The Awakening of Kate ChopinThe story of Kate Chopin The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a woman who throughout the story tries to find herself. Edna begins the story in the role of the typical woman-mother typical of Creole society, but as the story progresses, the distance it puts between her and society also increases. Edna's search for independence and a way to break away from society's rules and lifestyles is depicted through symbolism with birds, clothing, and Edna's process of learning to swim. Chopin mentions birds subtly at many points in the plot and if looked at closely enough they are always connected to Edna and the journey of her awakening. In the first pages of the story, Chopin reveals Madame Lebrun's "green and yellow parrot, which was hanging in a cage" (Chopin 1). The caged bird at the beginning of the story highlights Edna's subconscious feeling of being trapped as a woman in the ideal of a woman-mother in Creole society. The parrot "could speak a little Spanish, and even a language no one understood" (1). The parrot's lack of a way to communicate due to the unfamiliar language describes Edna's inability to express her true feelings and thoughts. It is for this reason that no one understands her and what she is going through. A little later in the story, Madame Reisz plays a ballad on the piano. Whose name "was something else, but [Edna] called it 'Solitude.' When she heard it, the figure of a man standing on a desolate rock by the sea came to her mind... Her attitude was desperate resignation as he looked towards a distant bird flying away from him" (25). The bird in the distance symbolizes Edna's desire for freedom and the man in the vision shows the desire for the freedom that is so unattainable. At the end of the story, Chopin shows "a bird with a broken wing...beating the air above, wavering, fluttering, circling disabled down to the water" as Edna swims in the ocean at Grand Isle shortly before drowning. (115). The bird represents the inability to break away from the norms of society and become independent without inevitably falling into the inability to do everything on one's own. The different birds all have different meanings to Edna but they all show the progression of her awakening.