by Marie-Luise Stromer

Created on: April 11, 2008   Last Updated: February 07, 2010

Wealthy Creole families from New Orleans spend their summer holidays at Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico, in fact the women and children do, the men only come down for the weekend. We get to know 40-year-old Mr Pontellier, his wife Edna, 28 years old, and their two small sons. There are two other families and a pianist whose names are mentioned as well as two lovers and a woman in black who remain anonymous. With the exception of Edna all protagonists are flat, we learn more about the ones whose names are mentioned than about the others, but they don't change, they never surprise, their function is merely to interact with Edna thus showing the different facets of her character. I see the nameless lovers and the woman in black as symbolic whose significance becomes clear only later on.

Robert Lebrun is visiting his mother who runs the holiday facility as he does every summer playing with the guests' children and flirting with the ladies. This summer he's the constant companion of Edna who's only two years older than he is. Edna is not a Catholic Creole but a Presbyterian from Kentucky and feels a bit of an outsider among the other guests, Robert's attention flatters her and does her good.

Madame Ratignolle, a woman of Edna's age she has befriended asks Robert to leave Edna alone. "She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously." This remark takes the innocence out of the relationship, Robert is angry but has to admit to himself that he has indeed fallen in love with Edna. Head over heals he escapes to Mexico where he had been offered a job some time before.

And Edna? She doesn't think she loves Robert, in fact she doesn't think at all about her situation, but she isn't content, she feels unhappy. Once she's sitting alone on the porch at night crying her heart out, why, what for? "An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish".

Her marriage was "purely an accident", but with time she has grown fond of her husband, "realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive or fictitious warmth colored her affection, thereby threatening its dissolution." Yet dissolve it does.

Why does Edna never talk to her husband? He adores her, he lives and works only for her and their children's happiness; Edna resents, however, that he views her as his personal property, she doesn't want to belong

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