As the main protagonist, Edna undergoes a significant change in attitude, behavior, and overall character throughout the course of the novel, as she becomes aware of and examines the private, unvoiced thoughts that constitute her true self. Her characterization was strikingly ambivalent for its time: She is neither a flawless heroine nor a fallen woman, and her rebellion seems motivated more by the self-centered desire to fulfill her whims and wishes than to battle for a great cause larger than herself.
Edna is initially symbolized by the caged green-and-yellow parrot of the opening scene, the parrot that insists, in French, that everyone "go away, for God's sake." Like the parrot, Edna begins to desire solitude, pushing away her husband and former friends to achieve time alone in which she can work on her art or engage in self-reflection.
From the start, she is different from her husband and all her friends because she is a Presbyterian from Kentucky rather than a Creole Catholic. Physically, she is different from other women with her distinctive face and figure. Also, unlike the other women by whom she is surrounded, she is not a mother-woman, one who is willing to sacrifice her very self to her husband, children, and household.
Although not a particularly strong or rebellious spirit in the past, during her summer on Grand Isle, Edna develops a devotion to the pursuit of passion and sensuality, two qualities lacking in her marriage and home. She has a great weakness for the melodrama of unrequited or unfulfilled love. The passion she develops for Robert over the summer becomes her all-consuming occupation and, in part, instigates her radical departures from convention upon returning to New Orleans. Her obsession with Robert is ultimately suspect in its sincerity, given her instinctive attraction to adversity in love.
