When reading Edna as a selkie robbed of her pelt, her final act at the conclusion of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening transforms from one of self destruction to, instead, a return to the existence she was always meant to achieve. When Edna is a selkie, the Ocean acts as a means for her, instead of dying a watery death, to escape to something greater than the man-made institutions of the land that kept her bound to her husband’s house—it gifts her the opportunity to transform. This alternative ending circumvents 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. Reading The Awakening as a selkie story awakens readers to the limits a terracentric outlook imposes on their imaginations, and begs them to look beyond the constructed boundaries this paradigm enforces.