Chapter 6 — the voice of the sea

The shortest chapter in the novel and one of the most direct. Chopin steps out of scene and names what has been happening. Edna could not have said why, having wished to go to the beach, she had first declined and then gone — "obeying one of the two contradictory impulses that pulled at her." A certain light is beginning to dawn inside her, "the kind of light that, while showing the way, also forbids it." At that early stage it only confuses her. It stirs an inclination toward dreams, toward pensive stillness, toward the shadowy anguish that had overtaken her at midnight when she had given herself over to tears.

"In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to grasp her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relationship — as an individual — to the world within and around her." The line is the novel's thesis, stated openly. "This may seem a ponderous weight of wisdom to settle upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight — perhaps more wisdom than is usually granted to any woman." Chopin acknowledges the philosophical scale of what she is claiming. "But the beginning of things, especially of a world, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and deeply unsettling. How few of us make it through such beginnings. How many souls are lost in the upheaval."

The chapter ends with the novel's most-quoted passage, which returns almost word for word in the final chapter: "The voice of the sea is seductive — never silent, whispering, insisting, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander awhile in abysses of solitude, to lose itself in labyrinths of inner contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace." Two paragraphs. No scene. Just the naming of the awakening and the image — sea, body, solitude — that will frame everything that follows. The structural marker is laid down.