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Open Window versus Closed Door

As readers analyze this work, they can easily pick up on the deeper meanings in Chopin’s choice of symbols, especially the contrast between the open window and the closed door in Louise’s room. As Louise retreats to her room, she sits in a chair in front of an open window.



When she looks out of the window, the diction and adjectives used to describe the scene, “new spring life,” “delicious breath of rain was in the air,” “patches of blue sky,” “sparrows...twittering in the eaves” each unmistakably contrasts the scene described in the first few paragraphs.  As Louise’s realization of freedom comes to her out of the sky, the window itself is a physical glimpse into what Louise is imagining her future to be. Chopin was not arbitrary in choosing her imagery for inside versus outside the house. Rain has always been a symbol for renewal, of washing away the old, and bringing nutrients to the new. Her husband’s death would wash away the “powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature” and bring on an independence so pure that she would be able to live “body and soul free.”



See more on imagery outside of the window from crying HERE





Yet, even though she sees this freedom coming to her, she resists it momentarily because it is not within the social norm for women at that time to think like Louise was beginning to. This freedom was so extraneous to the conditioned mind (or “mother-woman’s” mind, to reference Adele in The Awakening) of a 19th century woman that the only way Chopin would be able to explain it is through “the indefinite, the unidentified, which, as best we can judge, is some powerful force, something supernatural, something beyond the realm of mundane experience or the rule of logic.” (Deneau, Daniel P).



This scene through the open window represents freedom, and then it is immediately contrasted with the closed door that, “Josephine was kneeling before” imploring Louise to come back through. Eventually Louise turns away from her open window, yet she does not know that that action would literally finalize her fate away from a life of freedom. Louise and her sister descend the stairs toward Richards and Louise’s name is never mentioned again in the text.

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