• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 594 0

it is carbolic acid taken covertly in the police station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads. Edna Pontellier, fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea on a summer night and went down with the sound of her first lover’s spurs in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible iridescent style of hers to a better cause.

- from the Pittsburgh Leader (July 8, 1899)

Questions

1. Are the Globe-Democrat and the Times-Herald reacting against Chopin’s treatment of her subject or the subject matter itself?

2. The critics above assert that a writer of Chopin’s talent should have chosen a more appropriate subject matter. Are talent as a writer and choice of subject matter so easily separable?

3. Willa Cather says that Edna Pontellier, like Emma Bovary, is one of those people who “really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life” and that she is a victim “of the over-idealization of love.” Does the text of The Awakening justify that description of Edna Pontellier?

4. Are Edna Pontellier’s dissatisfactions the product of (a) her individual personality—that is, she’s spoiled; (b) her particular circumstances—that is, her husband is a drag; (c) the situation of middle-class women of the time—that is, she is given comfort in exchange for self-determination and freedom; or (d) human nature and the human condition, which generate longings they cannot satisfy?

5. Even her detractors praise Kate Chopin’s style. Describe its characteristics. Is it dated? Chopin does not fill up her scenes with inventories of concrete detail. Does she lack interest in material actuality? Or is she simply a poor observer?

FOR FURTHER READING

Biography

Rankin, Daniel S. Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932.

Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Toth, Emily Rines. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Walker, Nancy. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Critical Works

Barrish, Phillip. “The Awakening’s Signifying ‘Mexicanist’ Presence.” Studies in American Fiction 28:1 (Spring 2000), pp. 65-76.

Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Bimbaum, Michelle A. “ ‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race.” American Literature 66:2 (1994), pp. 301-323.

Culley, Margo. The Awakening: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Delbanco, Andrew. “The Half-Life of Edna Pontellier.” In New Essays on The Awakening, edited by Wendy Martin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 89-108.

Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Kate Chopin.” In Modern American Women Writers, edited by Elaine Showalter, Leah Baechler, and A. Walton Litz. New York: Collier Books, 1993.

DeKoven, Marianne. “Gendered Doubleness and the ’Origins of Modernist Form.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8 (1989), pp. 19-42.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “Kate Chopin’s Awakening.” Southern Studies (1979), pp. 261-290.

Gilbert, Sandra. “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin’s Fantasy of Desire.” Kenyon Review 5:3 (1983), pp. 42-66.

Gilmore, Michael T. “Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening.” In New Essays on The Awakening, pp. 59-88.

McCullough, Ken. Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Petry, Alice Hall, ed. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. New York: G. K. Hall/Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Pizer, Donald. “A Note on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as Naturalist Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal 33:2 (Spring 2001), pp. 5-13.

Rowe, John Carlos. “The Economics of the Body in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” In Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, edited by Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Showalter,