The Awakening (novel)
Encyclopedia
The Awakening is a novel
by Kate Chopin
, first published in 1899 (see 1899 in literature
). Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana
coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers around Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South
. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism
.
The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernism
; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner
and Ernest Hemingway
and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton
and Henry James
. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern masterpieces of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor
, Eudora Welty
, Katherine Anne Porter
, and Tennessee Williams
.
under the pretext of seeking business opportunities in order to escape a relationship that has no chance of survival. His return from Mexico further complicates matters and leads to the novel's tragic climax.
, Alcée actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. At first ambivalent at the prospect, eventually Edna allows him to court her. Alcée comes with a womanizing reputation but treats Edna in a chivalrous (if aggressively infatuated) manner.
. A perceptive and bluntly honest woman, she is almost shamanistic as she helps Edna sort out her emotions. Reisz is very much a foil to Madame Ratignolle's character; she has no family and happily lives alone without a care for what society thinks of her.
at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico
managed by Madame Lebrun and her two sons, Robert and Victor. The Pontellier family is composed of Léonce Pontellier, a businessman of Louisiana Creole
heritage, and Edna, his twenty-eight year old wife. They have two sons, Etienne and Raoul who do not feature prominently in the plot and who are largely symbols of Edna's proscribed existence.
Edna spends most of her time with her close friend Adèle Ratignolle. In a boisterious and cheery manner, Adèle reminds Edna of her duties as a wife and mother. At Grand Isle, Edna eventually forms a connection with Robert Lebrun, a charming and earnest young man who actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. They start to fall deeply in love, but Robert, sensing the doomed nature of any relationship that would develop between them, flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture.
At this point in the novel, the narrative focus shifts to Edna's complex and shifting emotions as she reconciles her maternal duties with her desire to be with Robert and her desire for social freedom.
The summer vacation over, Edna and the family return to New Orleans. Gradually, Edna begins to take an active role in her own happiness and reassesses her personal priorities. She starts to isolate herself from New Orleans society and withdraw from some of the duties traditionally associated with motherhood. Léonce eventually calls in a doctor to diagnose her, fearing she is losing her mental faculties. The doctor advises Léonce to let her be.
Léonce decides to leave Edna home as he travels to New York City on business. The children are sent to stay with his mother, leaving Edna alone at the house for an extended period. This gives Edna physical and emotional room to breathe and think over various aspects of her life. While her husband is still in New York, Edna decides to move out of her house and into a small bungalow nearby. During this period of transition she begins an abortive affair with Alcée Arobin, a persistent suitor with a reputation for being free with his affections. It's the first time in the novel Edna is shown as a sexual being, but the affair proves awkward and emotionally fraught.
The other person to whom Edna reaches out during this period of solitude is Mademoiselle Reisz, a gifted recitalist whose playing is renowned throughout New Orleans but who maintains a generally hermetic existence. At a party earlier in the novel, Edna is profoundly moved by Mlle Reisz's playing. Mlle Reisz is in contact with Robert while he is in Mexico, receiving letters from him regularly. Edna begs her to reveal their contents, which she does, proving to Edna that Robert is thinking about her.
Eventually Robert returns to New Orleans. At first aloof (and finding excuses not to be near Edna), he eventually confesses his passionate love for her. He admits that the business trip to Mexico was an excuse to get away from a relationship that would never work.
Edna is called away to help Adèle with a difficult childbirth. Adèle pleads with Edna to think of what she would be turning her back on if she did not behave appropriately. When Edna returns home, she finds a note from Robert stating that he has left and will not be returning.
Edna is devastated. She goes immediately back to Grand Isle, where she first met Robert Lebrun. It is also where she learned to swim earlier in the novel, an episode that was both exhilarating and terrifying, and an episode that perfectly encapsulated the conflicting emotions she wrestled with during the course of the novel. The novel ends with Edna allowing herself to be overtaken by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
.
