Perhaps Edna in The Awakening wouldn’t have started to paint, seriously, without her solitude. (What does it mean to paint seriously, to write seriously? It is all about self-identity, and discipline, this audacity to believe that what one could possibly create is worth sharing with the world.) In Chopin’s novel, Edna begins to see herself as both a sovereign person and an artist because her husband has left the vacation island to go to work. So she spends the summer in unusual circumstances, alone and with a community of women (as well as with Robert, her eventual lover).
