The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kate ChopinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-11
ISBN: 1438242921
Number of pages: 102
Publisher: CreateSpace
Book Reviews of The Awakening
Book Review: not so simple, not so obvious
Summary: 4 Stars
The protagonist of this excellent novel is commonly seen as a victim of the repression and hopelessness of women's desires for autonomy in middle-class American society around the end of the 19th century. This view is easily justifiable, and Chopin does give the reader plenty of pointers toward this interpretation.
But a different and also arguable view is that Edna Pontellier is not so much a victim, but rather a failure. Just what is her problem? Her husband is well off and considerate. He married her for love, and now finds himself with a wife whom he "meet[s] in the morning at the breakfast table." He tells her about his day and she doesn't listen. She's popular among her social set. She has plenty of servants. Even when she unilaterally declares her independence, dropping her social life, neglecting the children and the household, brusquely telling her husband "Let me alone, you bother me" and apparently denying him the pleasures of the marriage bed, he tolerates and indulges her in an even-tempered manner, merely asking for but not even insisting that she manage the household better. She then moves into her own house, leaving her husband behind, and he tolerates that too.
Whatever her problems, what is her program? She lives on fantasies of unrequited love; she lacks empathy for others (including her children); she's egoistic to a fine point. She acts on impulse; her desires are vague. She comes to know what she does not want - to belong to any man - but cannot formulate or pursue what she does want beyond incoherent, fanciful and impractical fragments. She won't pay her dues as wife and mother - even though those dues are very light. She realizes that she doesn't want to belong to any man, and she hasn't the courage to be alone. She takes some steps to change her life, has some partial success, but when she's rejected by Lebrun, the younger man who is too honorable to have an affair with a married woman (whom she has already realized she doesn't want either) she just quits. She's a malcontent without much of a program or much of a spine. The novel's title suggests an irony: Edna wakes up but doesn't know what to do in the world to which she awakens.
Edna's vague desires seem to be for a kind of de-humanized autonomy. Husband, children, friends, society - she experiences all these as constraints. She yearns to re-invent herself, but in a world with no attachments at all. This doesn't exist in life, and so - again without really realizing it - she chooses the only option that will free her from all those clingy attachments - death. At age 28, she gives up. Unable to do anything positive, she commits an act of complete rejection - of everything she has and anything to which she might aspire.
What's going on? If Chopin had wanted to write a simple exposé of woman as victim - the impossibility of a woman's desire for autonomy -- she could have made Edna a bit more gutsy, a bit less dreamy, a bit more positively purposeful. The literature of the time was full of women as victims - Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Manon Lescaut, Marguerite Gautier/Violetta Valéry, etc. etc. etc. None of them were half as sappy as Edna Pontellier. Has Chopin deliberately crafted something deeper and more sophisticated than just a screed about how tough it was to be a woman?
And there are still other possible interpretations - for example the very common one of the woman who acts immorally and is punished for it (see most of the heroines mentioned earlier in this note). Chopin has written a complex and ultimately ambiguous story. Is Edna a victim or is she a failure? Is she justly punished or unjustly repressed? Chopin has given us a game of reader's choice, including the richer appreciation that Edna is both a victim and a failure, both repressed by social norms and punished for violating them. Let the reader enjoy!
Summary of The Awakening
This is a beautiful new edition of Kate Chopin's classic novel, "The Awakening." Complete and unabridged.Classics Books
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