The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Kate Chopin [141]
He must have touched their hearts, for they both consented to let her go to a birthday party over at his house the following day. Grandfather Bézeau even declared that if it was necessary he would contribute toward providing her with a suitable toilet for the occasion.
INSPIRED BY THE AWAKENING
KATE CHOPIN LIVED AND thought well ahead of her time. Known initially as a “local colorist” and a writer of short stories in the style of Maupassant, she eventually amassed a significant body of work and left a legacy that has only recently been realized. Chopin’s many stories display her natural craft as a writer, but it is The Awakening (1899) that dramatically presents her modern views about an individual woman’s need for fulfillment and the role of women in society. Widely and viciously panned by critics, the novel found a sparse audience when it was first published. After being reprinted once in 1906, it went out of print for more than five decades.
Then, in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chopin’s work was resurrected as the world finally caught up to her. The Awakening resurfaced in the 1960s and 1970s during the revival of the women’s movement, as women’s writing began to enjoy wider exposure and acclaim. The novel’s fiercely independent heroine, Edna Pontellier, inspired a new generation of readers to herald Chopin as a premiere, even prescient, voice of feminism. In The Awakening, Edna breaks with the spiritual and intellectual mores to which women in her society are traditionally bound, eventually going so far as to free herself from the physical bonds of life itself.
Edna boldly betrays the social contract, which dictates strict familial commitment, marital fidelity, and sexual passivity for women. Despite the fact that Chopin did not consider herself a feminist or a suffragist, finding such labels inhibiting and contradictory to the larger freedom she sought, in this character Chopin delivered a model for strong women to emulate. Additionally, she foreshadowed a sexual liberation that was nearly unthinkable in her own time, but one that would help shape the lives of women for years to come.
Chopin’s writing is also remarkable for its humanity. All of her characters—men and women, white and black—are made vivid through speech and action; she simultaneously strives to reproduce authentic dialect and to reveal the soul of a character through his or her actions. Chopin’s treatment of African-American characters in particular reveals a sensitivity no writer could express who was not attuned to the individuality and dignity of her characters.
Chopin’s focus on strong characters and their humanity may be what has given her work such endurance. The latter half of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in all of it-more than 100 novels, short stories, and poems—and The Awakening has become a paradigm of feminist literature that now appears on the required reading lists of college courses across the country.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Kate Chopin’s The Awakening through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
ST. LOUIS GLOBE-DEMOCRAT
[The Awakening] is not a healthy book; if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson, the fact is not apparent. But there is no denying the fact that it deals with existent conditions, and without