s more out of life. She is moved by music. During that summer Edna sketches to find an artistic side to herself. She needs an outlet to express who she is. Edna feels that art is important and adds meaning to her life. After the summer is over and they are back to the city and Edna is a changed woman. She makes many steps towards independence. She stops holding “Tuesday socials”, she sends her children to live in the country with their grandparents, she refuses to travel abroad with her husband, she moves out of the Lebrun house on Esplanade Street, and to earn money, she starts selling her sketches and betting the horses. She also starts a relationship with another man Alcee Arobin. He meant nothing to her emotionally but she used him for sexual pleasure. Edna evolved above her peers she did not believe that sexuality and motherhood had to be linked. The last step of her “awakening” is the realization that she can not fulfill her life in a society that will not allow her to be a person and a mother. Edna commits suicide in the ocean at Grand Isle. She married Leonce not because she loved him but because she could not refuse his admiration and persistence. This marriage thrusts Edna into a foreign culture. She questions her role as a mother because she is different from the typical Creole “mother-woman.” Edna defies the central perception that women are mothers first and individuals second-or not at all. She never denies the value of motherhood. But she does deny its superiority over larger truths of human existence. This is what leads to her suicide. Edna refuses to return to a world that values only her performance as a mother, whose highest expectations for women are self-sacrifice and modest. She refuses to return to a world in which this idea is pervasive, inescapable, and inevitably colors even her own thinking. For Edna, -3-there is an ideal truth greater than that of motherhood. Motherhood be...
