All 39 chapters — Grand Isle in summer, New Orleans through autumn and winter, Grand Isle the following spring.
The novel moves between two settings. The first sixteen chapters take place at Madame Lebrun's Creole resort on Grand Isle, in the Gulf of Mexico, over a single summer. Chapters 17 to 38 take place in New Orleans through the autumn and winter that follow, as Edna's life unravels and reorganizes around her own desire. Chapter 39 returns to Grand Isle the next spring, alone, for the ending. The arc is small in scale and devastating in implication.
The Creole resort, the swim, Robert's departure for Mexico.
Sunday morning at Madame Lebrun's resort on Grand Isle. A parrot shrieks in French. Edna returns from the beach with Robert, sunburned and laughing. Mr. Pontellier looks at her like a piece of personal property that has suffered some damage. He goes off for billiards. Robert stays.
On the porch after Léonce leaves, Edna and Robert talk for hours. He of his perpetual plan to go to Mexico; she of her Kentucky girlhood and her sister's engagement. Each is genuinely interested in the other. The summer's pattern is being set.
Léonce returns at eleven from Klein's in fine spirits, pulls crumpled bills from his pockets, decides Raoul has a fever (he doesn't), and accuses Edna of neglect. He falls asleep in thirty seconds. Edna goes out to the porch and cries in the dark, unable to say why.
Chopin names the type. The mother-women of Grand Isle "adored their children, worshipped their husbands, and considered it a sacred privilege to efface themselves." Adèle Ratignolle is the embodiment. Edna, by Chopin's direct statement, is not.
A summer afternoon on the porch. Adèle sews; Edna sketches her; Robert teases Adèle about his old infatuation. While watching Edna work, Robert rests his head against her arm. She pushes him away. He does it again. The summer's tension is being set.
A short, declarative chapter. Chopin pulls back and names what is happening. Edna is beginning to grasp her position in the universe as a human being. "The voice of the sea is seductive..." — the most-quoted passage in the novel, which will return verbatim at the ending.
Edna and Adèle walk to the beach together; in the shade of a bathhouse gallery Edna opens up — Kentucky girlhood, a cavalry officer, a tragedian, an "accidental" marriage to Léonce. Adèle clasps her hand. The candor confuses Edna like a first breath of freedom.
On the walk back from the beach, Adèle tells Robert privately to leave Edna alone — "she is not one of us; she might take you seriously." Robert flushes with annoyance, defends himself, eventually changes the subject. The first crack in the summer's easy code.
A Saturday gathering with husbands down for the weekend. Lamps and garlands; the Farival twins; ice cream. Then Mademoiselle Reisz sits down at the piano and plays Chopin. Edna trembles, chokes, weeps. "You are the only one worth playing for," the pianist tells her on her way out.
The swim. Edna, after a summer of failed lessons, suddenly finds she can. She swims out alone, farther than any woman has — toward "something unlimited in which to lose herself." She walks home alone. Robert overtakes her, settles her into the hammock, sits on the step in silence. The first felt stirrings of desire.
Léonce returns to find her still in the hammock and orders her to bed. She refuses. He insists; she refuses again. "Don't speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you." He smokes through it on the gallery. The first refusal of her marriage.
Edna rises early and sends for Robert without ceremony. They take Beaudelet's boat to the Chêniere with the lovers, the woman in black, old Monsieur Farival, and Mariequita the Spanish girl. Robert proposes Grande Terre, the Bayou Brulow, the pirogue by moonlight. Edna feels her chains snap.
Edna leaves the church faint; Robert takes her to Madame Antoine's cottage. She sleeps the whole afternoon in a snow-white bed. The others go back without her. She wakes feeling transformed; she and Robert eat alone under the orange trees and listen to Baratarian sea-legends until night.
Edna comes home to find Etienne up and naughty after Adèle's long evening pacifying him. She rocks him to sleep. Léonce, away on cotton-broker business, has been worried. Robert plays guitar and sings. The last gentle evening before Robert announces he is leaving for Mexico.
At dinner Edna walks in and learns from the company's buzz that Robert is leaving for Mexico that very night. He had spent the whole morning with her and given no hint. The goodbye is brief and cold. He cannot bear to make it longer.
Robert is gone. Edna swims daily and looks for him in everything; he writes to his mother and to Reisz, but not to her. To Adèle on the beach Edna says: "I would give up the unessential — money, life — for my children. But I wouldn't give myself." Adèle does not understand. The distinction is the book.
The Esplanade Street house, Mademoiselle Reisz, Arobin.
Back in New Orleans. Edna has stopped receiving callers on the Tuesday afternoons her husband's business depends on. He criticizes the dinner and the missed visits. After he leaves for the club, she throws her wedding ring on the floor (it won't break) and shatters a vase in the fireplace.
