Suicide In Chopin's The Awakening

As a result, Edna’s suicide serves as the conclusion to these previous failures to perform the artistry defined by Chopin, and, in this regard, serves as the final descent into the vanity of her desiring of desire in itself. When she enters the ocean, Edna thought of “the blue-grass meadow that she traversed when a little child, believing it had no beginning and no end” (Chopin 176). In this regard, Edna references the indirection of her desire, that has no beginning nor an end, and relates this description of her desire to the ocean itself. Edna has been carried into this suicide by her flawed desiring of desire itself to such a point that she has been completely overtaken by this misplaced desire. In this way, in addition to her solitude

Since Wharton’s conception of art has an element of chance, in that the spectator may not be manipulated/convinced by the artist’s artifice and, therefore, would not affirm/abet the artist’s desire/cause (i.e. the artist’s individual self), Lily’s artifice must be desirable so that she may further her own cause. In this regard, Bertha Dorset’s sullying Lily’s reputation by insinuating that Lily attempted to be romantically involved with Mr. Dorset combined with both Lily’s monetary debt to Gus Trenor (in place of her refusal of his desire of an erotic payment) and with Lily being broke resulting from Mrs. Peniston’s devaluing the amount Lily would receive from her will all work together to completely devastate Lily’s reputation (and, in turn, the effectiveness of her artifice) by the end of this novel (NEED QUOTES). Furthermore, since Lily’s mother had instilled the belief that she should desire only to become a part of affluent society and that she could do so by the means of constructing an artifice based primarily on her natural beauty, when Lily’s artifice has been completely destroyed by her various debts, Lily declares that these “inherited tendencies [from her mother’s molding of her]...combined with early training [to] make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from a rock” (Wharton 293). In this regard, Lily’s identity was her artifice (or, perhaps, her artifice veiled no actual identity for which it wished to maintain and to further), and, therefore, she has no sense of self on which she could rely after her artifice had been