And the ladies, selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontillier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontillier was forced to admit she could think of none better. (pg. 11)
This isn’t the first time we see Edna Pontillier’s deep-rooted dissatisfaction with her lot in life, but this line, at least in my reading, set the tone for the rest of the book.
Leonce Pontillier believes his wife to be a bad mother. He criticizes her every opportunity he gets. When confronted with her unusually irritable and asocial moods, his worry is not about her as an individual, but about her neglected roles of hostess and homemaker, which impede his own social climb. His solutions to this were to scold her as if she were a child (pg. 87) and to ask a doctor to assess her in secret (pg. 102), again not for her sake, but for his own. Even upon his learning that she may leave him and their children, “He was simply thinking of his financial integrity… [Edna’s departure] might do incalculable mischief to his business prospects.” (pg. 143) All of this, and she believes he truly is the best husband she can find.
Throughout the novel, Mrs. Pontillier is fixated most often on what she cannot have. Even when we learn of how she and Leonce ended up married, we learn far more of the tragedian with whom she had been infatuated (pg. 26-27), with our narrator even telling us “The hopelessness of it colored it with the lofty tones of a great passion.” (pg. 26) This pattern of thinking continues into her relationship with Robert, with her fixation on him seeming to stem mainly from his newfound lack of presence in her life. Even her affair with Arobin seems to mainly focus on the fact that she would be better off to stay true to her husband. This stubborn contrarianism is a direct manifestation of her desire to be in control of her life as an individual.
For any woman who had been made for the role of 1890’s wife, wealthy, devoted Mr. Pontillier likely would be the ideal husband. For Mrs. Pontillier, someone so perfectly suited for the lifestyle of upper middle-class New Orleans would be eternally at odds with what she wanted from her life. The problem was not with her, or even with Leonce. The problem was Edna’s unfortunate timing of life. Trapped in and dissatisfied with what she believes are the best circumstances she can attain, we can hardly blame Edna for leaping into the sea.