Naturalism in Kate Chopin's "The Term Paper

" shall come back as soon as I can; I shall find you here."

One more time, she gives into her biological role. During Adele's labor pains, Edna recalls her own childbirth, an event that offered very different kinds of memories of an awakening than she has now. "Edna began to feel uneasy. She was seized with a vague dread. Her own like experiences seemed far away, unreal, and only half remembered. She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go." As a result,

Edna "began to wish she had not come; her presence was not necessary. She might have invented a pretext for staying away; she might even invent a pretext now for going." However, she stays. "With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture" (108-109).

Because of this internal need and drive for motherhood, Edna's other side -- her desire for freedom from the confines and constraints of society -- is impossible to attain. Her children, despite or because of the love she has for them, stand as a barrier. She tells Dr. Mandelet when he asks about her travels,

Perhaps -- no, I am not going. I'm not going to be forced into doing things. I don't want to go abroad. I want to be let alone. Nobody has any right -- except children, perhaps -- and even then, it seems to me -- or it did seem -- ' She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts, and stopped abruptly.The trouble is,' sighed the Doctor, grasping her meaning intuitively, "that youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.' (110).

Thus, despite Edna's awakening and need to break free, she cannot rectify her two different sides. She cannot go back to her life as just a wife and mother, nor can she completely run away from her present life and forget her children. She remains torn between the responsibility to natural laws and to her personal needs. The only way to escape this dilemma, she believes, is in death. As she swims further and further into the Gulf, "she thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul" (114). She has not been able to overcome the hold which the biology of motherhood and the social codes of marriage have had both on her emotions as well as on the beliefs and actions of others within the life in which she functions. Ironically, it is the sea, a true part of nature, which carries Edna away for the very last time and allows her to disappear forever from her internal conflicts. In the end, according to Chopin, nature wins.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York….....