"How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! How delicious! She felt like some new born creature, opening its eyes in some familiar world that it had never known." (115).
At the beginning of the novel, Edna is a stranger to the sensual freedom posed by Creole culture on the Grand Isle-- scandalized by discussions of pregnancy, proceeding from the house with a parisol and walking along the beach in a white dress covering everything. We get a full paragraph of text on page 14 describing this casual -- "She wore a cool muslin this morning, white with a waving verticle line of brown running through it; also a white linen collar and a big straw hat..." She unbuttons the collar with Madam Ratignolle on the beach, the cool muslin apparently not cool enough, right before her awakening begins--with her childhood memory of swimming through an endless field in Kentucky.
There are a number of references between this point and the end of the text in which clothing and society are synonymous with a kind of slavery of conformity. The baby garment Madam R knits for Edna with only two eyeholes as gates to the outer world is one such example of clothing as confinement. Also, when Edna decides to opt out of her social responsibilities, Chopin remarks, "he could not see that she was daily becoming herself and casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world" (57).
We can see this sense reflected in the other dualities the novel embraces as well.. lightness and darkness, the snake and bird imagery, the lovers and the religious woman in black who follows them-- Chopin is making a statement here about convention in clothing as not just a framing of one's individuality, but ultimately, determinative of one's identity, unless, like Madam Reizin says, one has the courage to constantly dare and defy.
Very smart post, Erin!
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