        The separation between Edna and her husband and therein between Edna and popular convention as well, is represented by her moving into her own house, but the most symbolic act of her rejection of the status quo occurs after dinner one night.  Edna throws her wedding ring to the floor and earnestly tries to crush it underfoot.  As she is unable to, we might take the point that she is not strong enough to abandon her marriage or convention, for that matter.  In fact, she puts the undamaged ring back onto her finger.  The doctor’s character seems to parallel the husband’s in denying the validity of female individualism.  He, after hearing about Edna from the husband’s point of view, offers his patriarchal analysis for the causes of deviant female behavior.  “[W]ith a smile,” insinuating ridicule, he theorizes that she might be “associating” with “a circle of pseudo-intellectual women – super-spiritual superior beings…”  It might even be a genetically inherited defect.  Finally, the doctor’s solution is to have “her stay among her own people.”  She would hopefully behave and think as “her own people” do (Chopin 88).  The doctor concludes that if all else fails, one must consider the nature of women as mood-based persons.  Double standards are characteristic of patriarchy.  Only men were permitted to lust for lust’s sake.  When Edna allows Arobin to have her, she compounds her failure at motherhood with a failure at womanhood, in the eyes of the society that conditioned her.  The character of Robert serves to illustrate, as he ultimately abandons her, that she is not able to find any life partner to join with her in a union which flouts convention.  Regarding her inner sense of identity, we are privy to Edna’s reaction to a woman even more “unfamiliar” than Riesz.  Edna “looked at [Mariequita’s] feet, and noticed the sand and slime between her brown toes” (55).  This image nicely conveys the view of the girl as savage and wild.  Because Edna’s response to the girl’s “broad and coarse” sandal-clad feet is that she “liked it all” (55), we gain insight into her burgeoning psychic transformation.  The girl also becomes an example of female nakedness and connection to the earth, which we are learning at this point in the story, must excite and intrigue Edna.  She becomes obsessed one night with a taboo book that is passed around a group of her peers.  The extent of their novelty with the item is to discuss it with each other, but Edna sneaks it away to her room where she secretly uses it, making sure nobody can discover what she’s doing.  Overall, her island visit makes her feel ”as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening – had snapped the night before…leaving her free” (56). 