Edna visits the Ratignolles in their apartment above his drugstore. The marriage is loving, domestic, content — exactly the model the novel keeps measuring her against. She walks home with a strange unnameable oppression. Not despondency. A glimpse into a life she cannot return to.
Edna abandons the household and immerses herself in painting. She hires a model. She no longer keeps the Tuesdays, no longer orders the meals, no longer consults the cook. Léonce, baffled and alarmed, consults Doctor Mandelet privately about her behavior.
Edna searches the city for Mademoiselle Reisz's new apartment. She locates her through the Lebruns and discovers Reisz too has been receiving Robert's letters from Mexico — letters that mention Edna. She climbs the long stairs to Reisz's small smoky rooms.
In Reisz's small apartment, the pianist plays Chopin from memory while Edna reads a letter from Robert. Edna weeps over it. Reisz tells her the artist must have "the courageous soul that dares and defies," and presses her hand to Edna's shoulder blades to feel for wings.
Léonce visits Doctor Mandelet to report his wife's strange behavior. The doctor suspects a romantic entanglement (he does not say so), counsels patience, and asks to be invited to dinner so he can observe her. Léonce departs slightly reassured. The doctor remains uneasy.
Edna's austere Confederate-Colonel father arrives. She takes him to the races; she meets Alcée Arobin there and wins. Doctor Mandelet comes to dinner that evening to observe her, sees her electric and lit up, and goes home certain she is in love with someone — but with whom?
The Colonel asks Edna to attend Sister Janet's wedding. Edna refuses. The quarrel is sharp; he leaves earlier than planned. She feels only relief. Léonce departs for New York on cotton business; the boys are with their grandmother in Iberville. Edna is alone in the house for the first time in her marriage.
Arobin, freed by Léonce's absence, becomes a regular presence — calls at the house, escorts Edna to the races, brings Mrs. Highcamp along as cover. After a quiet evening alone he kisses the inside of her wrist. She is disturbed. She does not send him away.
Arobin sends a written apology for his forwardness; Edna accepts. They continue to see each other. Reisz, on a visit, presses her hand to Edna's heart to test whether it has wings strong enough to carry her where she is going.
Arobin calls in the evening. Edna talks abstractly about herself; about Reisz feeling for wings. He sits close and kisses her. "It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire."
A single-paragraph chapter. Edna weeps after Arobin leaves — not from shame or remorse, but from understanding. "She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes." The only regret is that it was not love that had inflamed her.
Edna moves out, Robert returns, Adèle's childbirth.
Without waiting for Léonce's reply, Edna begins moving out of the Esplanade Street house. She rents a small cottage around the corner — Ellen the maid calls it the "pigeon house." Arobin finds her on a stepladder and helps her unhook pictures. The move happens in three days.
Ten guests at a glittering farewell dinner. Edna in gold satin presides like a queen, Reisz sits on cushions, Mrs. Highcamp drapes Victor with roses. Victor begins to sing Robert's song from Grand Isle. Edna shatters her glass against the carafe.
After the guests leave, Arobin walks Edna to the pigeon house and locks up the Esplanade Street house behind them. Edna is exhausted: "as if I had been wound up too tight, and something inside of me had snapped." Arobin says he is going. He does not go.
Léonce, from New York, writes disapproving letters; then he places a notice in the papers about "renovations" at the Esplanade house to save face. Edna admires the maneuver and laughs at the lie. She spends a delicious February week with the children in Iberville. She comes home alone.
Adèle warns Edna about her reputation; Edna shrugs. At Reisz's apartment Edna finds a letter from Robert hinting he may return. Reisz plays Wagner. That afternoon, in the pigeon house parlor, Robert appears at the door.
Robert and Edna dine in the pigeon house. The conversation is awkward and full of half-explanations. Arobin's tobacco pouch sits visible on the table; Robert sees it. He cannot quite explain his return or his restraint, and he leaves earlier than Edna wants.
Edna wakes hopeful, certain Robert loves her. The day passes. He does not come. The next day passes too. Arobin, untroubled, calls in the evening. The chapter is the slow turn from hope to exhaustion.
In a small garden café, Edna runs into Robert. He confesses he loves her and has been dreaming of asking Léonce to free her. She refuses the dream: "I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not." Then a knock — Adèle has gone into labor. Edna goes.
Edna sits with Adèle through hours of agonizing childbirth, watching with "a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature." When the baby is finally born and Edna kisses her friend goodbye, Adèle whispers in exhaustion: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children!"
Doctor Mandelet walks Edna home and offers his confidence; she declines it. She returns to the pigeon house expecting Robert. He is gone. A note on the table reads: "I love you. Good-by — because I love you." She lies on the sofa all night without sleeping or moving.
Alone on the beach.
Edna returns alone to Grand Isle. She finds Victor and Mariequita patching the gallery. She walks down to the beach, undresses, and swims out — farther than she ever has, until her arms give. The novel ends in childhood voices, the hum of bees, and the smell of pinks. It does not say whether she drowns.