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controversial to her contemporaries, Chopin’s frank treatment of female desire and autonomy, the dissatisfactions of marriage and motherhood, and the importance of artistic expression intersected perfectly with the concerns of the women’s movement. Influential members of the first generation of feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Sandra Gilbert would use Chopin as a paradigmatic instance of the work of feminist literary recovery. But once the struggle to establish Chopin as an important American author was won, it was possible to see that her significance extends beyond the bold thematization of women’s concerns. Her fiction’s considerable technical accomplishment and complex treatment of diverse characters and topics makes her a subject of ongoing scholarly interest. As critical tastes change and novels go in and out of fashion, Chopin’s work has consistently remained in print and become a staple of course syllabi.

The durability of The Awakening is due, in part, to the fact that, as with so much of Chopin’s previous writing, it refuses to provide simple answers to the difficult questions it raises. Its conclusion has proved especially resistant to definitive interpretation. Is Edna’s suicide a victory over the many demands her society has made of her? Or is it an easy way out of the otherwise messy and inevitable compromises of modern existence ? Has she reclaimed control by asserting the right to end her own life? Or has she passively acquiesced to her fate? Is wading into the sea a liberating alternative to the confines of a male-dominated culture? Or is it a pessimistic admission that women cannot find a space of their own within the existing social order?

How various readers have answered these questions has much to do with their assessment of Edna’s character—whether they take her to be a feminist heroine, selfish woman, victim, or bold iconoclast—as well as their understanding of the novel’s place within literary tradition. In certain respects, The Awakening borrows the concerns and settings of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. As Elaine Showalter has argued, its emphasis on domestic space and relationships between women locates it in the company of novels by such sentimentalist precursors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Susan Warner, and Maria Cum mins. However, Chopin avoids the rhetorical excesses and moralizing tendencies of these earlier authors. Her attention to the specifics of place, depiction of everyday life, and concern with women’s artistic autonomy aligns her with the somewhat later generation of female regionalists like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman.

There is also a case to be made for The Awakening as a work of naturalist fiction, despite the fact that this category has typically been associated with such aggressively masculine authors as Jack London and Frank Norris. Influenced by Darwinian theory, the naturalists depicted a world governed by powerful, amoral forces that would ultimately defeat the exertion of human agency and will. Bert Bender has suggested that Chopin was provoked by Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which emphasized the competitive aspects of the species’ struggle for reproduction. Though compelled by the notion of an innate physical attraction that could not be regulated by social institutions, Chopin objected to Darwin’s Victorian characterization of the female as passive and modest. A robust woman with strong appetites and a well-proportioned physique, Edna is determined to take an active role in the ritual of sexual selection. In a Darwinian universe, the social conventions of marriage are irrelevant to the sexual drive, which demands variety over constancy in choice of partners. In Bender’s analysis, Edna’s suicide results from the realization that her life is governed by forces outside her control. Her desire for autonomy is at odds with the species’ necessity to reproduce, which—after the exhilarating process of sexual conquest—inevitably relegates women to the role of motherhood.