The Awakening
ByPublisher Description
The Awakening charts Edna Pontellier’s journey of self-discovery. The time spent with a younger friend on a summer holiday on Grand Isle in Lousiana unlocks a feeling in her that she can’t close away again. On returning to her family home in New Orleans, she starts to transition from unthinking housewife and mother into something freer and more confident, although this doesn’t meet with the full approval of the society she’s a part of.
Kate Chopin had written a novel previously, but she was mostly known as a writer of Louisiana-set short stories. The Awakening, while keeping the setting, charted new territory with its themes of marital infidelity and less-than-perfect devotion of a mother to her children. The consequent critical reception was less than enthusiastic—hardly surprising given the prevailing moral atmosphere of the time—and her next novel was cancelled. The Awakening was rediscovered in the 1960s and is now regarded as an important early example of American feminist literature.
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“a lot to digest here. edna's desire for freedom so complete that she can only achieve it through freeing her soul from her body, make sure her soul is no one else's to possess, not her husband's and not her children's. the inherent circle of life (especially that of a woman, with the added societal pressure men don't experience) feels torturous to her. even love is temporary to her; robert would also, eventually, fade from her life, just as everything else will, and when she's liberated from all the societal convinctions and ideas around women and motherhood, when she rejects all these things and lives as a completely independent creature, what else is there for her to do, when it's all so temporary? only the complete freedom of the body and the soul through death is forever.
i quite like the ending and consider it to be the greatest act of love edna could perform for herself. what use is there, for her, to live in a society like this? confine herself to something after a long fight for liberation? it's quite useless, and i'm happy she finally gets to embrace the emptiness, her equivalent of absolute freedom.”About Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin (born Katherine O'Flaherty; February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904) was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and is one of the most frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage. She is best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening.
Other books by Kate Chopin
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