Chapter 1
The parrot and the rings
A Sunday morning at the Lebrun cottages on Grand Isle. A green and yellow parrot screams French and Spanish in a cage outside the door. Mr. Pontellier — forty, neat, bespectacled — is trying to read a day-old newspaper on the porch. He watches a white sunshade approach across the chamomile from the beach. Beneath it are his wife Edna, sunburned, and young Robert Lebrun, laughing. "You're burnt beyond recognition," Pontellier says, looking at her "as one looks at a piece of valuable personal property which has suffered some damage." She holds out her hand for the rings she gave him to keep before bathing. He drops them into her open palm. She slips them on, looks at Robert, and laughs. Léonce goes off to Klein's hotel for billiards. Robert stays.
Chapter 2
Edna and Robert on the porch
Edna's eyes are introduced — quick, bright, yellowish-brown, "lost in some inner maze of contemplation." She is handsome rather than beautiful. Robert rolls a cigarette. He talks about his perennial plan to go to Mexico for his fortune (he never goes); about his summer-in-with-his-mother routine at Grand Isle; about his clerk's job in New Orleans where his three languages make him useful. Edna talks about her father's plantation in Mississippi and her Kentucky girlhood. She reads aloud a letter from her sister Janet, who has just gotten engaged. Each is genuinely interested in what the other says.
Chapter 3
Edna weeps on the porch
Léonce returns at eleven from Klein's, in fine spirits, pulling crumpled bills from his pockets. Edna is sleepy and answers in murmurs. He finds her inattention discouraging. He goes into the boys' room, decides Raoul has a fever, and tells Edna she neglects the children. She knows the boy has no fever. She gets up, checks him, comes back without speaking. Léonce smokes and falls asleep within thirty seconds. Edna goes out to the porch, sits in the wicker chair, and begins to cry. The mosquitoes finally break the mood. The next morning Léonce gives her half his Klein's winnings and goes back to the city. A few days later a box of friandises arrives from him. The other ladies declare him the best husband in the world. Edna is "obliged to agree."
Chapter 4
Not a mother-woman
Léonce cannot quite explain how Edna falls short as a mother — he feels it more than perceives it. The boys do not run crying to her when they fall; they pick themselves up. "In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman." Chopin names the type — Creole women who "adored their children, worshipped their husbands, and considered it a sacred privilege to efface themselves as individuals and become ministering angels." Adèle Ratignolle is the embodiment: spun-gold hair, sapphire eyes, lips like crimson fruit, exquisite hands always at some piece of needlework. Adèle visits with sewing the afternoon the box arrives. The Creole women's free, ribald conversation continues to startle Edna, who still blushes at it.
Chapter 5
Sketching Adèle
A long, congenial summer afternoon on the porch. Adèle sews. Edna sketches her — never had Adèle seemed a more tempting model, "like some sensuous Madonna." Robert teases Adèle about his old, theatrical attachment to her, with mock-serious reports of his sleepless nights. He never takes that tone with Mrs. Pontellier. At one point, watching her sketch, he rests his head quietly against her arm. She pushes him away gently. He does it again. She pushes him away firmly. He does not apologize. The finished portrait does not look like Adèle and Edna smears it with paint and crumples the paper. At the end of the chapter Robert tells Edna she cannot miss her swim. He fetches her hat and they walk together toward the beach.
Chapter 6
The voice of the sea
A short, declarative chapter. Chopin pulls back from scene to philosophical statement. Edna cannot have said why, having wished to go to the beach with Robert, she had first declined and then gone. A certain light is beginning to dawn inside her — "the kind of light that, while showing the way, also forbids it." Edna is "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 chapter ends with the most-quoted passage in the novel, which will return word for word at the ending: "The voice of the sea is seductive — never silent, whispering, insisting, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander awhile in abysses of solitude." It is the awakening, named.
Chapter 7
Walking with Adèle
Edna walks to the beach with Adèle, leaving the children behind. Sitting in the shade of a bathhouse gallery, Edna does something rare — she opens up. She tells Adèle about a Kentucky girlhood walking through tall grass that seemed as big as the ocean; about running from the gloomy Presbyterian prayers of her father; about a sad-eyed cavalry officer she was passionately taken with; about a young man engaged to someone else; and about the celebrated tragedian whose photograph she kept on her desk and kissed in private. Her marriage to Léonce was an "accident" in the midst of that secret passion. She loves her children "in an uneven, impulsive way." Adèle clasps her hand and murmurs "Pauvre chérie." The candor confuses Edna pleasantly, like wine.
