Throughout The Awakening, Kate Chopin conveys her ideas by using carefully crafted symbols that reflect her characters' thoughts and futures. One of the most important of these symbols, the bird, appears constantly, interwoven into the story to provide an insight to the condition of Edna and her struggle. At each of the three stages of her transformation, birds foreshadow her actions and emphasize the actions' importance while the birds' physical state provides an accurate measure of that of Edna's. The irony in this is the independence the bird itself symbolizes, yet it is compared to Edna, a woman of great limitation and restraint. .
Early in the novel, while Edna attempts to escape from society's strong grasp, birds emphasize her entanglement by forecasting her actions and monitoring her development by reflecting her feelings. The novel opens with the image of a bird, trapped and unable to communicate, "a green and yellow parrot, which hung in the cage outside the door.could speak a little Spanish, and also a language that nobody understood" (1). Like the bird, Edna feels trapped and believes that society has imprisoned her. Her marriage to Mr. Pontellier suffocates her and keeps her from being free. At the same time, she remains shut apart from society like the bird in the cage, and different ideas and feelings prevent her from communicating. She feels that she, herself, speaks an unknown language. The only person in society that begins to understand her, Robert, eventually decides that he must remain a member of society instead of staying with her. He says that "you [Edna] were not free; you were Leonce Pontellier's wife" and that "[Robert] was demented, dreaming of wild, impossible things.[such as] men who had set their wives free" (108). Robert does not want to do something wild and unacceptable to society. In a situation parallel to that of Edna's, the only bird that understands the parrot is the mockingbird (Reisz) that "[is] whistling its fluty notes upon the breeze with maddening persistence" (1).
