Given the events of this chapter, Edna's fatal depression seems inevitable. Doctor Mandelet succinctly expresses the crux of Edna's dissatisfaction with life as a wife and mother, asserting that "youth is given up to illusions" about the nature of marriage and motherhood. The conservative culture she was raised in promoted the idea that marriage and motherhood provided an eminently satisfying vocation for all women, regardless of their temperament or true interests. Edna believed in this illusion and so committed herself to both endeavors, only to realize that she is suited for neither, being too independent and capricious.
Mandelet implies that the concept of motherhood as an integral and inevitable part of women's lives is constructed in part by society and in part by the most basic hormonal working of human biology — society's romanticized image of motherhood "seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race." This illusion disregards the trauma of childbirth and the dissatisfaction that some women feel with the constraints of motherhood. If a woman in Edna's culture responds to this dissatisfaction and seeks to give up marriage and motherhood in order to follow what she feels is her true path, she is condemned outright. If Edna divorces Léonce, she will be utterly ostracized.
In his counsel to Edna, the doctor insists that he would understand what she is going through, should she choose to confide in him. He is well versed in human nature, after all. The discrepancy in their levels of understanding and experience is emphasized when he twice addresses her as "my child." She is a child in terms of her newly developed comprehension of life, having just awoken to the reality of her unsatisfying marriage and overall lack of interest in the lifestyle Léonce demands. In waking to her true self, she is birthing herself. And like a child, she insists "I don't want anything but my own way," an internal demand she's been fully catering to since Léonce left for New York and the children left for their grandmother's. Now she is forced to consider, like an adult, whether she owes her children enough consideration to go on living with their father and subverting her desire for independence. She has to ask herself whether she should "trample upon the little lives," leaving children who need her on a personal level and who would face on a social level the stigma of their mother's abandonment.