Chapter 8
Adèle warns Robert
On the walk back from the beach, Adèle does something unusual. She tells Robert, privately, to leave Mrs. Pontellier alone. "She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate mistake of taking you seriously." Robert flushes with annoyance and is defensive — am I a comedian, a clown, a fool? Adèle is firm. The Creole code permits the summer attachment because everyone understands it is a performance; Edna does not understand it as a performance. Robert eventually changes the subject and tells stories about Alcée Arobin and other rakes. Back at the cottage he goes up to his mother's sewing-machine room. Madame Lebrun is busy at the machine, clatter and bang, and exchanges scattered conversation about Mexico, Victor's carriage, and Edna.
Chapter 9
Reisz at the piano
Saturday night at Madame Lebrun's. Husbands have come down for the weekend. Lamps blaze; the Farival twins play duets; a small girl in black tulle dances; ice cream and cake are passed. Edna has danced once each with Léonce, Robert, and Monsieur Ratignolle, and goes out onto the gallery to look at the Gulf. Robert fetches Mademoiselle Reisz. The pianist — small, wizened, eyes that burn — sits at the piano and plays Chopin. The music does not bring Edna pictures. "The passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves beat daily upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her." Reisz pats her shoulder on her way out: "You are the only one worth playing for."
Chapter 10
The swim
Robert proposes the moonlit swim and the whole company follows. Edna has spent the summer trying to learn. Tonight, "like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child who suddenly realizes its power and walks alone for the first time," she finds she can. She shouts for joy. She swims out alone, far past where any woman has swum, "reaching out for something unlimited in which to lose herself." She turns; the shore looks terrifyingly far. A vision of death. She regains the land. She walks home alone. Robert overtakes her. He settles her into a hammock and sits on the step rolling a cigarette. They do not speak. "No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more charged with the first felt stirrings of desire."
Chapter 11
Refusing to come inside
Léonce returns and finds Edna still in the hammock. He orders her in. She refuses. He insists; she refuses again. "Léonce, go to bed. I mean to stay out here. Don't speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you." Léonce, baffled, opens a bottle of wine, smokes cigars on the gallery. The hour before dawn comes; Edna at last gets up, cramped, and goes inside. The will has blazed up. Through habit she would have yielded, "unthinkingly, as we walk, move, sit, stand, go through the daily round of the life which has been portioned out to us." The habit has just broken.
Chapter 12
The boat to the Chêniere
Edna rises early and sends for Robert without ceremony — a thing she has never done. They drink coffee at the kitchen window and take a shortcut to the wharf. Beaudelet's boat waits with the lovers, the woman in black, old Monsieur Farival, and Mariequita the Spanish girl with a basket of shrimps. On the bay Robert proposes Grande Terre tomorrow, the Bayou Brulow the day after, the pirogue some moonlit night. "We'd share it, and scatter it together," he says of imagined pirate gold, his face flushing. They land and walk up to the small Gothic church of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Chapter 13
Sleep at Madame Antoine's
Edna grows faint during the church service and slips out; Robert follows. He takes her to Madame Antoine's cottage. The Acadian widow gives Edna her snow-white four-posted bed in a small side room. Edna loosens her clothes, washes, looks at her own arms "as if for the first time," and sleeps the whole afternoon. When she wakes the others have gone back; Robert has waited. She eats bread and wine, throws an orange at him from the tree. He cooks her supper. Madame Antoine returns and tells Baratarian sea-legends until night. They take Tonie's boat home with phantom ships speeding across the moonlit water.
Chapter 14
The last quiet evening
Adèle delivers an unhappy Etienne to Edna at Grand Isle. He has been refusing to go to bed; Adèle has been pacifying him. Edna takes him into her arms and rocks him to sleep. Léonce, away at Klein's on cotton-broker business, had wanted to set out for the Chêniere when Edna failed to return; old Monsieur Farival reassured him. Robert plays guitar and sings on the porch in the gentle late evening. The chapter is the novel's last quiet beat — small domestic textures, the boy's nightgown, a salt-shaker of cologne — before what is about to happen at dinner the next day.
