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PARTISAN REVIEW
there are significant differences. Mrs. Chopin's Edna Pontillier,
married to a wealthy Creole businessman in New Orleans, is not a
naive and restless fool like Emma Bovary, longing to escape from the
boredom of provincial bourgeois life. Mrs. Pontillier is a sensitive
and perceptive woman who put away her girlish fantasies of grand
romance when she married. But now, at twenty-eight, the mother of
two young sons, she feels strangely haunted by "an indescribable op–
pression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her
consciousness. "
This nameless and perplexing sensation has emerged in the
loosening languor of summer, which she is spending with her
children on an island in the Gulf of Mexico, and Edna realizes that it
has something to do with the dense proximity of the many Creole
women whom she ordinarily sees only occasionally at home in New
Orleans. In the midst of this Creole and Catholic world, Edna, a
Protestant from Kentucky, feels like the odd woman. She had never
been at ease with the Creole women's "entire absence of prudery,"
and is shocked by the casually uninhibited way they talk about "un–
mentionable" intimacies like childbirth. Nor can she understand the
free-and-easy flirtatiousness that is never allowed to encroach on
their inviolable wifely chastity. When Edna becomes infatuated with
Robert Lebrun, a young bachelor on Grand Isle, and begins to take
his caressing glances seriously, she has misunderstood the Creole
code that finds flirtation amusing but adultery impermissible, a
threat to the sanctity of marriage and motherhood.
As Kate Chopin conveys the smell and the look of the tropical
island, the rhythmic and dreamy sensuality generated by the heat of
the sun and "the seductive odor of the sea," it becomes clear that
Edna's attraction to Robert is only the outward sign of a profound
discontent, and she begins to listen to an unknown part of her inner
self that is stirring awake after years of sleep. Without realizing the
gravity - and ambiguity - of her words, Edna tells a Creole friend
that she would never sacrifice herself for her children: "I would give
up the unessential, I would give up my money, I would give my life
for my children, but I wouldn't give myself." The ominous implica–
tions of this confused distinction do not emerge until much later.
As Edna gradually becomes aware of the underlying self that is
struggling to declare itself like the howl of a newborn infant, she
begins to act out its seditious promptings. When she returns to New
Orleans at the end of the summer, she stops being "at home" on
Tuesdays to a stream of visitors who mean nothing to her. She flings
