Pontellier is deeply in love with his wife (sending her presents when away, feeling uneasy about her behaviour), it is indisputable that she is not that important to him to overcome his omnipresent fear - “what people would say” (p. 581).
Robert Lebrun, on the other hand, is a young bachelor not being tied up with family matters. He is open-minded and free, intending to go to Mexico one day and to make a fortune there. Though each summer at Grand Isle Robert used to devote his gentlemanly courtesy to a different woman from their community, it seems that this summer he has fallen in love with a woman who is different from the others. He likes to be in Edna’s presence and when having a conversation “each was interested in what the other said” (p.510). Robert’s old-fashioned gentlemanly courtesy and social grace appeals to Edna’s feminine side, igniting something inside her that causes her to look at herself in a different light. Edna Pontellier sees that she is a living, breathing human being, a woman who wants to create for herself a life guided by her own feelings and thoughts. Edna starts to awaken and reconsiders her situation.
The first signs of awakening of the main character can be traced back to the beginning of the novel, to the scene when Edna is sitting at the porch of Pontellier’s summer cottage, crying, after her husband accused her of being inattentive to and neglecting the children. In that moment “an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish… It was strange and unfamiliar, it was a mood” (p. 512).
The fact is that Edna Pontellier is not a typical mother figure, she is not a mother-woman. She is not a woman who idolizes her two children, or worships her husband as it could be observed in the behaviour of other Creole woman who were spending their summer at Grand Isle. It is their absence of prudery and reserve which distinguishes these women from Edna. Since Edna has not always been a member of this Catholic Creole environment, we can understand her behaviour, which was at the beginning prudent and reserved. She comes from a respectable Presbyterian family living on a plantation in Kentucky. She was not accustomed to any expression of affection, nor any expression of opinion. Therefore her marriage to a young Catholic, Léonce Pontellier might also be understood as a sign of revolt in her traditional Victorian role of a woman.
Though gradually, facing the reality, Edna grows fond of her husband and of her children in an uneven and impulsive way. “She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them” (p. 522).