Chopin's admiration for the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant
is evident in The Awakening, yet another example of the enormous influence Maupassant exercised on nineteenth century literary realism. Chopin's novel bears the hallmarks of Maupassant's style: a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures.
However, Chopin's style could more accurately be described as a hybrid that captures contemporary narrative currents and looks forward to various trends in Southern and European literatures.
Mixed into Chopin's overarching nineteenth century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper class pretension, reminiscent of direct contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde
, Henry James
, Edith Wharton
, and George Bernard Shaw
.
Also evident in The Awakening is the future of the Southern novel as a distinct genre, not just in setting and subject matter but in narrative style. Chopin's lyrical portrayal of her protagonist's shifting emotions is a narrative technique that Faulkner would expand upon in novels like Absalom, Absalom!
and The Sound and the Fury
.
The plot looks forward to the stories of Eudora Welty
and Flannery O'Connor
and the plays of William Inge
, while Edna Pontellier's emotional crises and her eventual tragic fall look ahead to the complex female characters of Tennessee Williams
's plays.
Aspects of Chopin's style also prefigure the intensely lyrical and experimental style of novelists such as Virginia Woolf
and the unsentimental focus on female intellectual and emotional growth in the novels of Sigrid Undset
and Doris Lessing
.
Perhaps Chopin's most important stylistic legacy is the detachment of the narrator.
's landmark drama A Doll's House
(1879), a work with which The Awakening shares an almost identical theme.
However, published reviews ran the gamut from outright condemnation to the recognition of The Awakening as an important work of fiction by a gifted practitioner. A good example of this can be found in the divergent reactions of two newspapers in Kate Chopin
's hometown of St. Louis, Missouri
. The St. Louis Republic labeled the novel "poison" and "too strong a drink for moral babes" and the St. Louis Mirror said: "One would fain beg the gods, in pure cowardice, for sleep unending rather than to know what an ugly, cruel, loathsome Monster Passion can be when, like a tiger, it slowly awakens. This is the kind of awakening that impresses the reader in Mrs. Chopin's heroine." Later in the same year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
would write in praise of the novel in an essay entitled "A St. Louis Woman Who Has Turned Fame Into Literature."
Some reviews clucked in disappointment at Chopin's choice of subject: "It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the over-worked field of sex-fiction," (Chicago Times Herald). Others mourned the loss of good taste as when The Nation
referred to Chopin as "one more clever writer gone wrong."
And some reviews indulged in outright vitriol, as when Public Opinion stated: "We are well-satisfied when [Edna Pontellier] drowns herself."
Chopin did not garner unqualifiedly negative reviews. The Dial
called The Awakening a "poignant spiritual tragedy" with the caveat that the novel was "not altogether wholesome in its tendencies." In the Pittsburgh Leader, Willa Cather
set The Awakening alongside Madame Bovary
, Gustave Flaubert
's equally notorious and equally reviled novel of suburban ennui and unapologetic adultery—though Cather was no more impressed with the heroine than were most of her contemporaries. Cather concluded her review: "next time I hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent style of hers to a better cause."
The Awakening was dramatized in a film known as Grand Isle
in 1991 starring Kelly McGillis
as Edna, Jon DeVries as Leonce and Adrian Pasdar
as Robert.
In the 2010 season 1 episode 9("Wish Someone Would Care") of the HBO series Treme
, Tulane
professor Creighton Bernette (John Goodman
) assigns the novel to his class, and briefly discusses the novel with his students before later committing suicide by drowning himself.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty , was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century....
, first published in 1899 (see 1899 in literature
1899 in literature
The year 1899 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*Edgar Rice Burroughs begins working in his father's business.*Rainer Maria Rilke travels to Moscow to meet Leo Tolstoy....
). Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers around Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
.
The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernism
American modernism
American modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic...
; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
and Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton , was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.- Early life and marriage:...
and Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern masterpieces of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...
, Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
, Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
, and Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
.
