Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Kate Chopin's The Awakening are novels about the traps that society creates for the individual. In both books suicide is seen as the only way out of the constricted circumstances in which the characters are expected to live. In both books, however, the authors also make it clear that society's confinement of the individual does not affect just their suffering heroes. In fact, these social constraints affect most of the characters. In Chopin's novel, the dramatic difference between Leonce Pontellier and Edna Pontellier is in his choice to adapt to his cage and her becoming conscious of the cage and finding its constraints unbearable. In Wharton's novel, both the Fromes suffer from the cage in which they find themselves, but their responses to their entrapment, while they differ in content, are alike in form as each blames the other.
In nineteenth century society, especially in a highly structured society such as that of New Orleans, women's positions were everything to them so long as they wished to continue living on good terms with the larger group. But men were expected to adhere to a code as well. Men's behavior was freer than women's, but this does not mean that there was not a great deal of pressure to conform. In a tightly knit group or in a rural area, to break faith with the mores of the group might mean that one would be cast out. A smaller group has greater power to sanction the individual transgressor. There were, of course, major differences in what men and women could do. Women had little control over what their husbands might be up to in a society such as that depicted in Chopin's novel. Men, after all, included the control of their wives in their social responsibilities. The limitations on a woman's power to act were as great inside the home as they were outside. In smaller communities, the greatest control women could exert was to invoke or to threaten the censure of t...