, regards her as an example of the Southern woman: " a submissive wife whose reason for being was to love, honor, obey, and occasionally amuse her husband, to bring up his children and manage his household- . He often leaves her alone, accuses her of not being a good mother, and Edna's tension caused by this neglection is set free by her "having a good cry all to herself-. At this time she is not entirely conscious of what makes her so unhappy. .
New Orleans is just a cage to her, a pidgeon-house, where she is expected to behave as a good wife, mother, daughter would behave. She is a Presbyterian from Kentucky, where the grass is like the seas, and married to Leonce she feels as an outsider among the Roman Catholic Creol aristocracy. Their distinct world, their "absence of prudery- fascinates her, but is "at first incomprehensible to her-. She cannot find her place in their intimate, indirect world. Her awkward feelings, her suppression is shown through the allegory of the caged parrot. The bird as a symbol of her state appears towards the end of the novel again, in the picture of a broken winged bird. .
"Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman."" She developed an ambivalent feeling towards motherhood and her children. She was fond of them "in an uneven, impulsive way-. She loves them, of course, but cannot imagine her life spending all of her time with them, bringing them up, as a Southern woman is expected to do. Her children meant a sort of limitation for her, "their absence was sort of relief-. She could not think about her children as the only purpose of her life.
The time at Grand Isle and her love to Robert Lebrun makes her seek for individuality conscious in Edna, but this is not the point when the process begins in her. Already as a child she "had lived her own small life all within herself-. She led a "dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions-.