nt after the concert when she reclines in the hammock and does not agree with Pontellier that it is time for her to be in bed: "Another time she would have gone in at his request . . . not with any sense of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly" (Chopin 30). The point is that Edna has begun, however diffidently, to think for herself, to make an assertion of independent, subjective moral entitlement in an environment hostile to any such action.
But it seems inappropriate to see The Awakening as a fem inist political tract. It is a personal story of a woman trying to find her way, now by determined quest, now by diffident experimentation with scandal, but always in tension with an environment that stifles idiosyncratic impulses against convention. ""I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex," she says. "But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it" (Chopin 79). Allen specifically rejects the view that the novel is "about" Edna's awakening sexuality or her "biologic functions . . . sex-partner and mother, mere agent to the needs, sexual and nurturing, of others--the real human beings" (Allen 229).
It seems difficult to overstate the social content of Edna's psychoemotional odyssey, whether illicit love affair or a rest in a hammock. Each episode creates domestic tension as others worry what is the matter with her. Resolution of suc
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