The Awakening is about Edna's dissatisfaction with the social constraints on women's freedom. Therefore, it is significant that it opens with two caged birds. Throughout the novel, Edna feels that marriage enslaves her to an identity she for which she is not suited. The parrot is an expensive bird valued for its beauty. The mockingbird is fairly common and plain, and it is valued for the music it provides. These two birds function as metaphors for the position of women in late Victorian society. Women are valued for their physical appearance and the entertainment they can provide for the men in their lives. Like parrots, they are not expected to voice opinions of their own, but to repeat the opinions that social convention defines as "proper" or "respectable."
             The parrot shrieks "Go away! Damnation!" These are the first lines of The Awakening, and they signal the essentially tragic nature of the novel. The parrot speaks French, a little Spanish, and a "language which nobody understood." Again, the parrot serves as a metaphor for Edna's predicament. As she becomes more defiant, she voices unconventional opinion about the sacred institutions of marriage, gender, and motherhood. Throughout the novel, Edna is misunderstood by her friends, lovers, and her husband. In a sense, she speaks a language that she can make no one understand.
             The tensions in Edna's marriage are apparent from the beginning. Leonce does not regard Edna as a partner in marriage, but as a possession. At the same time, he thinks of Edna as the "sole object of his existence." Obviously, his actions belie this belief.
             Leonce's beliefs about the role of women are strictly defined by Victorian social conventions. The ideal woman is what Leonce terms the "mother woman" desire nothing other than to "to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels" for their families. They are supposed to "flutter about with extended, protecting wings." The symbo...