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Search - The Awakening
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The Awakening Author: |
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Other Versions of this Book: Paperback, Hardcover, Hardcover, Audio CD (Unabridged), Audio Cassette (Abridged), Audio CD (Abridged), Audio Cassette (Abridged)
Book Description:
"She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before."
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, shocked readers in 1899 and the scandal created by the book haunted Kate Chopin for the rest of her life. The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two sons living in conventional Creole society. Unlike the married women around her, whose sensuality seems to flow naturally into maternity, Edna finds herself wanting her own emotional and sexual identity. During one summer while her husband is out of town, her frustrations find an outlet in an affair with a younger man. Energized and filled with a desire to define her own life, she sends her children to the country and removes herself to a small house of her own: "Every step she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to 'feed upon the opinion' when her own soul had invited her." Her triumph is short-lived, however, destroyed by a society that has no place for a self-determined, unattached woman. Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and woman's opportunities in an oppressive world.
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, shocked readers in 1899 and the scandal created by the book haunted Kate Chopin for the rest of her life. The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two sons living in conventional Creole society. Unlike the married women around her, whose sensuality seems to flow naturally into maternity, Edna finds herself wanting her own emotional and sexual identity. During one summer while her husband is out of town, her frustrations find an outlet in an affair with a younger man. Energized and filled with a desire to define her own life, she sends her children to the country and removes herself to a small house of her own: "Every step she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to 'feed upon the opinion' when her own soul had invited her." Her triumph is short-lived, however, destroyed by a society that has no place for a self-determined, unattached woman. Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and woman's opportunities in an oppressive world.
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Top Member Book Reviews
Linda C. (
4 member(s) found this review helpful.
"Speaks to me as pertinently as any fiction published this year or last. It is uncanny, nothing else...A masteriece." Linda Wolfe, The New York Times
The publication of THE AWAKENING in 1899 occasioned shocked and angry response from reviewers all over the country. The book was taken off the shelves of the St. Louis Mercantile Library and its author was barred from the Fine Arts Club. Kate Chopin died in 1904.
THE MOTHER-WOMEN
"It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idoloized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels."
It was the summer of Edna Pontellier's twenty-eighth year and as she watched all the mother-women surrounding her on the beach, she vowed not to be one of them and to acknowledge the dire needs and deep yearnings within herself that were unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood.
Kate Chopin was long before her time in dealing with secual passion...and the personal emotions of women." -- Jean Stafford, The New York Review of Books
Jennifer C. (
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
Waste of time.
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
I was surprised how well this story kept my interest. I tend to find novels written during this time period tedious, but I finished The Awakening within 4 days. The lead character, Edna, is someone every woman can relate to in one way or another. She is real and flawed.
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
For this subject to be written about when it was, was an absolute scandal. No one had ever heard of a woman standing up to her husband, let alone breaking it off. This is just one of those novels that I'm proud to say I've read.
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
First published in 1899, this novel broke new ground in its depiction of women's passions and moral relativism. Scandalous in its day, the story is another of those whose authors seemed unable to imagine that a woman might break with her husband and society's expectations and yet find a happier life. As usual, she ends badly.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
I read this as a requirement for an English class. I found it interesting and the style was smooth and timely. However, Edna, the main character, was selfish and unlikeable in my opinion. I would recommend it because Kate Chopin is an important writer for all women to have read.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Not that great a read.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
I recently reread Chopin's revolutionary novella and was more impressed now than I was the first time.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
From the inside cover of the book: Written nearly 100 years ago, The Awakening is the compelling story of any extraordinary modern woman struggling against the constraints of marriage and motherhood, and slowly discovering the power of her own sexuality.
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Please Rate these Book Reviews
Mary W. 
Barbara (This book is a character study of a not particularly likable woman. If Edna was truly supposed to be suffering from depression, then her story is sad; otherwise, she comes across as merely selfish, impetuous, and childish, a woman dissatisfied with her lot in life but unwilling to find constructive ways to improve it. Even within the confining social structure of her times, she might have prevailed if she had tried. The writing was wildly uneven, fluctuating from rather lurid purple prose and flat dialogue to lines of elegant phrasing and insight.
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