Chapter 15
Robert leaves
Edna comes down to dinner to find the entire pension already discussing it: Robert is leaving for Mexico. Tonight. He has spent the morning with her without a hint. He says only that the chance has finally come and he must take it. The goodbye is brief and cold; he cannot bear to make it longer. Edna struggles to hide her devastation. She lies awake. The summer that has been opening her has just shut.
Chapter 16
"The unessential"
Robert's absence becomes the shape of every day. Edna swims daily. She looks for him in everything. She visits Madame Lebrun and Madame Lebrun reads aloud from his Mexico letters; he writes to his mother, to Mademoiselle Reisz, but not to Edna. The injury settles. In a conversation with Adèle on the beach, Edna gives the novel's most-quoted moral statement: "I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself." Adèle, baffled, says nothing seems clearer than that a mother gives her life for her children. Edna does not insist. The distinction is the book.
Chapter 17
The shattered glass
Back in the grand Esplanade Street house, Edna is supposed to receive callers on the Tuesdays Léonce's business depends on. She has not been home all day. Léonce, returning, finds the calling cards. He quizzes her about each missed visitor, criticizes the dinner, and reminds her: "we've got to observe les convenances if we ever expect to get on and keep up with the procession." He leaves for the club. Edna sits a moment, then stands, takes off her wedding ring, and stamps on it. The ring will not break. She seizes a glass vase from the mantel and shatters it in the fireplace. The maid, alarmed, comes in. Edna picks up the ring, slips it back on, and goes upstairs.
Chapter 18
Visiting Adèle
Edna visits Adèle and Monsieur Ratignolle in their gracious New Orleans apartment above his drugstore. Monsieur Ratignolle is "the fusion of two human beings into one" with his wife — domestic, attentive, content. They are the model of the marriage that works; they show Edna what a happy bourgeois Creole household looks like up close. Edna walks home through the streets oppressed by something she cannot name. "It was not despondency. It was something rather of an awakening to the unattainable, a glimpse into a life she could not return to and could not quite leave."
Chapter 19
Painting
Edna stops attempting to manage the household. She no longer keeps her Tuesdays. She does not order the meals; she does not consult the cook; she lets the children's schedule run as the nurse pleases. She has set up her atelier and she is painting. She works at her canvases all day, hires a model to come and pose, sings under her breath as she works. The dignity of the work and the absorption of it carry her through hours that used to be obligation. Léonce, watching, is bewildered and increasingly alarmed. He consults Doctor Mandelet privately. The chapter is the moment the quiet refusal hardens into a daily practice; Edna is no longer running the house, and she is not pretending to be.
Chapter 20
Finding Reisz
Edna searches New Orleans for Mademoiselle Reisz, whose Bienville Street apartment has been vacated. The pianist is hard to find on purpose. Edna finally locates her through Madame Lebrun, who lets her come to the Chartres Street house and read Robert's letters in person. While she is there she discovers, by the way Madame Lebrun handles them, that Reisz too has been receiving letters from Robert — letters that mention Edna. The discovery sharpens the search. Edna gets an address and climbs the long stairs to Reisz's small, smoky top-floor rooms. She finds the door open; the pianist welcomes her with no ceremony.
Chapter 21
Reisz reads the letter
Reisz pours coffee. She makes Edna sit by the window. She produces one of Robert's Mexico letters — a long letter mostly to her, that mentions Edna with formal restraint — and reads passages aloud while she plays Chopin from memory. Edna reads the letter herself, weeping. Reisz watches her closely. She tells Edna that the artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies, and presses her hand to Edna's shoulder blades to feel for wings. The pianist is auditioning Edna for the life she has chosen for herself, and is honest about its costs.
Chapter 22
Léonce and the doctor
Léonce visits Doctor Mandelet at his office and gives him a careful, slightly comic account of his wife's strange behavior. She has stopped keeping her Tuesdays. She walks the city alone. She talks of women's rights. She has left him sleeping in their room and gone out at all hours. The doctor asks the right questions and listens. He suspects a romantic entanglement; he does not say so. He counsels patience and recommends Léonce invite him to dinner so he can see Edna himself. He warns Léonce that "women, my dear friend, are very peculiar creatures." Léonce departs slightly reassured. The doctor, alone, feels uneasy.
