The Awakening
Kate Chopin (1899)
“Published in 1899, destroyed its author's career, and wasn't rediscovered until the 1960s — because it told the truth about women's inner lives a century before the world was ready.”
At a Glance
Edna Pontellier, a married woman vacationing with her family at Grand Isle, Louisiana, begins to feel the stirrings of an inner life she cannot name. Through a friendship with Robert Lebrun, music lessons with the reclusive Mademoiselle Reisz, and the example of her devoted friend Adèle Ratignolle, Edna awakens to desires — artistic, sexual, and spiritual — that her marriage and society have no room for. She learns to swim alone. She moves out of her husband's house. She takes a lover. And when she understands that no external life can contain her internal one, she walks into the sea.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 1899 to hostile reviews, it effectively ended Chopin's writing career. It was considered so scandalous — a married woman who desires, who takes a lover, who walks into the sea without being punished by the narrator — that it was barely in print by 1906. Rediscovered in 1969 when Per Seyersted published a comprehensive biography and critical edition of Chopin's work. The feminist movement of the 1960s-70s recognized in Edna Pontellier a precursor to everything second-wave feminism was articulating: the problem has no name, the structure is the problem, the personal is political. It is now one of the most taught novels in American college English programs.
Diction Profile
Formal narration shifting to interior free indirect discourse — Chopin inhabits Edna's consciousness while maintaining a slightly removed narrative voice
Very high in nature and interior scenes; restrained in social scenes. The sea is Chopin's master metaphor