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.”
Characters in The Awakening
by Kate Chopin · 1899 · 6 characters analyzed
Cast: Edna Pontellier, Léonce Pontellier, Robert Lebrun, Adèle Ratignolle, Mademoiselle Reisz, Alcée Arobin.
Character Analysis
Not a feminist icon in any simple sense — she is specific, contradictory, and sometimes passive. She is a woman in the middle of discovering she has an interior life that the world has no room for. Her awakening is genuine; her exit is tragic; neither is simple. She is not a martyr, not a saint, not a cautionary tale. She is a person who saw clearly and the clarity was fatal.
Her language becomes more direct and less socially decorated as the novel progresses — fewer hedges, fewer social flourishes, more declarative sentences.