Ranya Tobin
Professor Pressman
ECL 305
Final Essay
05/09/2024
Edna Pontilier: How A Modern Selkie Incarnate Contests Terracentric Epistemology
The land exists at the forefront of our minds as the arbiter of our existence. It is where we stake our claim and build our homes—and the law that governs it, governs us, in turn. That is what makes the myth of the Selkie so alluring. The selkie has both a home on land and within the Ocean, granting it the privilege of fluidity, both in physical form and lifestyle; it has the freedom to exist in its truest state, regardless of what the society on land demands. Societal pressures impose on us land-dwelling humans insecurities, inequities, and systemic oppression that selkies and other sea creatures are immune to. The longing to escape the suffocating reality of these demands is encapsulated by the novel The Awakening (1898), by Kate Chopin, with the protagonist Edna Pontilier desperate to break free of 1800s American gender roles. Edna finds her situation unlivable to the degree that she swims into the Ocean with the plan to never return, which is commonly read as her suicide, however, reading Edna as a selkie, and one robbed of her pelt, offers a different interpretation of the ending. If Edna is a selkie, the Ocean is her home, so instead of a tragic suicide, her choice to enter the water is an escape from the man-made institutions of the land that kept her bound to her husband’s house. Through this lens, the ending becomes a beginning. This alternative way of reading the novel’s ending offers a means of circumventing terracentric epistemology by recharacterizing the Ocean as a transformative place that offers new opportunities for existence, rather than the unsurvivable void Western ideas previously believed it to be (see Vast Expanses). Reading The Awakening as a selkie story awakens readers to the limits a terracentric outlook imposes on their imaginations and invites reading beyond the constructed boundaries this paradigm enforces.
A Selkie is a mythical creature with roots stemming from Viking Ballads of 793 AD to Ancient Ireland and the Northern Isles of Scotland (McEntire). The Selkie is traditionally a woman, and most iconic for her thick, beautiful coat of fur. When hooded, selkies roam the sea freely as seals, but when their coats are removed, they become beautiful humans able to tread upon land. These coats exist as a symbol of the woman’s autonomy, as she decides what form she takes. However, this liberty is too easily usurped; Many Selkie stories follow a similar plotline, where a Selkie’s coat is stolen from her by a pirate or leering land-born man and held ransom against her will. Without the pelt, the Selkie is barred from returning to her natural form and is forced to conform to human life as her assailant’s wife. Her existence on land is in service to her captor, as she is obligated to bear him children and keep his house, however, each retelling of the myth gives the seal woman the chance to make a great escape. Their husband is bound to make a mistake, accidentally revealing the location of where he has hidden the coat through a slip of the tongue or a failed hiding spot, and she seizes the opportunity to steal it back and regain her access to the sea. The selkie will always return to the Ocean at the end of these stories, as she is an animal, not meant to exist within the confines of human constructs. Without looking back, she hastily abandons the life she was made to live on land, including the children she was forced to bear, in exchange for her freedom—which she desires above all else.
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, written in 1898, coincidentally follows the classic Selkie plotline. The story centers around the character Edna Pontillier, a 28 year old housewife in Louisiana, with two young boys and a husband named Léonce Pontellier who is a forty-year-old, wealthy New Orleans businessman. Edna is a victim of the 1898 status quo, where a woman’s only purpose in life and typically only option is to serve a husband and bare him children. Some women happily take to this role, as observed in her friend Adele Ratignolle, but Edna is not one of these women. Edna is different, and something deep within her violently rejects the role that was forced upon her. She feels “an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, [and] filled her whole being with a vague anguish.” (Chopin 16). Nancy Cassle McEntire’s article, “Supernatural Beings in the Far North: Folklore, Folk Belief, and the Selkie.”, explains the emotions of the Selkie housewives, stating that “[The selkie] often longs for the sea, but she resigns herself to her fate and becomes a dutiful wife and mother.” (McEntire 8). Edna and the Irish Seal Women share each other’s anguish, forced to be wives to husbands they do not love and mothers to children they never wanted to have. They live in despair, wishing to escape the oppression keeping them tethered to their husband’s homes. Edna resents her role as a housewife, knowing she cannot fully be herself when acting within the confines of the gender role imposed on her. Despite feeling a natural maternal affection for her children, she is unable to abandon the desire to exist as her truest self, stating, “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.” (116). The core of Edna’s being longs to be free; she yearns for independence and the opportunity to explore a life beyond the house she was made to keep and the men she is forced to serve. This is very similar to how a Selkie, no matter how long she remains on land or how much she may care for her children, will always long for the sea above all else. The Awakening also features frequent symbolism of the Ocean as a place of freedom and revitalization, and Edna’s draw to it mirrors the connection between Selkies and their home. Edna ponders how, “the voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” (39). The novel’s fixation on the Ocean and how it calls to Edna is uncannily similar to what a Selkie would experience in her situation. The Ocean acts as a refuge, warm and inviting like the home Edna did not have on land. It is a space that welcomes her and promises to revitalize her soul. This puts Edna on track to reaching the sea as an inevitable destination.
