She begins to let her own creativity flow and through her art takes a closer view of her own father, who has controlled her since she was a young child. With her pen in hand, Edna realizes that she need not be caged in and just copy what she sees. Instead, she can draw freehand with her own interpretations. She starts to recognize the power that she has as an artist and creator of her own life.
Likewise, Edna begins to understand her sexual power. She is not only free to feel with her artwork, but also with her sensuality and sexual awareness. Now she recognizes the power with both her art and body and is ready to attempt things that once were impossible. For example, she fully experiences her physical power when learning how to swim. At first, she feels "a certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water, unless there was a hand nearby that might right out to reassure her." This, of course, forecasts what is to come. Later, this fear disappears, and she bravely wades to the gulf "alone, boldly and with over-confidence" and "shouts for joy" as "a feeling of exultation overtakes her, as if some power of significant import had been given her soul. Her self-esteem, her self-awareness and confidence is growing as she goes farther and farther from her gilded cage.
Edna begins to ignore her wifely responsibilities. Instead of receiving callers, she takes long walks. She is bothered by her husband's complaining and stops having relations with him. "We meet in the morning at the breakfast table," Mr. Pontellier tells Dr. Mandelet, the old Creole physician he recruits to talk with Edna, to no particular avail. Listening to her own inner needs, Edna starts expressing her own opinions. She visits her friends and continues more seriously with her artwork. When Edna refuses to attend her sister's wedding in New York, her husband goes by himself.
Edna's makes her major flight from the cage when Robert Lebrun, the...
Edna also becomes close to Adele, who, unlike Edna, loves her traditional role, but who also draws Edna out of her shell and away from the mother nest. Edna realizes that she married her Catholic husband in order to annoy her family and to keep herself from being drawn to a world she never expected to have. She became a wife and a mother without especially wanting to be one, and she encaged herself like the parrot.
However, what happens when someone gets what she wants? What is the saying, "Be careful what you wish for? It may come true?" Edna becomes torn between the obligations and responsibilities that await her in the cage -- her children, "She understood now clearly what she had meant long ago when she said to Adele Ratignolle that she would give up the unessential, but she would never sacrifice herself for her children... The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days" -- and what she knows would be her life away from the cage -- a life with Robert until that thought would leave her, as well.
The only answer is to once again submerge herself and hide away from what she wants to become. However, this time she cannot just put up the barriers and the bars. This time, she has to totally submerge her interests and desires until they or she no longer exists.
References
Chopin, Kate. "The Awakening." 20, November 2007. http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ChoAwak.html
Crane, Gregg. The Cambridge Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century American Novel
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007.
Nolan, Elizabeth. "The Awakening." Oxford: Routeledge, 2004.
Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