Edna Pontellier
The novel's protagonist. The wife of Léonce and the mother of two boys, she is presented as a complex and emotionally dynamic character (a rarity for female characters of the period). Her "awakening" forms the core of the plot.Robert Lebrun
The son of the proprietor of the Grand Isle resort where the Pontellier family spends its summers. Edna and Robert develop a mutual attraction that forms the central conflict of the novel. He relocates to MexicoMexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
under the pretext of seeking business opportunities in order to escape a relationship that has no chance of survival. His return from Mexico further complicates matters and leads to the novel's tragic climax.
Léonce Pontellier
Edna’s husband. Léonce is a stern patriarch with very clear ideas about what a woman's preoccupations should be. In his eyes, Edna's only aims in life should be the orderly maintenance of the family estate and the care of their two children. He becomes genuinely confused at his wife's gradual desire for emancipation, as it goes against all the social conventions of the time, and his absence on an extended business trip to New York City provides Edna the room to reconsider her situation.Alcée Arobin
When Robert Lebrun leaves for MexicoMexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Alcée actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. At first ambivalent at the prospect, eventually Edna allows him to court her. Alcée comes with a womanizing reputation but treats Edna in a chivalrous (if aggressively infatuated) manner.
Adèle Ratignolle
Friend of the Pontellier family. She is set up in opposition to Edna as an almost unthinkingly self-sacrificing "mother-woman" (as Chopin describes her). She is the traditional ideal of femininity for the late 1800s but is also a warm, generous, and boisterous presence. As Edna struggles with her place in the home and in society at large, Adèle reminds her to think of her children and put them above all else, even herself.Mademoiselle Reisz
A pianist. While barely a fringe member of New Orleans society (she is renowned as a gifted pianist but is not a part of the "in crowd"), Edna seeks out Mlle Reisz both for advice and because Mlle Reisz is in communication with Robert Lebrun while he is in MexicoMexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
. A perceptive and bluntly honest woman, she is almost shamanistic as she helps Edna sort out her emotions. Reisz is very much a foil to Madame Ratignolle's character; she has no family and happily lives alone without a care for what society thinks of her.
Plot summary
The novel opens with the Pontellier family vacationing on Grand IsleGrand Isle, Louisiana
Grand Isle is a town in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, located on a barrier island of the same name in the Gulf of Mexico. The island is at the mouth of Barataria Bay where it meets the gulf. As of the 2000 census, the town population was 1,541; during summers, the population sometimes increases to...
at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico
Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico is a partially landlocked ocean basin largely surrounded by the North American continent and the island of Cuba. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba. In...
managed by Madame Lebrun and her two sons, Robert and Victor. The Pontellier family is composed of Léonce Pontellier, a businessman of Louisiana Creole
Louisiana Creole
Louisiana Creole can refer to:* Louisiana Creole people* Louisiana Creole French language* Louisiana Creole cuisine...
heritage, and Edna, his twenty-eight year old wife. They have two sons, Etienne and Raoul who do not feature prominently in the plot and who are largely symbols of Edna's proscribed existence.
Edna spends most of her time with her close friend Adèle Ratignolle. In a boisterious and cheery manner, Adèle reminds Edna of her duties as a wife and mother. At Grand Isle, Edna eventually forms a connection with Robert Lebrun, a charming and earnest young man who actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. They start to fall deeply in love, but Robert, sensing the doomed nature of any relationship that would develop between them, flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture.
At this point in the novel, the narrative focus shifts to Edna's complex and shifting emotions as she reconciles her maternal duties with her desire to be with Robert and her desire for social freedom.
The summer vacation over, Edna and the family return to New Orleans. Gradually, Edna begins to take an active role in her own happiness and reassesses her personal priorities. She starts to isolate herself from New Orleans society and withdraw from some of the duties traditionally associated with motherhood. Léonce eventually calls in a doctor to diagnose her, fearing she is losing her mental faculties. The doctor advises Léonce to let her be.
