Chapter 39 — Grand Isle; the swim out

Edna takes Beaudelet's lugger to Grand Isle alone. She has done her thinking the night she lay awake on the sofa: "To-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be some one else. It makes no difference to me, it doesn't matter about Léonce Pontellier — but Raoul and Etienne!" She understands now what she meant when she told Adèle she would give up the unessential but never give herself. The children appear before her like antagonists who would drag her into "the soul's slavery for the rest of her days." She knows a way to elude them.

She finds Victor and Mariequita patching a gallery in the sun. Victor is exaggerating her dinner; Mariequita is sullen. Edna asks for fish for supper and says she will go down to the beach for a wash. They warn her the water is cold. She walks down anyway. She finds her old faded bathing suit on its peg, puts it on, walks to the sea. At the water's edge, alone on the empty beach, she casts the suit off. "For the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her... She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known."

The wavelets curl up to her white feet "and coiled like serpents about her ankles." She walks out. She lifts her body into a long, sweeping stroke. The passage from Chapter 6 returns: "The voice of the sea is seductive... inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude." She does not look back. She thinks of the blue-grass meadow she walked through as a child, "believing that it had no beginning and no end." She thinks of Léonce and the children — part of her life but with no right to possess her. She thinks of Reisz: "the artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies." Her arms grow tired. The old terror flames up for an instant and sinks. She hears her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. The barking of an old dog. The clang of the cavalry officer's spurs. The last sentence: "There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air." Whether she drowns the prose will not say.