Throughout Kate Chopin’s The Awakening the issue of — and potential damage from — prescribed gender roles for women is apparent. The main protagonist Edna struggles with the few select roles she is allowed to play as she “awakens.” There were very few roles a woman could play in the 1800s, and by the end of the novel, Edna ends up drowning herself in the Gulf of Mexico.
As she swims, she recalls Robert’s parting letter to her and its miscalculation. “‘Good-by — because I love you.’ He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand.” (156) Robert claims he left her because he loves her and doesn’t want to bring her shame for having an affair. Robert doesn’t understand, though, that he has taken the choice away from Edna entirely; the agency she’d strived to have over her life and her self has been removed, for she may have chosen to leave everything behind for him.
“She looked to the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.” (157) Edna ends up embracing her death as her choice in a world with so few choices for a woman: a socially acceptable, dutiful housewife and mother or an independent social pariah. Edna struggles to try to find an in-between existence, trying to find herself. Through her misadventures, Edna learns the harsh reality: Even in the cultural and artistic hubbub she lives in, there is no place for the person she has become.
So she kills herself.
In a morbid way, by killing herself, Edna has made her stance. She is rejecting all the roles forced upon her by leaving her society in the most literal way. She is calm and resolute in her choice to reject all the roles she has been forced to assume. This is her choice, and in the end, she dies content.