The plight of Edna in The AwakeningDr. Mandelet, speaking more like a wise, older man than a medical authority, seems to understand Edna's plight. When Mr. Pontellier asks him for advice regarding his wife's strange behavior, the doctor immediately asks: "Is there any man involved in the case?" (950). While Edna thinks about expressing her rights of independence, Dr. Mandelet knows that her heart is still tied to the need for a man in her life and an uncontrolled submission to sexual passion. After her self-proclaimed liberation from the narrow world of her husband's prescribed gender roles, Edna begins to act spontaneously, without considering, as Leonce would have it, "what people would say" (977). During a visit to Mademoiselle Reisz, he boldly displays his new attitude, rejecting the more modest hot chocolate in favor of a "man's drink": "I'll have some brandy," said Edna, trembling as she removed her gloves and overshoes. He drank the liquor from the glass as a man would. Then, throwing himself onto the uncomfortable sofa, he said: "Mademoiselle, I am going away from my house in Esplanade Street." (962)Yet she will move "just two steps" (962), she admits, betraying the fact that her feminist step forward will be hindered by at least two steps back. Her new assertiveness will not be enough to protect her from the difficulties associated with changing her life. Although she expresses herself to Robert in what she considers an "unfeminine" style (990), she is still a victim of social conditioning, wanting to give up her identity to another person. Cristina Giorcelli writes that "Transitional states are inevitably states of interiority and exterior ambiguity. In her search for her true self, Edna loses, or enhances with the addition of opposite ones, her original gender connotations and social attributes" (121). However, such a reading risks simplifying the story in an attempt to clarify exactly what is ambiguous. Even if Giorcelli agrees that the message of the story is confused, he seems to contradict himself when he claims that, through her androgyny Edna manages to achieve the totality of a composite unity, integral and versatile, necessary and free. Triumphing over sex and role differentiations ontologically implies subjugating what substantiates but limits, and ethically implies mastering the dark one-sidedness of responsibility. The bourgeois crisis that Edna endures: the discrepancy between duty towards others and right towards herself[--] .