Some Ways of Reading the Strange Journey of Edna Pontellier

Please note that these are highly condensed and schematized. I attached names to some of these if they showed up in your journals, but I've encountered some of these ideas elsewhere as well, and sometimes I extrapolated or restated things from your journals in ways you may or may not accept. Also, I left out parts of your journal and I offer them merely as discussion starters--feel free to embroider, qualify, or correct.

1. Feminist (triumph): she realizes her true condition in the world. She kills herself because she fears going back to sleep. (Justyna)

2. Feminist triumph, B. She's a brave searcher for truth and authentic love who rejects all the false roles and conventions society has tried to impose on her. (Leslie)

3. Feminist (disaster): she realizes her true condition, but responds only with flighty and irrational search for meaning in relationships with men who are unworthy of her. (Leah)

4. Moral: She's a coward, retreats like a child from confronting the real world rather than being brave as Mlle. Reisz warns her is necessary. (Eric)

5. Moral, B: She violates all the taboos, so she gets more or less what she deserves.

6. Moral, C: overwhelming egotism/rampant selfishness: "I don't want anything but my own way," 184.

7. Cultural/sociological: Creole/Victorian society has no place for liberated woman, she has no real options but suicide, retreat to conformity, or disaster.

8. Mystical: the end as "entrance to yet another world of happiness?" (Magda)

9. Psychological: failure to achieve "adjustment." "Get over it!"

10. Psychological, B: untreated bipolar disorder/depression/melancholia ("there was no one thing in the world that she desired," (188). Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: "The depressed person has the impression of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good, of something unrepresentable, that perhaps only devouring might represent, or an invocation might point out, but no word could signify" (13). "The meaning of melancholia? Merely an abyssal suffering that does not succeed in signifying itself and, having lost meaning, loses life" (189).

11. Psychological, C: oral fixation. (Note her dream of "possession of the loved one," 185)

12. Formalist: the plot requires disaster if it's not to become stupid and conventional romance novel.

13. Semiotic: Edna has no language for her condition, thus no way to truly understand it, thus no way to deal with it.

14. Aesthetic: Suicide as failure of imagination, inability to envision new way of being in the world.