Despite the many social changes occurring at the turn of the 20th century, Victorian-era ideas about women’s roles within their families and society at large remained prominent.Chopin began writing fiction as a form of therapy for her depression.Edna returns to Grand Isle, swims out to sea and drowns herself. Later, she declares her love for Robert Lebrun – whom she fell for at Grand Isle. She moves into her own house and begins an affair with a local lothario. Back in New Orleans, Edna pursues her art, ignoring her children and husband. While vacationing at Grand Isle, Edna Pontellier’s interactions with the Creoles she meets reignite a number of long-repressed emotions.Kate Chopin’s The Awakening offers an ahead-of-its-time portrayal of female sensuality and women’s desire for independent, meaningful selfhood.

Surprisingly modern in style and psychology, Chopin’s unique blend of matter-of-fact narration with lyrical interludes continues to draw readers and raise incisive questions about the nature of desire and the complications of freedom. As the heroine Edna Pontellier sheds the influences and obligations laid upon her from without, Chopin offers both a pointed critique of the limited social roles permitted to women in America and a sympathetic exploration of the challenges inherent in an individual’s search for existential truth and autonomy.

Critics condemned it as much for its portrayal of female sensuality as its unorthodox perspectives on marriage and motherhood. At the time of its publication in 1899, however, many saw Chopin’s exploration of a married woman’s quest for fulfillment and autonomy as morally deviant.

It illustrates their respective conceptual assumptions and findings concerning The Awakening by attending to a selection of exemplary, especially recent critical works.Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is widely considered one of the most important and beautifully crafted novels of the turn of the 20th century. Finally, the essay identifies and discusses two main clusters within the burgeoning scholarship on the novel - those of feminist and gender criticism, and those of literary history. In the reading of the novel’s key formal and thematic properties that follows, the focus rests on its narrative of rebellious femininity and on the ambiguities that are woven into its fabric. It begins by contextualizing the novel within the author’s life and oeuvre, contouring, on the one hand, Chopin’s less than conventional biography and, on the other, The Awakening’s turbulent reception history - the widespread rejection it met at the time of its publication and its enthusiastic recovery at mid-twentieth century. This essay offers an introduction to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and to its discussion in scholarship.

The great awakening kate chopin