en ignore or escape them altogether, since they simply do not engage her interest. While it is only now that Edna consciously acknowledges her feelings, these, as Chopin implies, have steadily built inside her mind for awhile. The dual stimuli of Robert Lebrun and enforced social indolence when summering at Grande Isle, in combination, bring Edna's personal crisis to a head. Now she knows for sure that her life as it is has no important meaning, for herself, even if still for her husband and sons.
             But Edna is tired of living only for or through others. However, Edna's deepest despair, which leads to her eventual self-destruction springs not from that, but instead from the fact that Edna, especially within her time, place, and situation, can find no means of lasting, permanent escape from her current life that will permit her a different, genuinely happier one. Thus, she can maintain no hope, especially after Robert's final rejection of her suggestion of a possible future for them together (which also reveals, to her excruciating disappointment, Robert's core Creole conventionality after all) that anything important to her own self will become better for her.
             Her sad isolated personal journey toward this realization at the end of the book, though, is a relatively slow, circuitous one. This begins (within the story itself, at least) when Edna initially reaches beyond and outside her household, at first in mere conversational visits with other, more (if distinctly) contented women that summer. Edna's search for a concrete and obtainable key to her possible self-actualization, despite (and/or even in place of) her present domestic circumstances, next leads her to engage in full-blown extra-marital affairs, including one with the opportunistic Alcee Arobin, in her continued if fruitless efforts to calm her agitated mind and spirit. But here as well she discovers that no one at all – ei...