Caged Birds In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

In the novel The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, caged birds are used throughout the story to symbolize Edna’s journey from entrapment to freedom, to then losing hope. A caged bird, a free bird and a broken winged bird all relate to her journey as an enlightened person, wanting freedom but feeling a lack of hope. During Edna’s gradual awakening, the caged birds are used to symbolize her feeling of imprisonment by a male dominated society, in which she tries to overcome to have her own freedom. In the beginning of the novel, caged birds are used to represent her lack of freedom and her entrapment by society. The novel takes place during the Victorian Era, in which many women were not allowed to think or act on their own and their job was merely to care for the health and happiness of their families. In the first sentence, a Parrot squawks, “Allez vous-en! Sapristi!” as it sits in a cage, being ignored by Mr. Pontellier. It's literal entrapment represents Edna’s figurative imprisonment, both being something they cannot control. The Parrot is speaking nonsense to others, yet the caged
mockingbird understands. This represents Edna’s inability to voice her frustrations to the outside world until she meets Mademoiselle Reisz, who helps her journey to freedom. As Edna starts to become her own person and make her own decisions, Chopin uses the image of free birds to symbolize her new found identity and freedom.
She moves out of her house, leaving her husband and children behind, into a small little house, coincidentally called the “Pigeon House” This small house is her new nest, similar to a birds nest, in which she can keep her own belongings. A women living on her own was very rare for Victorian woman, which represents her flight from the cage that society has set around her. Mademoiselle Reisz was similar to a mother bird, teaching her young chicks how to fly and live on there own. She says “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings”. Even though Reisz wants Edna to succeed on living on her own and having freedom, she foreshadows the possibility of Edna failing and losing faith in
herself. In the end of the novel, Edna begins to lose hope in herself and questions whether the decisions she made were the right ones. As she is walking down to the beach, ready to commit suicide, she looks up and sees a bird with a broken wing, “beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling, disabled, down, down to the water.” This injured represents her attitude before drowning, unable to break through the boundaries no matter how hard she pushed, and constantly being shut down by others. The caged birds referenced in the novel represent her figurative imprisonment by a male driven society, the free birds symbolize her awakening and drive o become her own person, and the injured bird in the last scene concluded the story to show how she failed that breaking through her own cage, and was defeated by her own decisions.