zelle Aurelie, who had never thought of marrying. She had never been in love. At the age of twenty, she had received a proposal, which she promptly declined. Also at the age of fifty she had not lived to regret it. (Chopin, Night in Acadie 145).In The Awakening, Edna becomes friends with Mademoiselle Reisz. Mademoiselle Reisz is another woman figure introduced into Edna's life. She is a musician who had devoted her life to music and considered to be somewhat eccentric because of her outspoken and candid views. Mademoiselle Reisz has no patients for social rules and violates many basic expectations of femininity. She, like other of Chopin's characters, is not married. This attitude on life that Mademoiselle Reisz expresses, and a certainty of who she is and what she thinks is absorbed by Edna. Mademoiselle Reisz seems to "reach Edna's spirit and set it free" (The Awakening 78). Chopin uses Mademoiselle Reisz's acts as a reinforcement to Edna's "Awakening". It is not until Mademoiselle Reisz plays a song for Edna that Edna announced aloud to others the love she feels for someone else other than her husband. Madame Ratignolle and Mademmoiselle Reisz not only represent important alternative roles and influences for Edna, they also suggest different plots and conclusions. Adele Ratignolle's character and story suggest that there is a possibility that Edna will stop rebelling and return to her marriage and learn to love her husband. This was "the plot of many late nineteenth-century sentimental novels about eering young women married to older men." (Showalter 182). Mademoiselle Reisz's story suggests that Edna will lose her beauty, youth, husband, children-everything. Chopin refuses both of these endings to escape from the literary traditions they represent. Her literary solitude made it possible for her to put her own ending in the story. The least obvious ending for Chopin to choose was the one she chose, suicide for Edna....
