When the kids arrive with guess who, Robert to the beach were Edna and Adele are having a conversation about feeling that Edna does not usually have. They talk about her childhood lovers, her true feelings of life, and what she thinks about her family. Robert leaves the children with their mothers and later on they all leave in order to get ready for a dinner party that night.
Robert loses sight of Edna and looks for her all over the beach and finally decides to head back to her mother's cottage. There we know that Victor his brother is quite the opposite from Victor, a "young, wild, and free" soul that from my perspective does not follow general norms. Robert talks with her mother and her mother asks Robert where Mrs. Pontellier which Robert answers by going over to look for her. It looks as if her mother has implied Robert his, his way of dealing with woman and treating them the way he usually treats them.
In chapter IX Edna arrives with her kids to the dinner party where all the people of the island are gathered around. Edna finds herself in some sort of way bored, alones, and desolated. After her kids have gone to bed she exits the cottage and heads over to the porch to look at the calm but hostile ocean which Chopin uses as a constant reference to different points of view that arise throughout the novella, mostly meaning the desire to pursuit a dream or vocation.
Robert reaches the porch and talks a while with Edna and induces her to walk inside again to listen to the performance the little children. Edna then states that she likes Adele way of playing and pictures images of different emotions while she plays, in her mind she sees pictures of "a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His attitude was once of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him." (Chopin, 55) I think that Edna feels with every piece of music a different emotion or picture and Adele's picture evokes an image of a naked man maybe suggesting that Adele even though her music is good it is still portrayed through the figure of a man and not a woman even if she is the creator of the piece. The historical period implies that everything a woman makes is in part property of her husband, if not completely.
However we learn that Mademoiselle Reisz has accepted Roberts's invitation to play for Edna in the dinner. As Mademoiselle Reisz plays her soft tunes and melodic rhyme Edna feels something she has never felt before and she is completely amazed by the impact the music had on her. "But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her." Edna in my opinion felt connected to Reisz in a very deep way and could have thought that she shared the same feelings as her, the same despair, and anguish portraying it through her music and making other woman understand the true power of Reisz music. At the end Mademoiselle Reisz tells Edna "You are the only one worth playing for. Those others? Bah!" I think Mademoiselle Reisz also felt connected to Edna in some way.
Just before chapter IV ended something caught my eye and that was the following: "The last prelude! Bon Dieu! It shakes a man!" I liked how Chopin expresses Mademoiselle Reisz music as a feeling so powerful an emotive that it could be able to shake a man which is normally thought to be the brave and heroic character in society.
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