In conclusion, Fleur's and Edna's abilities to find their home in the third space in between societal roles are determined by their respective relationship to a community. These two characters are both struggling with pulls from different cultures or gender roles. I have illustrated these pulls by analyzing symbols in both novels, where water, the black umbrella and card games are the symbols communicating Fleur's hybridity while it is still water but also aposition between stereotypic bi-characters that symbolizes Edna's hybridity. I have moved on to show how Fleur's hybridity is empowering and works as a resistance against the oppressing colonizing power. This I have contrasted with how Edna never arrives at feeling empowered, but instead is driven to isolation and suicide. In both cases I have argued that their respective level of empowerment or lack thereof is related to their connection to a community.
By comparing Edna to Fleur, I have emphasized the importance of a community in relation to hybridity. Ramos’ argument that Chopin's novel is a warning to what might happen if one abandons all societal roles (143), has been developed through contrasting Edna, a hybrid character who increasingly isolates herself, to Fleur - another hybrid character who belongs to an interdependent society that values community. Their hybridity is shared, what makes them end differently is their different relationships to their communities.
It cannot be ignored that the strong relationship to a community is a deeply rooted Native American value (Jepson 26). This might not be the case for the American culture. I will end this essay with a quote from Susan Castillo, where she problematizes the rather meek female protagonists in the American canon and compare them to heroines in Native American literature:
"Heroines, particularly those who challenge prevailing social and cultural norms, are all too prone to every sort of disaster: they are either condemned to social ostracism...or die in ways which are more or less aesthetically appealing (...Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier, and so very many others). In our own century, however, it is curious that female protagonists who actually manage not only to survive but actually to prevail and even prosper can be found in significant numbers in popular fiction and in fiction by so-called "ethnic" or minority writers. Perhaps for this reason, I have found novels by Native American women particularly attractive." (13)
Maybe it is true that no (wo)man is an island. To have "a transpersonal self that includes a network of relationships to a culture, history, and place" (Jepson 26), is perhaps the only way to find a home in the search for one, in between pre-determined roles.
2021. , p. 22