Widow’s Bay 109 & 110: a chilling conclusion

One of the recent answers on Jeopardy! was Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. No one got it. Well, I did, but I wasn’t competing. I barely remember reading this book in high school, except that I was deeply moved by it. I do remember the ending, because the main character, distraught, walks straight into the ocean, and now I’m always out here thinking about walking directly into the ocean, too. (What I didn’t understand as a teen—a poor understanding of geography on my part—was that the protagonist walks into the same ‘ocean’ at the end of my own childhood street block, the Gulf of Mexico. So as a teen I would’ve been flinging myself into the same sea from a slightly different vantage, from a slightly different arc of the shore’s curve.) Anyway, I bring it up because this book’s ending is downright Lovecraftian. Its protagonist Edna, fully faced with the dread of her predicament—the snaking tendrils of Victorian societal expectations that keep her trapped where she is—gets it, understands…