to love and empathize, it creates a barrier in their adult life because they are unable to reciprocate feelings that they were never taught. “She behaves the way that she does because her childhood prevented any emotional connection” (Wyatt). The damage caused from an emotionally negligent father caused Edna to be unable to make emotional connections with her husband and her children. “She grew fond of her husband, realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection, thereby threatening its dissolution” (Chopin 63). Although Leonce buys Edna expensive gifts, he does not give her the love and affection that she desires which results with her relationship with Leonce to be much like her relationship with her father. Edna does have some sort of affection toward Leonce but it is not the passionate love that one would expect in a romantic relationship; it is more like affection felt toward a family member or a friend. When Edna begins spending a lot of time with Robert, Leonce pays no attention to it. When Leonce goes away on business trips, he gives Edna no love to hang onto so that further steers her away from him. Edna and Leonce have two children together. Edna feels as if her children are a burden to her. “She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them” (Chopin 63). Edna became a passive mother because her father never taught her how to feel those emotions that accompanied parenthood. Edna’s love for her children is not motherly love; it is an instinctual love that comes naturally with offspring. If it were motherly love, Edna would love her children at all times, but she finds herself forgetting about them. There were also moments where Edna’s emotions had built up to the point where she had no idea what to do. “It was only one phase of the multitudinous emotions which had assailed her. There was with her an overwhelming feeling of irresponsibility. There was the shock of the unexpected and the unaccustomed” (Chopin 139). Edna was not used to feeling so many emotions at once and she was unable to express those emotions. Her damaged psyche becomes more apparent during times where emotions are necessary.

Neal Wyatt quotes Roscher with “She acted on impulse rather than forethought. The dreamlike maze in which her thinking was trapped only here and there evolved into patterns” (Roscher 291).