Status
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Description
Introduction by Kaye Gibbons Edited and with notes by Nina Baym Commentary by Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and from The Picayune's Creole Cook Book The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers with its forthright treatment of sex and suicide. Departing from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class life are the themes of this now-classic novel. As Kaye Gibbons points out in her Introduction, Chopin "was writing American realism before most Americans could bear to hear that they were living it." This edition includes selected stories from Chopin's Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie. Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide… (more)
User reviews
The novel "The Awakening" might better be termed "The Abandonment."
I suggest that
Style: Chopin writes smoothly and easily, with succulent descriptive passages. The use of dialect is not overly intrusive (compare "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and a host of grade-B writings from the period up through the 1950s).
SPOILER ALERT
The self-indulgent protagonist seems never to have outgrown her youthful fantasies, and certainly made no effort to extend herself to understand her husband or care for her children (which she admitted).
There have always been women with no desire to be encumbered by a family (her family removed her from a convent at some age, if I remember rightly). To accept the task and then shirk it, as Edna did, does not become justified by the claim that she didn't understand herself until later. Depriving her children of their mother is not a noble act, although they probably won't ever miss her, since she interacted with them as little as possible. (At least she didn't kill herself in front of them, compare "The Horse Whisperer".)