Swimming Towards Freedom

In the end of the awakening, Mrs. Pontelier commits suicide. It's ironic that she does this in the place where she was first awakened because this is where she saw everything with new eyes and now, she is shutting them forever. Her awakening brought her to this decision because she was able to open her eyes to the reality of the society she lived in.

Mrs. Pontelier goes back to Grand Isle and there she decides to go for a swim but she prematurely knew this would be her last swim. She begins by describing in page 213 how "the sea is sensuous, enclosing the body in its soft close embrace", and with this we can imply that the fear she had at the beginning of the sea is completely gone. In this case she is not afraid of the unknown and welcomes the sea as an escape of what she does know. The sea is where she first realizes that everything she does know is not letting her live life to the fullest and she embraces the freedom that death will bring her.

Her mind at this moment is not about coming back to the shore, since that is where everything that keeps her trapped is, she is swimming out to escape it. She realizes that while it was expected that her duties to her husband and her children should be her top priority, she doesn't want them to posses her. She feels these duties have possessed her “mind body and soul" and the only way she feels she can complexly escape this is by swimming out far enough to reach a point where she will be untouchable in any of these aspects.

In the last page of the novella, Mrs. Pontelier is already growing tiered of swimming and realizes that no one would have understood her. She recalls Roberts’s letter and she realizes that even though they loved each other he wouldn't understand the woman she had become. That’s why Robert went away and didn’t wait for her. He wanted to stick to what was right in the society Mrs. Pontelier had learned to defy and he wasn’t going to it with her. It's interesting that she thought the doctor might have understood and this is probably because he is the only one that saw she had changed. He seemed to think she might do something like this but her mind was already made up by then and anyway" the shore was far behind her and her strength was gone." By saying this she acknowledges that what is on the shore would have just tried to reel her back into whom she used to be before her awakening and she rather die than go back.

The last paragraph is about Edna returning to a time when she was free. She recalls the memories of her Childhood and the people in itand this seems like the idea that our life flashes before us before we die and we remember the good times. It's interesting that she recalls these things rather than her husband and children. This demonstrates once again that they really are what ties her and holds her back. She pictures her childhood because it was back before she had a husband and children that she felt happy. Instead of describing the drowning of Mrs. Pontelier, Chopin chooses to mix it with her memories to go back to a happier time when Mrs. Pontelier didn't belong to anyone. At the beginning of this paragraph the terror Mrs. Pontelier felt towards the water comes back for one second but it quickly goes away. There is a little bit of fear towards death but it is also what will make Mrs. Pontelier free and freedom is what she decides for herself. This was all her choice and for once she is not expected to consider others in her decision and that is why her death was in a sense imminent from the beginning, it is the last decision a person can make for themselves since we choose to either stay in the shore or swim out and face our fears.