The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published on 22 April 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earlier American novels that focuses on women's issues utilizing narrative techniques. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics.
The book may be considered as being aligned with the nineteenth-century female traditions of writing, in particular the Anglo-American New Woman fiction. The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature; 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 works of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.
Summary The novel opens with the Pontellier family—Léonce, a New Orleans businessman of French Louisiana Creole heritage; his wife Edna; and their sons Etienne and Raoul as they take a vacation on Grand Isle at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico managed by Madame Lebrun and her sons Robert and Victor.
Edna spends a lot of her time with her close friend Adèle Ratignolle, who cheerily and boisterously reminds Edna of her duties as a wife and mother. At Grand Isle, Edna eventually forms a connection with Robert Lebrun, a charming, earnest young man who actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. When they fall in love, Robert senses the doomed nature of such a relationship and flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture. The narrative focus moves to Edna's shifting emotions as she reconciles her maternal duties with her desire for social freedom and for Robert.
When summer vacation ends, the Pontelliers return to New Orleans. Edna gradually reassesses her priorities and takes an active role in her own happiness. She starts to isolate herself from New Orleans society and to withdraw from some of the duties traditionally associated with motherhood. Léonce eventually talks to a doctor about diagnosing his wife, fearing she is losing her mental faculties. The doctor advises Léonce to let her be and assures him that things will return to normal.
When Léonce prepares to travel to New York City on business, he sends the boys to his mother. Being left home alone for an extended period gives Edna physical and emotional room to breathe and reflect on various aspects of her life. While her husband is still away, she moves out of their home and into a small bungalow nearby and begins a dalliance with Alcée Arobin, a persistent suitor with a reputation for being free with his affections. Edna is shown as a sexual being for the first time in the novel, but the affair proves awkward and emotionally fraught.
Edna also reaches out to Mademoiselle Reisz, a gifted pianist whose playing is renowned but who maintains a generally hermetic existence. Her playing had moved Edna profoundly earlier in the novel. Reisz focuses her life on music and herself instead of on society's expectations, acting as a foil to Adèle Ratignolle, who encourages Edna to conform. Reisz is in contact with Robert while he is in Mexico, receiving letters from him regularly. Edna begs Reisz 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 escape a relationship that never could work.
Edna is called away to help Adèle with a difficult childbirth. Adèle pleads with Edna to think about her children and what she would be forgoing if she did not behave appropriately. When Edna returns home, she finds a note from Robert stating that he has left forever because he loves her too much to shame her by engaging in a relationship with a married woman.
In devastated shock, Edna rushes back to Grand Isle, where she had first met Robert Lebrun. Edna seeks escape by committing suicide, drowning herself in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York, NY: Bantam Classic, 1981.
Main characters Edna Pontellier – a respectable Presbyterian from Kentucky, living in Creole society in Louisiana. She rebels against conventional expectations and discovers an identity independent from her role as a wife and mother. Léonce Pontellier – Edna's husband, a successful businessman who is oblivious to his wife's unhappiness. Mademoiselle Reisz – Her character symbolizes what Edna could have been if she had grown old and had been independent from her family. Despite viewing Reisz as disagreeable, Edna sees her as an inspiration to her own "awakening." Madame Adèle Ratignolle – Edna's friend, who represents the 19th-century woman as she is totally devoted to her husband and children. Alcée Arobin – known for seducing married women, he pursues a short-lived affair with Edna, satisfying her while her husband is away. Robert Lebrun – has a history of charming women he cannot have but finds something different with Edna and falls in love. Robert's flirting with Edna catalyzes her "awakening", and she sees in him what has been missing in her marriage.
Style Kate Chopin's narrative style in The Awakening can be categorized as naturalism. Chopin's novel bears the hallmarks of French short story writer Guy de Maupassant's style: a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures. This demonstrates Chopin's admiration for Maupassant, yet another example of the enormous influence Maupassant exercised on 19th-century literary realism.
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 literature.
Mixed into Chopin's overarching 19th-century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper-class pretension, reminiscent of 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 only 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 in novels like Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. Chopin portrays her experiences of the Creole lifestyle, in which women were under strict rules and limited to the role of wife and mother, which influenced her "local color" fiction and focus on the Creole culture. Chopin adopted this style in her early short stories and her first novel At Fault, which also deals with some of the issues of Creole lifestyle. By using characters of French descent, she was able to get away with publishing these stories because the characters were viewed as "foreign", without her readers being as shocked as they were when Edna Pontellier, a white Protestant, strays from the expectations of society.
The plot anticipated the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and the plays of William Inge, and Edna Pontellier's emotional crises and her eventual tragic fall look ahead to the complex female characters of Tennessee Williams's plays. Chopin's life, particularly in terms of having her own sense of identity—aside from men and her children—inspired The Awakening. Her upbringing also shaped her views as she lived with her widowed mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, all of whom were intellectual, independent women. After her father was killed on All Saints' Day and her brother died from typhoid on Mardi Gras, Chopin became skeptical of religion, a view that she presents through Edna, who finds church "suffocating". Being widowed and left with six children to look after influenced Chopin's writing, which she began at this time. Emily Toth argues against the view that Chopin was ostracized from St. Louis after the publication of The Awakening, stating that many St. Louis women praised her; male critics condemned her novel.
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. Chopin's most important stylistic legacy is the detachment of the narrator.
Themes
Solitude One of the more prominent themes in The Awakening is solitude. As noted previously, Chopin's work was originally called A Solitary Soul.
Through Edna Pontellier's journey, Chopin sought to highlight the different ways that a woman could be in solitude because of the expectations of motherhood, ethnicity, marriage, social norms, and gender. Chopin presents Edna's autonomous separation from society and friends as individually empowering while still examining the risks of self-exploration and subsequent loneliness. In an attempt to shed her societal role of mother and wife, Edna takes charge of her limited life and makes changes to better discover her true self. For example, Edna leaves her husband and moves into a new house to live by herself, a controversial action because a true woman never would leave her husband. Although Edna's journey ultimately leads to an unsustainable solitude due to lack of societal support, "her death indicates self-possession rather than a retreat from a dilemma."Massie, Virginia Zirkel. "Solitary Blessings: Solitude in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and Kate Chopin." Louisiana State U, 2005. She takes control over what she still has agency over: her body and her self.
By making Edna's experiences critically central to the novel, Chopin is able to sound a cautionary note about society's capacity to support women's liberation. As shown through Edna's depressing emotional journey, isolation, and eventual suicide, Chopin claims that the social norms and traditional gender roles of the 19th century could not tolerate an independent woman. The novel questions the value of solitude and autonomy within a society unable to positively sustain women's freedom.
Gender roles and social constraints The themes of romance and death in The Awakening aid Chopin's feminist intent of illuminating the restrictive and oppressive roles of women in Victorian society. Edna's longing for Robert Lebrun and affair with Alcée Arobin explicitly show Edna's rejection of her prescribed roles as housewife and mother as she awakens to her sexuality and sense of self. Edna has an emotional affair with Robert, who leaves in order to avoid shaming her in society. Afterward, Edna has a physical affair with Alcée. Through these affairs, Edna exercises power outside of her marriage and experiences sexual longing for the first time. However, through these affairs Edna also discovers that no matter which man she is with, there is no escape from the general oppression women face; Edna's society has no place for a woman like her, as she must either be an exemplary housewife and mother like Adèle Ratignolle or an isolated outsider like Reisz.Clark, Zolia. "The Bird that Came Out of the Cage: A Foucauldian Feminist Approach to Kate Chopin's The Awakening." Journal for Cultural Research 12.4 (2008): 335-347, Academic Search Complete. Web.