Between the caged parrot with a huge cage “outside the door” that repeated “Get away! Get away! Damnation!” and Mr. Pontellier ‘s rebuke to his wife that she was “burnt beyond recognition,” and the description of him looking at his wife as “a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.” the antenna went up. There is not a welcoming beckon in the very beginning and we are alerted to the dysfunction of a marriage all with a page or two. It is a sad beginning. The introduction of Robert Lebrun along with Edna sets up the triangle. We are told that “Robert talked a good deal about himself. He was very young, and did not know any better. Mrs. Pontellier talked a little more about herself for the same reason. Each was interested in what the other said.” Robert from the onset has “plans” although he and Edna talk she has none.
When Mr. Pontellier returns from Klein's hotel and awakens Edna, with criticism about her care of the children , after a night out with the boys. We begin to see him as thoughtless and as eligible as Edna for the same criticism. She goes into the adjoining bedroom and cries. This indifference on the part of her husband triggers, “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.” At this point the antenna were up and the story began to accelerate.
We are told that Mrs. Pontellier was not a “mother woman”. The mother women in the story are easy to know “they (were) fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood.” They grew wings as “ministering angels”.
I noticed along with the caged birds in the opening of the story the number of bird images throughout. It is Mademoiselle Reisz that tells Edna, “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.’”Edna refers to her new home as “the pigeon-house”. It pleased her. “It at once assumed the intimate character of a home, while she herself invested it with charm which it reflected like a warm glow. There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual.”
When Edna returns to the Gulf for her final swim the beach was deserted. The only living thing was a “bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering circling disabled down, down to the water.”There are birds which Edna was like and those which she was unable to be like because her wings were not strong enough to fly.
