Q.) Edna and Adele are friends, but clearly foils of each other. How?
Edna and Adele are clearly friends, that is an indisputable fact of the novel. It’s especially present within the scene of them sitting in the sun together in chapter 7. However, there is a present divide between them that prevents them from being on equal footing. It starts with the critique of Edna’s mothering skills and comparing them with what he sees of Adele’s, as Adele is seen at the typical doting motherly figure who adores her children and the role of motherhood herself.
“…Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle… They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.” (Chopin, Chapter IV)
Adele, who we don’t get a deep insight into her mental process, comes across as the ideal of the woman of the time. Happy being a wife and a mother without any real reason to question it. Edna didn’t really marry her husband for love; it was more for convenience and to keep up the surface level of her happiness with turmoil boiling underneath. That’s the real difference between Edna and Adele. Edna finds personal reason to question her lifestyle, what led her to it, and how to progress forward along with this questioning. She becomes aroused to what her real place within this world really is, while Adele is content with her role already.
” Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight… But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!” (Chopin)
Their individual physical appearances is also something that they differ in, though not as strongly as their emotional statuses. Adele is described in an idealistic way, as though she is the definition of that period’s beauty. “There are no words to describe her save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams.” (Chopin) This is such a poetic description of Adele that nobody could ever keep up, let alone Edna. Their physical descriptions are not as distinct as their internal differences, however, their outer appearances mirror whatever is going on inside their mind, whether they’re happy or fighting an inner storm of emotions.
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