“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin: Edna’s “old terror,” hearing voices, and the possibility she committed suicide due to multiple personality disorder

“the old terror”

In the novel’s last paragraph, as Edna Pontellier is committing suicide, “…the old terror flamed up for an instant…Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s…”

What was “the old terror”? Why are her father and older sister present, but not her mother or her younger sister, Janet (whose wedding Edna had refused to attend)?

Could it have anything to do with the fact, mentioned back in chapter VII, that her mother died when the girls were quite young?

Was “the old terror” Edna’s feeling of being unloved and abandoned as a motherless child?

I don’t know what “the old terror” was, but I do know that Edna heard voices, as noted in the novel’s last paragraph (see above) and as follows.

Hearing Voices

“She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope” (chapter XVII, p. 50). 

“Edna was sobbing, just as she had wept one midnight at Grand Isle when strange, new voices awoke in her” (chapter XXI, p. 62).

Were these only metaphorical voices? I wouldn’t assume so, unless her suicide was metaphorical.

And since I don’t think that Edna had schizophrenia, I think her voices were more likely the voices of alternate personalities, some of which “jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope” (see above).

Multiple Personality

Since Edna is not described as having overt switching of personalities or obvious memory gaps (the two cardinal features of multiple personality), I cannot make a definite diagnosis in her case. Auditory hallucinations that are not due to a psychosis like schizophrenia are suggestive of multiple personality, but not definitive. All I can add to the above are the following suggestive passages:

“She could only realize that she herself—her present self—was in some way different from her other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect” (chapter XIV, p. 39).

“…she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded” (chapter XV, p. 44).

“One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don’t know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can’t convince myself that I am. I must think about it” (chapter XXVII, p. 79).

Suicide

Suicide is a risk in clinical, multiple personality disorder. In past posts, I discussed the suicides of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart as examples. The diagnosis of multiple personality in Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier is much less sure, but worth considering. 

Kate Chopin. The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, Edited by Margo Culley. New York, WW Norton, 1994.