The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899)

A young married woman in New Orleans, Edna Pontellier, who seems to have every material comfort wonders if there might not be more to life.

Classics Review: The Awakening is one of those novels that makes the reader wonder how it got published. Sure, there was Madame Bovary (1856) and Anna Karenina (1877) before, but those were written by those decadent Europeans. Hard to believe that staid, Puritan America could produce a rival, even set in French New Orleans. Although Chopin is blunt in her purpose in The Awakening ("They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings"), there's still enough story here to keep it from becoming an essay ("sailing across the bay ... Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage"). The writing is modern, looking to the future, yet has abundant symbolism (e.g., she learns to swim) for those want to read for more. There is so much here that The Awakening could certainly be the book that launched a thousand dissertations. For example the infinitely complex ending can be unacceptable to readers from both sides of the feminist divide, promoting no end of discussion about women and motherhood. What Chopin captures is that Edna had no choice in her life decisions until that important summer, she never knew of alternatives to the life predestined and arranged for her. She "awakens" as a new person in that moment, not responsible for her previous actions. Chopin shows that after the awakening she has no alternatives in this world that she didn't make -- living in a strict Catholic community, rejected by the man she loves, for her there is no acceptable resolution in that time. Another theme worth noting is one that I cannot call the "female gaze," but in The Awakening Edna studies other women intently, critically analyzing their lives, their looks, their actions. This is not done (or at least not solely done) in a sense of sexual competition or sexual attraction, but in a sense of examining other women to learn how they conduct themselves, how they put themselves together and out there (I recently also noticed this in the works of Nella Larsen -- dissertation anyone?). I'll also note in passing that part of our hero's "awakening" is brought about by the music of an independent woman who is a talented pianist (counterpart to a "perfect mother" character), given to playing the works of Frederic Chopin; perhaps a nod to the author and her own participation in the realization here. The dinner party scene alone makes the book. Kate Chopin wrote in a naturalist, modernist style, incorporating themes and symbols that would resonate in the work of future American authors. In that period, Edna's evolution was seen as akin to illness or insanity. "He could see plainly that she was not herself ... he could not see that she was becoming herself." The Awakening is a novel that can excite anger, intolerance, condemnation, even hate in readers, as well as wonderment that such a book was so far ahead of its time.  [4½★]