Exploring Kate Chopin's The Awakening Through Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism

Steven Kerry: This kind of story is almost a fiction genre in its own right: the story of the social conformist who finds conformity a drag and thus attempts to wiggle out of it like a trapped fly in a web.
Edna is a complex protagonist and thus it is the reader who will cast his or her own net of narratives over this story as to what her problem really was. She had the works: the successful, respectable, and work-centric husband, the children (a joy, yet a nuisance as well), the personal beauty and charm (every other man in this book seems to have the hots for Edna). But Edna wants MORE from life than being the 1800s version of a multi-tasking mama and demurely agreeable wife. She want ROMANCE and, even more so, ATTENTION. These are what the mister can't give her while hanging out with other cigar-smoking husbands and playing cards or doing whatever men did in such gentlemen's' clubs in the 1800s. To the book's credit the author does not paint the husband as a bad man, only a man determined to comply with the conformist standards of his time as to how to be a husband and father. He is not evil or abusive, just a bit of a bore. He is actually more of a victim in the book than his...

United States on Sep 11, 2023

Jess S: Set in the late 1800s, The Awakening follows 29 year old Edna Pontellier as she struggles to come to terms with her increasing disillusionment as a wife and mother in polite society.

Edna lives comfortable life with a very generous, if uninspiring, husband. She spends her days keeping up appearances, holding court for visitors on Tuesdays, and overseeing the nanny and the cook. She has no real fervor for her husband and isn't entirely smitten with coddling her children either.

When Edna befriends Robert Lebrun at a summer resort she finds herself inexplicably drawn to him. He kindles in her a previously unknown passion. She is excited to see him, interested in speaking with him, and finds herself excited like she hasn't been before.

When she returns to New Orleans after the summer, Edna finds herself on her own for perhaps the first time in her life... And she rather likes it.

Edna's awakening is one of self-discovery and honest appraisal. She finds that she loves to paint and she is good at it, and truth be told, she doesn't much care for being an accessory to her husband or even a mother to her children.

Her self-reflections in the book are...

United Kingdom on Apr 10, 2023

Ms. L. A. MacNeil: This book was beautifully written. The descriptions of the beach, New Orleans and the characters sweep you up in amongst it all.
Edna's initial unconscious ambivalence is gradually replaced by jet knowledge of what she does and doesn't want from life.
Not to sacrifice oneself... easier said than done!

United Kingdom on Jul 05, 2022

Iftekhar Ahmed Ishtiyaque Ahmed Ansari: Plz add all pic related to the BOOK for buyer otherwise we buy n return if we not satisfied the contain of book.
Therefore I requesting u plz add.

India on Sep 23, 2018

John P. Jones III: …to Amazon!, for recommending this book. Most regrettably, until Amazon suggested her book, I had never heard of Kate Chopin. If she is to be labeled, she is a southern American female writer, and I have long been fond of the works of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. She also attracts the “feminist” label. This work was first published in 1899, twenty years after Ibsen’s  A Doll's House (Dover Thrift Editions)  and thirty years before Virginia Wolfe’s  A Room of One's Own . I believe Amazon’s “algorithm” recommended this work based on my recent re-read of Ibsen’s classic, in Kindle version.

The novel commences on Grand Isle, Louisiana, one of the outer most barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico. It is a summer resort, established and hosted by Madame Lebrun for the “gratin” of New Orleans society. Edna Pontellier, and her husband, Leonce, are honored guests. They have two young children. The children are tended to by an individual whose label is now rather quaint, if not entirely obsolete, as in, thrown into the “dust bin of history”: a quadroon. Edna is 28, from Kentucky blue-grass country, and a bit of an outsider in what is...

United States on Dec 23, 2016

girlwithherheadinabook: The Awakening was a book that truly surprised me, not least the fact that it was published in 1899. This is most likely the earliest feminist novel that I can ever remember reading. My copy came with a bracing foreword that instructed me that although the protagonist’s name was Edna, it was the only aspect of the novel which had dated. I finished it and agreed more or less. I have never read The Doll’s House or indeed watched it on stage but it seemed that the two stories have a fair number of themes in common. The Awakening considers the concept of the self outside the defined roles of wife or mother but it is not a particularly comfortable read.

It opens with Madame Edna Pontellier vacationing along with a host of other French Creole families. Edna’s great friend is Madame Adele Ratignolle but she is being languidly wooed by Robert, although of course nobody ever takes Robert’s attentions seriously. Leonce Pontellier is vaguely dissatisfied with his wife and feels she is insufficiently attentive. Predictably, Edna falls in love with Robert and is silently aghast when Robert decides to leave, recognising that the relationship is doomed. Adele Ratignolle is the...

United Kingdom on Feb 12, 2016

三好常雄: In Japan, we are more familiar with『A Doll's House』by Henrik Ibsen [1828〜1906] than『Awakening』by Kate Chopin[1850-1904], both deal with the independence of women. But the latter concentrates the sexual impulse of women, therefore accepted harsh criticism including the ban on to read when the book was published in 1899, I learned.

This time at my second reading ( my first reading, in Japanese version, was about 10 yeas ago), I carefully read the story as a scale, measuring my degree of feminism. I’m afraid myself to be called "sexist" as same as the men of 100 year ago if I denounce Mrs.Edna Pontellier. So I, a contemporary man, who got baptized by the second and third-wave feminism, can admit Mrs. Potellier’s desire of self-fulfilment, or, at least, must admit for.

But problem is whether Mrs. Potellier was really awakened or not. In my opinion her awakening is fully doubtful.

The story suggests that her awakening began when Edna loves Robert. Can, however, we evaluate the Edna’s love for Robert is a real love of adults? I think she only fancies one more dream after her younger love, to the cavalry, to the fianc'e of neighbor girl and to the...

Japan on Mar 13, 2013