Here is a book cover for The Awakening. The sea is a central theme in the book, and something that Edna engages with a lot. She learns how to swim, she wants to swim farther than anyone else has ever before, and at the end of the book she commits suicide by swimming far out into the sea so that she is physically unable to swim back to the shore. As a way of engaging with the text, I looked up other images of women and the sea and chose one which I think could serve as a better book cover for The Awakening than the one pictured above. The image I chose portrays a shadowy, almost mist-like, silhouette of a woman wading into the water. Other than the obvious connection to the novel’s ending, the blurriness of the picture, and the fact that the woman’s face is obscured, fits the tone of the novel because Edna is in deep emotional turmoil and is confused about her identity as a woman and a mother. At the end of the book she is hardly present in her family or community and I think this image captures that. It is similar to the real book cover because the woman’s face is unseen and the sea is a prominent aspect. In many ways, the two images have a similar composition and color palate. The reason why I think it could be a better, more updated book cover is because of the subtlety of the colors and the ghost-like appearance of the woman, it hints at the intense sadness of Edna in The Awakening.
Great American Novels 