282 Chopin, Kate
produced it. The laws in Louisiana at the time and
the role of women in Creole society are important
to understanding the character of Edna Pontellier.
Kate Chopin (1850–1904), the author of The Awak-
ening, was extremely interested in the role of women
and critical of the institution of marriage in Ameri-
can society at the turn of the 20th century. Almost
all of Chopin’s fiction deals with these issues, and
The Awakening is no exception. The novel explores
the deepest psychology of a woman as she begins to
understand that her marriage is not satisfying her.
Chopin’s novel is also extremely literary. Her use
of language to express her character’s psychological
development is rich and nuanced, and her narrative
experiments with unconventional points of view.
Audience reception of The Awakening was not
altogether positive. The idea of a married woman
taking lovers was too much for the American audi-
ence of the time, and the book was taken out of
circulation. It was rediscovered decades later at a
time when audiences were better prepared to study
and appreciate the novel’s richness.
Kathryn Kleypas
cOminG OF aGe in The Awakening
The core of The Awakening by Kate Chopin is the
coming of age of its protagonist, Edna Pontellier,
making it a key text in the genre of coming-of-age
novel’s. While Edna is technically an adult at the
beginning of the novel, the action centers on her
development into a more psychologically mature
individual.
The Awakening deals heavily with issues of
women in society. Kate Chopin is also very inter-
ested in the role of marriage, and we can see
throughout The Awakening the interesting ways that
she explores this and other issues through Edna’s
coming-of-age process. Chopin seems to have very
strong opinions about the role of women in society
and we can read Edna’s story as a strong criticism
about the ways that women were supposed to behave
at the time the novel was written.
When we first meet Edna, she is spending her
summer holiday away from the city (New Orleans),
surrounded by what the narrator calls “mother
women.” These women, such as her friend Madame
Ratignolle, care very deeply for their children and
focus on doing things that are socially acceptable for
women to be doing. Edna is always a little confused
when she is around such women. She sees that
her own behavior is different from the behavior of
the “mother women,” but she does not completely
understand why. Edna’s husband is also critical of
how she treats their children, believing she is too
detached from them.
During Edna’s summer holiday, she cultivates a
friendship with a man for whom she begins to have
romantic feelings, but he leaves for a job in Mexico
and she returns to New Orleans to resume her nor-
mal life. It is as she resumes her normal daily life
back home that we begin to see Edna having minor
epiphanies—a common experience in coming-of-
age narratives. In many works by Chopin, her char-
acters frequently experience epiphanies, and the
very title of this novel, The Awakening, suggests that
Edna’s epiphany is central to the story.
Edna begins to understand, at first only very
simply and then later in more complex ways, that
she is unhappy in her marriage. She does not dislike
her husband personally, but she resists the expecta-
tions that society has placed on her in her role as a
woman, wife, and mother. As Edna has more minor
epiphanies, she begins to explore ways that she can
resist society’s expectations of her. The first thing
she does is to spend more time with Mademoiselle
Reisz, a woman who fully resists society’s expecta-
tions of womanly behavior. She is intelligent, sticks
to her own opinions, lives alone in a small apart-
ment, is unmarried, supports herself, and is not
particularly pleasant in her behavior to others. It is
very common in women’s coming-of-age novels to
have the main character learn from another woman
who is more evolved.
Edna finally moves out of her husband’s house
and takes control of her own finances, supporting
herself with a small inheritance and her work as
an artist. Even though the house she moves into is
extremely small compared to the home her husband
had provided, she pays all of its expenses herself. She
allows her children to be cared for by their grand-
mother, and she experiences a brief time completely
free of the marital and maternal restrictions she
had known. She takes a lover, which completes her
“awakening.”