Edna Pontelli's The Awakening

The novel opens with Léonce Pontellier sitting on the porch of his seaside summer home in Grand Isle, near New Orleans. He and his wife Edna are renting a cottage from Madame Lebrun. Edna and Madame Lebrun's son Robert join Mr. Pontellier, having spent the afternoon swimming together. Edna and Robert try to relate an amusing experience to Mr. Pontellier, but he is not part of the joke and fails to share in their mirth.
Mr. Pontellier cannot explain exactly what made him angry at his wife that one night. He senses that it has something more to do with her attitude than with her actual behavior. For example, whenever his children injure themselves, instead of immediately rushing to Mrs. Pontellier for comfort, they pick themselves and go on as before. The children seem, in Mr. Pontellier's eyes, almost abnormally independent, and treat their …show more content…
Pontellier is not a mother-woman: she is not one of the "women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it as holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels." The narrator describes as the perfect example of a mother-woman a neighbor named Adéle Ratignolle, who represents the epitome of idealized femininity. She is voluptuously and romantically beautiful, sews elaborate clothes for her children and is constantly pregnant. Edna. Pontellier dutifully visits her friend to learn how to sew winter undergarments for her children, but is bored despite Robert's presence. Robert accidentally hints that Madame Ratignolle might be pregnant again, and Mrs. Pontellier begins to reflect about how her Creole neighbors are so much more upfront and unrestrained than she is used to. They treat each other as extensions of one big family and feel free in discussing matters of a sexual nature, although in reality they behave very chastely. In contrast, Mrs. Pontellier frequently becomes embarrassed by her friends' topics of conversations and