Edna's Suicide in The Awakening The novel, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin is set in the late nineteenth century, in Louisiana. This is a place and time for women to submit themselves to the wants and needs of husbands and families. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, isn’t content with being a mother-woman, one of the ordinary, traditional women who, "...idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it to a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels"( Chopin 51). Edna wanted more, and as there were very few women at this time leading