Léonce decides to leave Edna home as he travels to New York City on business. The children are sent to stay with his mother, leaving Edna alone at the house for an extended period. This gives Edna physical and emotional room to breathe and think over various aspects of her life. While her husband is still in New York, Edna decides to move out of her house and into a small bungalow nearby. During this period of transition she begins an abortive affair with Alcée Arobin, a persistent suitor with a reputation for being free with his affections. It's the first time in the novel Edna is shown as a sexual being, but the affair proves awkward and emotionally fraught.
The other person to whom Edna reaches out during this period of solitude is Mademoiselle Reisz, a gifted recitalist whose playing is renowned throughout New Orleans but who maintains a generally hermetic existence. At a party earlier in the novel, Edna is profoundly moved by Mlle Reisz's playing. Mlle Reisz is in contact with Robert while he is in Mexico, receiving letters from him regularly. Edna begs her to reveal their contents, which she does, proving to Edna that Robert is thinking about her.
Eventually Robert returns to New Orleans. At first aloof (and finding excuses not to be near Edna), he eventually confesses his passionate love for her. He admits that the business trip to Mexico was an excuse to get away from a relationship that would never work.
Edna is called away to help Adèle with a difficult childbirth. Adèle pleads with Edna to think of what she would be turning her back on if she did not behave appropriately. When Edna returns home, she finds a note from Robert stating that he has left and will not be returning.
Edna is devastated. She goes immediately back to Grand Isle, where she first met Robert Lebrun. It is also where she learned to swim earlier in the novel, an episode that was both exhilarating and terrifying, and an episode that perfectly encapsulated the conflicting emotions she wrestled with during the course of the novel. The novel ends with Edna allowing herself to be overtaken by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Style
Kate Chopin's narrative style in The Awakening can be categorized as naturalismNaturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
.
Chopin's admiration for the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents....
is evident in The Awakening, yet another example of the enormous influence Maupassant exercised on nineteenth century literary realism. Chopin's novel bears the hallmarks of Maupassant's style: a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures.
However, Chopin's style could more accurately be described as a hybrid that captures contemporary narrative currents and looks forward to various trends in Southern and European literatures.
Mixed into Chopin's overarching nineteenth century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper class pretension, reminiscent of direct contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton , was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.- Early life and marriage:...
, and George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
.
Also evident in The Awakening is the future of the Southern novel as a distinct genre, not just in setting and subject matter but in narrative style. Chopin's lyrical portrayal of her protagonist's shifting emotions is a narrative technique that Faulkner would expand upon in novels like Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during, and after the Civil War, with the focus of the story on the life of Thomas Sutpen.-Plot...
and The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
.
The plot looks forward to the stories of Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
and Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...
and the plays of William Inge
William Inge
William Motter Inge was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, and one of these, Picnic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize...
, while Edna Pontellier's emotional crises and her eventual tragic fall look ahead to the complex female characters of Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
's plays.
Aspects of Chopin's style also prefigure the intensely lyrical and experimental style of novelists such as Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
and the unsentimental focus on female intellectual and emotional growth in the novels of Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.-Biography:Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark, but her family moved to Norway when she was two years old. In 1924, she converted to Catholicism and became a lay Dominican...
and Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH is a British writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos....
.
Perhaps Chopin's most important stylistic legacy is the detachment of the narrator.
Publication and critical reception
The Awakening was particularly controversial upon publication in 1899. Although the novel was never technically banned, it was censored. Chopin's novel was considered immoral not only for its comparatively frank depictions of female sexual desire but for its depiction of a protagonist who chafed against social norms and established gender roles. The public reaction to the novel was similar to the protests which greeted the publication and performance of Henrik IbsenHenrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
's landmark drama A Doll's House
A Doll's House
A Doll's House is a three-act play in prose by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premièred at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month....
(1879), a work with which The Awakening shares an almost identical theme.
