Life itself, with its peculiar and humiliating processes, comes to seem like an obligation when she watches her friend give birth. As she loses her desire for a connection to others, she gets the sense that the people around her are “uncanny, half-human beings” in “an alien world.” She feels loosed from her place in the world, as though she is free to be no longer human. This desire for radical freedom is what is behind her obsession with the sea, a place of complete solitude and emptiness. Freedom, for her, is also disengagement from obligation of any kind, including obligations to her husband and children.

Freedom, for Edna, is release from the binding rules and stereotypes of convention, which the narrator compares to an ill-fitting garment.