The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Summary
Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother of two spending the summer at a Louisiana resort on Grand Isle, finds herself drawn into a slow, disorienting awakening to wants she has never let herself name, sparked first by an intense but restrained connection with the younger Robert Lebrun. Robert, aware of exactly how dangerous the attachment has become for both of them, leaves abruptly for Mexico rather than let it develop further, and his absence pushes Edna not back into her old domestic role but further out of it: she moves out of her husband's house into a small place of her own, takes up painting seriously for the first time, and begins an affair with a practiced seducer named Alcee Arobin that satisfies her physically while leaving the deeper want that Robert stirred in her entirely unmet. Robert eventually returns and admits he loves her too, but pulls back again once he faces what an actual life together would cost Edna as a married woman in Creole society, and his final refusal to actually stay with her closes off the one version of freedom Edna had let herself imagine concretely. Edna returns alone to Grand Isle and swims out into the Gulf of Mexico, further than she has ever swum before, in an ending Chopin leaves deliberately without melodrama or explicit confirmation of intent, the water simply closing over her as she goes.
Chopin narrates Edna's whole trajectory with a cool, unjudging sympathy that refuses either to punish her for wanting more than her marriage offers or to excuse the real cost her choices exact from the people around her, and that refusal to moralize is exactly what made the book so unwelcome to its first readers. It is a short, quietly devastating novel, more interested in Edna's interior shifts than in incident, and it reads today as remarkably modern in its refusal to resolve her story into either tragedy or triumph.
Chopin drew on French Creole characters and setting partly to put a layer of distance between her American Protestant readers and material she knew would already be difficult for them, and she wrote no further novels after the backlash the book received.
Historical Context & Significance
Herbert S. Stone and Co. published The Awakening on 22 April 1899 under a working title Chopin had considered, A Solitary Soul, before settling on the final one. The reception was swift and harsh: the St. Louis Republic called it poison, too strong a drink for moral babes, the Chicago Times Herald objected that a writer of such refinement had no business entering the overworked field of sex fiction, and Public Opinion stated flatly that it was well satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swam out to her death, though The Dial did allow it a measure of praise as a poignant spiritual tragedy.
The backlash effectively ended Chopin's career as a novelist, and the book drifted into obscurity for decades until the scholar Per Seyersted rediscovered and championed her work in the 1960s. It is now read as a founding text of American feminist fiction and literary modernism, credited with influencing later Southern writers including William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, its frank treatment of a married woman's desire for a self beyond wife and mother reading, if anything, more clearly to modern audiences than it did to Chopin's own.