Chapter XX — Summary

Plot Summary

Chapter XX opens with Edna in one of her dark, restless moods, seeking out Mademoiselle Reisz and the solace of her piano playing. Having lost the pianist’s card, Edna consults an outdated city directory and travels to an address on Bienville Street, only to find a family of mulattoes renting furnished rooms. The grocer nearby is equally unhelpful, declaring Reisz the “most disagreeable and unpopular woman” ever to live on the street. Far from discouraging Edna, these obstacles intensify her desire to find the musician—a pattern that mirrors her growing attraction to what lies beyond easy reach.

Edna decides that Madame Lebrun would most likely know Reisz’s whereabouts and walks to the Lebrun home on Chartres Street. Victor Lebrun opens the gate and, while they wait for his mother, begins recounting a romantic escapade from the previous evening in a conspiratorial whisper. Madame Lebrun arrives, effusively welcoming Edna, and the conversation turns to two letters received from Robert in Mexico. The letters are polite and impersonal—financial updates, descriptions of Mexico City, love sent to the family—but contain no message for Edna. Madame Lebrun provides Mademoiselle Reisz’s address, and Victor escorts Edna to the streetcar, entreating her to keep his evening’s story confidential.

Character Development

Edna’s determination to locate Mademoiselle Reisz despite repeated setbacks reveals a woman who has learned to act on her own impulses without waiting for permission. Her willingness to traverse New Orleans alone, visiting unfamiliar neighborhoods and pressing strangers for information, marks a significant departure from the domestic passivity expected of Creole wives. When she discovers that Robert’s letters include no word for her, Chopin writes that “the despondent frame of mind in which she had left home began again to overtake her,” exposing the fragility beneath Edna’s new independence—her self-worth still tethered, at this stage, to Robert’s attention.

Victor serves as a youthful, uninhibited mirror of Robert’s charm. His flirtatious storytelling draws Edna into a feeling of being “a confederate in crime,” and the chapter closes with his candid observation that Edna is “ravishing” and “doesn’t seem like the same woman.” Through the eyes of both Victor and his mother, the reader sees external confirmation of Edna’s transformation.

Themes and Motifs

The chapter foregrounds the theme of desire for the unattainable. Edna’s search for Mademoiselle Reisz becomes more urgent with each obstacle, and her silent anguish over Robert’s absent message reflects the same pattern: what she cannot easily have compels her most powerfully. The iron bars on the Lebrun house, described as “a relic of the old régime” that “no one had ever thought of dislodging,” function as a symbol of outdated social constraints—still firmly in place despite having lost their original purpose, much like the conventions governing women’s lives in Creole New Orleans.

Music resurfaces as a motif of emotional refuge: Edna seeks Reisz specifically to “listen while she played upon the piano,” suggesting that art offers a channel for feelings Edna cannot yet articulate through language or action. Robert’s letters, meanwhile, enact a motif of emotional absence—his polite, dutiful words serve the family but withhold exactly what Edna craves.

Literary Devices

Chopin structures the chapter as a quest narrative in miniature: Edna passes through a series of gatekeepers—the mulatto family, the grocer, Victor, Madame Lebrun—before finally obtaining the address she needs. This picaresque movement through New Orleans physically enacts her psychological journey away from domestic enclosure. The iron bars before the Lebrun house constitute an architectural metaphor for patriarchal tradition, and the high fence and locked garden gate literalize the barriers between Edna and the information she seeks. Victor’s story of a girl “peeping and smiling at him through the shutters” creates an ironic parallel to Edna’s own awakening desire—both are drawn to forbidden connections glimpsed from behind barriers. Chopin’s closing dialogue technique is characteristically indirect: the final exchange between Victor and his mother delivers the chapter’s key insight—that Edna’s inner transformation is now visible to the world—through voices outside Edna’s own.