Langston Hughes and Kate Chopin use nature in different dimensions to demonstrate the powerful struggles and burdens of human life. In Kate Chopin's The Awakening and many of Langston Hughes' poems, overwhelming images of the beauty and power of nature demonstrate the struggles that characters face and their eventual freedom from those struggles. Nature and freedom coexist, and the characters ultimately learn to find freedom from the confines of society, themselves, and ultimately freedom in their own soul. The use of nature for this purpose brings the characters and speakers in the works of Chopin and Hughes to life, and the reader feels the life and freedom of those characters. Nature, in the works of Chopin and Hughes, serves as a powerful symbol representing the struggle of the human soul towards freedom, the anguish of that struggle, and the joy when that freedom is finally achieved. In The Awakening the protagonist Edna Pontellier undergoes a metamorphosis. She lives in Creole society, a society that limits sexuality, especially for women of the time. Edna is bound by the confines of a loveless marriage, unfulfilled, unhappy, and locked up like a caged bird. During the summer in Grand Isle she confronts herself in her truest nature and finds herself overwhelmed by passion and love for someone she can't have, Robert Lebrun. The images of the ocean in Grand Isle and its attributes symbolize a force that calls to her. to face his internal struggles and find freedom. Chopin uses imagery of the ocean to represent the innate force in her soul that calls to her. "The voice of the sea is seductive; it never ceases, it whispers, cries, murmurs, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abyss of solitude; to get lost in a labyrinth of interior contemplation." (p.14) Through nature and its power, Edna, begins to find freedom in her soul and then returns to a life in the city where the conflicts that surround her lie. Edna grew up on a Mississippi plantation, where life was simple, happy, and peaceful. Images of nature, which serve as a symbol of the freedom of the soul, appear when talking about this existence. In the novel she recalls a simpler life as a child, immersed in nature and free: "The warm wind beating in my face made me think - without any connection that I can trace - of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the little girl walking through the grass, which was taller than her waist.