The Awakening of Kate ChopinKate Chopin's short story, The Awakening, tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a woman who, throughout the short story, tries to find yourself. Edna begins the story in the role of the typical mother-wife of Creole society, but as the novella progresses, the distance she puts between herself and society also increases. Edna's search for independence and a way to break away from society's rules and ways of life is represented through the symbolism of birds, clothing, and Edna's process of learning to swim. Chopin mentions birds subtly at many plot points and if you look closely enough they are always linked to Edna and her journey to her awakening. In the first pages of the story, Chopin reveals Madame Lebrun's “green and yellow parrot, hanging in a cage” (Chopin 1). The caged bird at the beginning of the story highlights Edna's unconscious feeling of being trapped as a woman in the ideal of a mother-woman in Creole society. The parrot “could speak a little Spanish, and also a language that no one understood” (1). The parrot's lack of means of communication due to the unfamiliar language illustrates Edna's inability to express her true feelings and thoughts. This is why no one understands her or what she is going through. A little further into the story, Madame Reisz plays a ballad on the piano. The name “was something else, but [Edna] called it “Solitude.” When she heard it, her imagination appeared to her as the silhouette of a man standing on a desolate rock by the sea… His attitude was one of desperate resignation as he looked toward a distant bird that was receding. of him" (25). The bird in the distance symbolizes Edna's desire for freedom and the man in the vision shows the desire for freedom that is so out of reach. At the end of the story, Chopin shows " a bird with a broken wing…beating the air above, staggering, fluttering, circling, crippled, down to the water” while 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 for oneself The different birds all have different meanings for Edna but. they all show the progression of his awakening..