Understanding Edna’s connection to the mythical Selkie drastically changes the ending of her story. The Awakening ends with Edna deciding to commit suicide by walking into the Ocean and swimming as far as she possibly can until her body eventually gives in to exhaustion—drowning her. By interpreting The Awakening as a selkie story, Edna’s final act is not one of self destruction or a result of an untreated mental health crisis. Instead, if Edna herself is a selkie, this end is not a death, but a return. Before this return, she transforms in a reverse-Selkie fashion; “she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and 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.” (268). Where a selkie would throw on her hood to return to her seal form before diving in, Edna strips off the clothes she is made to wear within the rules of the human world and enters the water in only her natural, naked body. She goes on to describe that “she felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world it had never known.” (269). The novel takes care to describe that this is an encompassing transformation of self. Edna is no longer existing within the body governed by stringent societal expectations. She shifts much like her Selkie predecessors into a form with which she can enter a new life. The most curious thing about Edna’s “death” however…is the novel never actually states that she passes away. The final sentence of the novel is “there was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.” (270). This is the final Earthly sensation Edna experiences, but she does not perish within the water—at least, the text never states so. This ending is left up to interpretation, with readers operating under a terracentric lens assuming she dies. This assumption makes apparent the limitations terracentrism imposes on our imaginations. When knowing nothing other than life on land, we neglect to envision life anywhere else. Observing this conclusion through the lens of a Selkie story opens readers to a new paradigm of thought: looking beyond the constructed reality of land-based society and conceptualizing our own reality. The ending where Edna transforms and escapes into the sea to live out the free existence she was always meant to achieve invites us to picture our own transformations and self-determined existences outside of what land-based society tells us is acceptable or possible.
This new lens through which The Awakening may be read contrasts the terracentric beliefs that dominate our social consciousness. Terracentrism, as defined in The Ocean Reader, written by Eric Paul Roorda, “refers to people’s tendency to consider the world and human activity mainly in the context of the land and events that take place on land.” (The Ocean Reader, Roorda). Because humans cannot breathe within the water, nor colonize or terraform it, many European-based cultures have mistakenly believed it to have no history or meaning. It is important to understand that terracentric stems from early European culture, as a vast amount of cultures such as the Inuit or religions such as the Yoruba tradition actually worship the Ocean and intertwine their cultural identity and society with it intimately. The rejection of the Ocean’s worth as an archive and our place in it, persisting from early European colonization of the world, ultimately limits us in what we imagine is capable of our existence. Traditional Terracentric values gravely mischaracterize the Ocean as an arbiter of death—a void unwelcome to human life (see Vast Expanses). In this case, the Ocean is devoid of stories, of history. However, reading The Awakening through an Ocean-centric perspective offers readers a new hope; when met with stories that extend into the water, the restrictions we experience on land become arbitrary. Life is difficult on land; our constructed, land-based society is corrupted with values that are oppressive to not only women, as experienced by Edna, but also minorities, those whose identities are not deemed acceptable by the status quo, and those without wealth. An Ocean-centric point of view allows us to recognize a world outside of these constructed boundaries—a space where life persists and life forms evolve without regulation. In the Ocean, we could be free to transform into our truest self, just as Edna did…which leads us to question why the same can’t be done on land. Steve Mentz’s “Deterritorializing Preface”, a snippet of his greater work, Ocean, emphasizes the opportunities an Ocean-centric perspective can offer us, claiming that “The great waters open up a dynamic environment, fluid, saline, moving, and moved… Watery transformation deterritorializes.” (Ocean xv). Mentz goes on to explain that the Ocean’s ever-changing nature is conducive to humanity’s ability to change, and scuttles the importance of predetermined, “grounded” reality. When we take inspiration from the flow state of the Ocean, embracing fluidity, we see that change is not only positive, but occurring continuously, and a rigid state of thought inhibits development. This rigid state is what kept life on land unlivable for Edna and others like her, but instead of retreating to the Ocean, we can bring the acceptance the Ocean offers onto the land.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin was a monumental text of its time, with its ending leaving a lasting, sorrowful impression on its readers. To end the story with a suicide was a powerful choice, insisting to the novel’s readers that the social norm of a woman’s role being defined for her creates an uninhabitable existence for women who desired more. However, The Awakening as a Selkie story offers a peek into the Ocean’s reality, where there are no institutions to abide by the rules of, allowing us to recognize the obtuse nature of terracentric, stagnant ideologies. Edna’s Selkie ending encourages us to transform as we wish and push for a state of change on land that mirrors that of the Ocean. When reflecting with an Ocean-based ideology, the way in which we govern ourselves on land shifts, and we become free mould our society in a way inclusive to all states of being.
Citations:
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Penguin Classics, 2018.
Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown, “Introduction: The Stories We Tell about Mermaids and Other Water Spirits” (Penguin, ix-xxii)
Mentz, Steve. Ocean, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=6036857.
Nancy Cassell McEntire. “Supernatural Beings in the Far North: Folkore, Folk Belief, and the Selkie.” Scottish Studies (Edinburgh), vol. 35, 2010, pp. 120-, https://doi.org/10.2218/ss.v35.2692.
Rozwadowski, Helen M.. Vast Expanses : A History of the Oceans, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central,