However, published reviews ran the gamut from outright condemnation to the recognition of The Awakening as an important work of fiction by a gifted practitioner. A good example of this can be found in the divergent reactions of two newspapers in Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty , was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century....
's hometown of St. Louis, Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
. The St. Louis Republic labeled the novel "poison" and "too strong a drink for moral babes" and the St. Louis Mirror said: "One would fain beg the gods, in pure cowardice, for sleep unending rather than to know what an ugly, cruel, loathsome Monster Passion can be when, like a tiger, it slowly awakens. This is the kind of awakening that impresses the reader in Mrs. Chopin's heroine." Later in the same year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the major city-wide newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Although written to serve Greater St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch is one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and is available and read as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, as far south as...
would write in praise of the novel in an essay entitled "A St. Louis Woman Who Has Turned Fame Into Literature."
Some reviews clucked in disappointment at Chopin's choice of subject: "It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the over-worked field of sex-fiction," (Chicago Times Herald). Others mourned the loss of good taste as when The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
referred to Chopin as "one more clever writer gone wrong."
And some reviews indulged in outright vitriol, as when Public Opinion stated: "We are well-satisfied when [Edna Pontellier] drowns herself."
Chopin did not garner unqualifiedly negative reviews. The Dial
The Dial
The Dial was an American magazine published intermittently from 1840 to 1929. In its first form, from 1840 to 1844, it served as the chief publication of the Transcendentalists. In the 1880s it was revived as a political magazine...
called The Awakening a "poignant spiritual tragedy" with the caveat that the novel was "not altogether wholesome in its tendencies." In the Pittsburgh Leader, Willa Cather
Willa Cather
Willa Seibert Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours , a novel set during World War I...
set The Awakening alongside Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...
, Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
's equally notorious and equally reviled novel of suburban ennui and unapologetic adultery—though Cather was no more impressed with the heroine than were most of her contemporaries. Cather concluded her review: "next time I hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent style of hers to a better cause."
Legacy
Chopin did not write another novel after The Awakening and had understandable difficulty in trying to publish stories after its publication; but today it is regarded as a classic of feminist fiction.The Awakening was dramatized in a film known as Grand Isle
Grand Isle (film)
Grand Isle is a 1991 film directed by Mary Lambert. It is based on the early feminist novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. It starred Kelly McGillis as Edna Pontellier, Jon DeVries as Léonce Pontellier and Adrian Pasdar as Robert Lebrun....
in 1991 starring Kelly McGillis
Kelly McGillis
Kelly Ann McGillis is an American actress. Her films include Top Gun, The Accused, and Witness, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination.-Career:...
as Edna, Jon DeVries as Leonce and Adrian Pasdar
Adrian Pasdar
Adrian Kayvan Pasdar is an American actor, voice artist, and film director. He is known for playing Jim Profit on the TV series Profit, for his roles in Near Dark, Carlito's Way, Mysterious Ways and as Nathan Petrelli on Heroes. Additionally, he directed the feature film Cement...
as Robert.
In the 2010 season 1 episode 9("Wish Someone Would Care") of the HBO series Treme
Treme (TV series)
Treme is an American television drama series created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer that premiered on April 11, 2010 on HBO. It takes its name from Tremé, a neighborhood of New Orleans...
, Tulane
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
professor Creighton Bernette (John Goodman
John Goodman
John Stephen Goodman is an American film, television, and stage actor. He is best known for his role as Dan Conner on the television series Roseanne for which he won a Best Actor Golden Globe Award in 1993, and for appearances in the films of the Coen brothers, with prominent roles in Raising...
) assigns the novel to his class, and briefly discusses the novel with his students before later committing suicide by drowning himself.
External links
(plain text and HTML)- The Awakening at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
and Google Books (scanned books original editions) - The Awakening (ver 1) at LibriVoxLibriVoxLibriVox is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher...
(audio) - The Awakening (ver 2) at LibriVoxLibriVoxLibriVox is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher...
(audio)