Throughout The Awakening, Edna experiences significant revelations about herself, the people around her, and life. Social expectations have controlled her life thus far; she’s assumed roles belonging to the bland existence imposed upon her. But after meeting Robert at Grand Isle, she begins to have an epiphany: she has a voice; she isn’t a possession of her husband; she should be able to make her own choices and go after what she wants. She’s entitled to a full, unencumbered existence. She realizes the role of wife and mother feels impossibly trapped and that she lacks the instinctive desire of the womb she knows to give up everything for her children. She wants to reign over herself rather than live a deferential, apologetic existence. As she embarks upon the life she really wants, Edna learns that there may be no place for a woman with the boldness to desire, the strength to assert herself, and the spirit to think beyond life as it is.

Months before her final swim, Edna spent the summer at Grand Isle gaining confidence in the water; once she swam out so far she was afraid she could not come back. At the end of the novel when she swims out, she has no intention of coming back. It’s as if she was on the brink of something the last time, and this time she is sure of it. When Edna decides to put the small houses on the corner and moves, she experiences “a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took, relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual” (176). The significance of Edna’s final swim is that she has entirely let go of these obligations; she has rejected them, but she also feels that they have rejected her. Robert believes that the two of them can’t be together–“he did not know; he did not understand” (215), Edna concedes.

Towards the end of the novel, Edna walks home with Doctor Mandelet after witnessing Madame Ratignolle give birth: “With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture” (205). Edna seems to be questioning why women happily go through this kind of pain; why birth is considered so beautiful when all she sees is agony. As she and the Doctor walk home, he realizes how heavily affected she was by the scene. Edna struggles to express her thoughts, as even she is trying to grapple with them. But the Doctor understands her admittance that “I’m not going to be forced into doing things” (207). He says, “Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost” (207). Nature has its own way of doing things, and in some ways, we are at its mercy. The societal expectations for a woman Edna so detests result from the fact of Nature that women give birth. Nature is not to blame; these societal norms are our creations; yet they stem from natural causes, so perhaps Nature is to blame. Edna concurs that it’s better to “wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life” (207). Yet the feeling she is chasing becomes inaccessible: Robert leaves her. Edna cannot, apparently, live in this world on her own terms.

Social, psychological, and natural forces lead to Edna’s final swim. She undergoes an awakening which ultimately turns her on to the unjustness of life. As revelations accumulate in Edna’s mind, she experiences a depression, but her final swim is accompanied by a feeling of peace, finality, and release.