The short novel, The Awakening, begins at a crisis in Edna Pontellier’s life. Edna is a free-spirited and passionate woman who has a hard time finding means of communications and a real role as a wife and a mother. Edna finds herself desperately wanting her own emotional and sexual identities. During one summer while her husband, Leonce, is out of town on business, her frustration and need for emotional freedom leads to an affair …showed first 75 words of 791 total…

…showed last 75 words of 791 total…her own life, she found that "Every step she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see an apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to ‘feed upon the opinion’ when her own soul had invited her" (118). She had triumphed, however, she had been destroyed by a society that had no place for her.