Chapter 23
The Colonel
Edna's father arrives in New Orleans on his way to Sister Janet's wedding. He is a Confederate Colonel from Kentucky, austere, Presbyterian, a connoisseur of toddies. Edna finds his company livelier than her husband's. She takes him to the races; he is a good judge of horseflesh. Alcée Arobin is at the track and is introduced. Edna wins. The whole party — Colonel, Edna, Arobin and his friends — comes back excited and electric. That evening Doctor Mandelet comes to dinner, sees Edna lit up, observes her with the Colonel and Léonce and is mostly reassured. He notices she is in love. He goes home wondering with whom.
Chapter 24
The Colonel leaves
The Colonel asks Edna to attend Sister Janet's wedding in the East. Edna refuses. The Colonel scolds her at length on a daughter's duty. She is unmoved. The quarrel is sharp; the Colonel leaves earlier than planned. Edna feels only relief — Chopin notes it without comment. Around the same time Léonce departs for New York on cotton business; the boys have already been sent to Iberville to their grandmother. Edna is alone in the Esplanade Street house for the first time in her marriage. The autumn that follows is one of the most productive of her life.
Chapter 25
Arobin at the races
Alcée Arobin, freed by Léonce's departure, becomes a regular presence in Edna's life. He calls at the house. He takes her to the races several afternoons in a row. Mrs. Highcamp comes along as the social cover. Arobin is courtly, attentive, not yet pressing. After one quiet evening alone with Edna at the house, he picks up her hand and kisses the inside of her wrist. The contact is unexpected and unwelcome — and not unwelcome enough to send him away. Edna is disturbed. She does not send him away.
Chapter 26
Reisz feels for wings
Arobin sends Edna a written apology for his forwardness — half sincere, half strategic. Edna accepts it. They continue to see each other. The note has done its work; the small breach can now be repaired without breaking the larger arrangement. Edna also visits Mademoiselle Reisz again. Reisz has been observing the change in Edna closely. She presses her hand to Edna's heart to test whether it has wings strong enough for the kind of flight Edna is contemplating. The chapter is the structural meeting of the two paths — Arobin and Reisz — between which Edna will spend the next month deciding.
Chapter 27
The first real kiss
Arobin calls in the evening. Edna is in a strange, suspended mood, talking abstractly about herself. She tells him about Reisz pressing her hand to her shoulder blades. Arobin asks where she would soar. She does not know. He sits close; his fingers find her hair; his eyes are very near. He leans forward 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." The chapter is one of the shortest and most decisive in the novel.
Chapter 28
Alone after Arobin
A single-paragraph chapter, the shortest in the novel. Edna cries a little after Arobin leaves. It is one phase of many: there is "an overwhelming feeling of irresponsibility," "the shock of the unexpected," "her husband's reproach looking at her from the external things around her which he had provided," and Robert's reproach felt as a quicker, fiercer love now awake in her. Above all, "there was understanding." There is no shame. There is no remorse. There is "a dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips."
Chapter 29
Moving to the pigeon house
Without waiting for Léonce's reply to her letter, Edna begins to move. She has rented a small cottage around the corner — Ellen the maid calls it the "pigeon house" because it is so small. Edna packs feverishly. She is taking only what is hers — what she has earned from her painting, what she has acquired apart from her husband's bounty. Arobin finds her on a high stepladder unhooking pictures and insists on taking her place; he climbs the ladder in a comically tied dust cap. Edna is splendid in a blue gown with a red kerchief on her head. The move is happening in three days.
Chapter 30
The farewell dinner
Ten guests: the Merrimans, Mrs. Highcamp, Arobin, Mademoiselle Reisz, Monsieur Ratignolle (Adèle is too far along to come; Madame Lebrun sends regrets), Victor Lebrun, Miss Mayblunt the would-be intellectual, the journalist Gouvernail, and Edna. The table glitters with crystal, gold, candles, yellow roses. Edna wears a gold satin gown and a cluster of diamonds in her hair (Léonce's birthday gift; she has just turned twenty-nine). Reisz, set on cushions, is small enough to need them. Mrs. Highcamp drapes Victor with a garland of roses and a white silk scarf. Victor begins to sing Robert's song from Grand Isle: "Ah! si tu savais." Edna shatters her glass against the carafe.
