The Awakening

Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother summering at Grand Isle, stops accepting the terms of her life in Creole New Orleans and finds that the society around her has made no provision for what she wants instead. The prose is spare and the ending is unresolved on purpose.

Its reception is part of the story: the novel was reviewed harshly in 1899, Chopin’s reputation suffered for it, and the book stayed largely out of print until critics recovered it in the 1950s and after. It is now standard in American literature courses.

Context: Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was best known in her lifetime for her Louisiana short stories, collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). The Awakening was her second and last novel.

Connections

• Kate Chopin — the author.
• Feminism — the critical tradition that brought the book back into print.
• Marriage
• Literature