just starting to consider as an unhappy wife and mother in Creole New Orleans.  She isn't that simple.

As the chapter progresses we learn that Edna had some "loves" in her past, but that they were more of her imagination than any possibility of reality.  She loved a "sad-eyed cavalry officer" who was actually more of an acquaintance of her father.  She loved a man, from a distance, who hardly knew she existed and who was engaged to the lady on the neighboring plantation.  She finally loved a "great tragedian" that "began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses."  Unfortunately, he was completely out of her realm -- a picture on her table -- and it was completely hopeless.  With all of this flashback information, it comes as no surprise then that when Leonce woos her with real, actual ardor, she is taken in, even though she doesn't love him.  Leonce is everything her father isn't, and that is part of his appeal.  He is attentive and loving; her father is aloof and a heavy drinker.  Leonce is polished and sincere; her father is a former army officer and a bit more brash.  Edna even openly admits that the fact that Leonce is Catholic and that that would irritate her father is one of the reasons she agreed to marry him. This flashback gives us a very complete picture of Edna's history in regards to men and establishes the foundations of her marriage to Leonce, so that when we see things falling apart, we can know that this might have been inevitable.  This has a great effect on the reading of the novel -- it makes Edna's character more complex and more interesting.

I think that the best function of flashbacks operate in the final scene of the novel.  Edna's entire life had been one in which she was "asleep," waiting to be "awakened."  The flashbacks fit into this narrative at the end of the novel.  They appear as voices she hears, being drowned out by the water's sound.  Her flashbacks go as far back to her sisters' voices and the presence of her father.  They operate as a frame of reference in representing how far Edna has come and how much she has grown or "awakened" from that time.  The fact that the flashbacks at the end of the novel come in the form of voices is also significant.  These voices represent the idea that at one point she understood and experienced these realities, these voices, only to find that now in her life they have their own specific contexts.  In a way, the flashbacks represent who she used to be, the person she was.  Their function at the end of the novel is to represent the past conception of Edna, one that has become permanently put to sleep and not "awakened."  It is here where I think that Edna's flashbacks into her past function in a profound manner, reflecting how a construction of self used to be in light of what is and, as Edna enters the water, what can and will be.

Edna's flashbacks reveal that she has always, consciously or not, questioned society's rules and the expectations placed on her as a female in the late-nineteenth century. The narrator describes Edna's juvenile crush on a famous tragedian (an actor), and she would kiss the glass on a framed picture she kept of him. Her marriage to Leonce, however, was "purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as decrees of Fate."

It is telling that the narrator describes her marriage as looking like it has to do with fate, as though Edna has no real choice in the matter—as though she entered into her role without really realizing what she was doing. She is flattered by his devotion, believes that they have some things in common, and feels her father and sister's "violent opposition" to her marriage to a Catholic. This is enough for her because she thinks that her relationship is unique and interesting. At any rate, once she realized her error,

As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.

Such a recollection shows us that Edna grew to accept the idea that reality and dignity could not accompany romance and dreams. The Creole wife is supposed to be an angel, self-effacing, luminous and near-divine in her duties to family, but this is something Edna never bought. She wants to be worshiped by her husband, not to worship at her husband's and children's feet.

Edna's flashbacks illustrate the fact that Edna has always felt different from the people that surround her.  In chapter 7 the narrator says that "even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself."  Edna's feelings and actions in the present time of the novel are not completely new feelings for her.  She is not simply unhappy with her marriage or her role as wife and mother.  She has felt a sense of disconnection between herself and the expectations of society and the traditional roles she was supposed to uphold.  She marries Leonce "on accident" because she was flattered by him and his Catholicism irritated her father and sister.  She has a benevolent disregard for her children.  In the last pages of the novel, as she is wandering out to sea, the rememebers an earlier night of swimming, and that reminds her of a feeling from her childhood.

She went on and on.  She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore.  She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.

The flashbacks provide insights into this woman who leaves what could be seen as a very nice life, and in the end, realizing she can't have everything she wants or that she isn't strong enough to maintain herself in this life, decides to end it all.