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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Loosening Chains:
In Chapter 12, Edna and Robert plan to go to the Chênière for mass. On the journey there, Edna senses that something about herself is changing, and the book uses a simile to describe this change:
Sailing across the bay to the Chênière Caminada, Edna felt 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 when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails.
This passage describes Edna as being previously tied to an anchor, now free. This figurative language conveys Edna’s new desire for independence, a result of her beginning to focus on her inner life and individuality. The anchor could be said to represent the conventions Edna begins to reject throughout the course of the novel, specifically her duties as a mother and wife. Eventually, though, Edna behaves according to her own desires: she moves into the pigeon-house alone, away from her husband and children, and spends time alone with the young bachelor Alcée Arobin, abandoning the conservative values of the society she lives in. In this sense, the figurative "chains" holding her "snap[]." However, the novel suggests that Edna’s abandonment of societal rules has a cost, which is perhaps what this passage alludes to when it describes Edna "drift[ing]." Aimless and alone, with no clear principles or social norms to live by, she chooses a tragic form of freedom: death.
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