Chapter 31
Locking up the house
After the guests leave, Arobin and Edna lock up the Esplanade Street house together. He turns out the lights; she closes the windows; they leave through the front door and Arobin carries the key. They walk the short block to the pigeon house through midnight bells. Edna is exhausted and chilled; "I feel as if I had been wound up to a certain pitch — too tight — and something inside of me had snapped." Arobin says he is going. He smooths her hair. He kisses her shoulder. She says "good night." He does not leave. The chapter ends with the small italic line: "He did not say good night until she had become supple to his gentle, seductive entreaties."
Chapter 32
Léonce manages appearances
Léonce, learning of the move, writes Edna an unqualified disapproval. Then his usual cleverness kicks in. He instructs an architect to begin "renovations" at the Esplanade Street house — frescoing, hardwood floors, an addition. He places a notice in the papers that Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier are sojourning abroad and that their handsome residence is being remodeled. Financial reputation is preserved. Edna admires the maneuver. The pigeon house pleases her — "a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual." She spends a delicious February week in Iberville with the children. She comes home alone.
Chapter 33
Robert's letter
Adèle calls at the pigeon house and gently warns Edna about Arobin's reputation. Edna shrugs it off. Later Edna goes to Mademoiselle Reisz's; the pianist is out. Waiting in the empty apartment, Edna finds an open letter from Robert on the piano: he is about to return to New Orleans. Edna sits stunned. When Reisz comes home she sits down at the piano, plays Wagner, and lets Edna read the letter aloud. Edna leaves the apartment electric. That afternoon, sitting in the parlor of the pigeon house, Robert appears at the door.
Chapter 34
Awkward dinner
Robert and Edna dine in the pigeon house. The dinner is awkward, overwhelmed. He tells her vague things about Mexico. She returns a small book he had once given her with a marker still in it. He cannot quite explain his return. He cannot quite explain his absence either — why he never wrote. He is tortured by something he will not name. Arobin's tobacco pouch sits visible on the table; Robert sees it. He leaves earlier than Edna wants. He says he will come again. He is restrained where she expects him to be open.
Chapter 35
Hope and disappointment
Edna wakes the morning after Robert's visit hopeful — certain he loves her, willing herself to believe nothing insurmountable stands between them. The day passes. He does not come. He does not write. The next day passes too. She begins to doubt. Arobin, untroubled by Robert's reappearance, calls in the evening as usual. Edna receives him. The chapter is the slow turn from hope to a more careful, exhausted clarity. Robert is not behaving as a lover; she has, perhaps, been wrong about what he intends.
Chapter 36
In the garden café
Edna has discovered a small drowsy garden café in the suburbs — green tables under orange trees, a sleeping cat, an old mulatresse who sells coffee. One afternoon Robert walks in. They share her dinner. She presses him on his absence; he gives way. "Why have you been fighting against it? — Because you were not free; you were Léonce Pontellier's wife." He has been dreaming of asking Léonce to set her free. Edna, gentle, refuses the dream: "I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take her,' I should laugh at you both." A knock at the door — Adèle has gone into labor. Edna goes.
Chapter 37
Adèle's childbirth
Edna goes upstairs to find Adèle on the sofa in her white peignoir, hair plaited "like a golden serpent," eyes haggard. The nurse is urging her back to bed. Adèle scolds Doctor Mandelet for being late. Edna sits with her through hours of labor. She watches Adèle suffer. Her own remembered births come back faintly — the chloroform, an "ecstasy of pain." She wishes she had not come. She does not go. "With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture." When at last the baby is born and Edna leans over to kiss her friend goodbye, Adèle whispers, exhausted: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!"
Chapter 38
"Good-by — because I love you"
Doctor Mandelet walks Edna home in the small hours. "You shouldn't have been there, Mrs. Pontellier. That was no place for you." He gives her his most explicit philosophical line: "Youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race." He offers his confidence; she thanks him and does not accept it. She wants only her own way. At the gate she sits on the porch a long while. Inside, Robert is gone. On the table in the lamplight, a scrawled note: "I love you. Good-by — because I love you." She lies on the sofa all night without sleeping.
Chapter 39
The walk into the Gulf
Edna returns alone to Grand Isle. Victor and Mariequita are patching the gallery. She asks for fish for dinner and walks down to the beach. She strips off her old faded bathing suit at the water — "for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air" — and walks out. She does not look back. She thinks of Léonce and the children, of Reisz, of Robert's note. Her arms grow tired. She hears her father's voice, the barking of an old dog, the cavalry officer's spurs across the porch. The last sentence: "There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air."