“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin (1899)
Probably the most fascinating novel I have read all year – and most certainly during my semester here in New Orleans – is “The Awakening.” Not surprisingly, “The Awakening” is about a woman in and out of New Orleans – I actually have to read it for two classes, but one is “Literary New Orleans” – but not from New Orleans, a woman who is searching for something beyond her marriage, beyond her motherhood. What she finds is an affair with a slick creole, shady friendships and a way out: suicide.
This may not sound very encouraging but her last walk into the sea is quite liberating for the heroine Edna Pontellier, the wife of a wealthy creole who sees his wife as merely one of his possessions. As such he brings her to a vacation island off the U.S. coast where for the first time she awakens to something other than her life as wife, mother and hostess. Her yearning starts there when she meets other creoles who are – different from her husband – full of life and creole attitude. She meets Robert Lebrun and falls in love with him (or does she?), only to discover in the end that he is not strong enough to love her. She meets the perfect creole woman, who becomes her friend but who is also the picture perfect Edna herself can never be. And she meets Mademoiselle Reizs and she is quite the mysterious influence on Edna’s creative nature…
The book is full of New Orleans description, vibrant, heated, sexually charged… no wonder, the book was no success in 1899. It took the feminist movement of the 60s to rediscover this masterpiece of restricted womanhood.
I have written an essay about it and will post it on the essay-page. It is an A, by the way. Yeah, I am really that good…
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