Title: The Awakening Author: Kate Chopin Creation Date: 1899 Location: United States Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
The Awakening was published on 22 April 1899 by Herbert S. Stone & Company in Chicago. Within weeks of its appearance it was being condemned by reviewers across the United States — in St Louis, where Chopin lived and had her social world, as well as in the eastern literary press — as "unhealthy," "morbid," "sickening," and "a monstrous book." The outrage was aimed at a novel in which a respectable married Creole woman pursues her own desires, conducts an affair without guilt, moves out of her husband's house, refuses to be organised around the needs of her children, and at the end walks naked into the Gulf of Mexico. The controversy effectively ended Chopin's literary career. A third collection of her short stories, already accepted by Herbert S. Stone, was withdrawn from publication. Invitations to literary events stopped arriving. She wrote very little in the five years remaining to her and died of a brain haemorrhage in August 1904 at the age of fifty-four.
The book was not banned in any formal sense — it did not come under the postal censorship that had destroyed other novels of the period — but it was something nearly as effective: it was allowed to go out of print and to disappear. For fifty years it was out of serious critical conversation. The recovery began in 1952 when the Norwegian-American scholar Per Seyersted travelled to St Louis to research Chopin's papers and eventually produced the two-volume Complete Works of Kate Chopin (1969) that made the novel widely available again. By the time the feminist literary recovery of the 1970s was in full swing, The Awakening had been recognised for what it was: one of the most significant American novels of the nineteenth century, the first major American fiction to treat female sexuality and interiority with this degree of frankness, and the first to refuse the conventional solutions — conversion, forgiveness, chastened return to the marriage, death as moral punishment — that the tradition offered women who wanted more than the tradition permitted.
The novel is set among the Creole bourgeoisie of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast resort of Grand Isle, and its social texture is precisely observed. Chopin had lived both worlds. Her husband Oscar Chopin was a Louisiana Creole cotton factor, and after his death in 1882 she had raised six children and eventually returned to St Louis to begin writing seriously. Her short fiction of the 1890s — Bayou Folk (1894), A Night in Acadie (1897) — had been successful in the local-colour mode, celebrated in the magazines of the period for its accurate Louisiana settings and its sympathetic treatment of Creole and Cajun characters. She was a well-respected regional writer. The Awakening was the book in which she attempted to move beyond regional colour into something else entirely, and the something else is what her reviewers could not forgive.
The Prohibition
The prohibitions on Chopin were not legal but social, and they operated through the machinery of literary reputation rather than through formal censorship. American fiction of the 1890s had developed a clear set of rules about what could be shown of women's inner lives. Adultery was an available subject — Hawthorne, Howells, and James had all handled it — but on one strict condition: the adulterous woman had to be punished. The punishment could be death (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary), social ruin (Hester Prynne), or conversion and return to the marriage, but it had to be delivered. A novel that allowed a woman to pursue her desires and then refused to punish her for it, or that refused to identify her desires as wrong in the first place, was not publishable within the conventions of the Gilded Age literary market. Chopin was breaking the rule deliberately, and she knew it.
The second prohibition was social. Chopin was a St Louis widow of Irish-Catholic and French descent who had married into the Louisiana Creole elite and then returned to St Louis after her husband's death. Her standing depended on the goodwill of the educated Catholic circles of St Louis and the continued regard of New Orleans Creole society. A woman of her class was not expected to write frankly about sexual desire or marriage as a prison. She was expected to write the charming local-colour sketches of Bayou Folk — stories about picturesque Creoles and Cajuns, pitched to northern magazine readers — and to leave the deeper questions to the male novelists who had been given cultural permission to ask them. The expectation was rarely articulated explicitly. A single reviewer calling the new book "unhealthy" was enough to begin the social ostracism that would follow.
The third and most insidious prohibition was the one the novel itself anatomises: the prohibition against a wife and mother having an interior life that was not organised around her husband and children. The ideal wife in the Creole Louisiana Chopin describes was what her narrator calls a "mother-woman" — a woman whose physicality and intelligence were entirely expended on her family and who therefore did not feel herself to have a separate self at all. A woman who began to notice desires or creative ambitions unaccounted for by her marriage was understood to be suffering from a nervous disorder. The treatments prescribed for such women in the 1890s — Silas Weir Mitchell's famous rest cure, confinement, the removal of books and writing materials — were designed to return the patient to the state of undifferentiated maternal absorption her condition had disturbed. Edna Pontellier's discovery of her own interior life is the discovery the novel's social world considered a symptom. The novel insists that the symptom is the truth and the prescribed cure is the disease.
The Strategy
Chopin's strategy was to use the techniques of European symbolist fiction to do what American realism was refusing to do. She had read Flaubert, Maupassant, and the French naturalists in the original — French was the language of her husband's family — and had absorbed from Maupassant in particular a compression of effect and a willingness to treat inner life without moralising commentary. She translated several Maupassant stories in the 1890s. In The Awakening she used techniques American fiction had barely attempted: stream of consciousness at moments of intense feeling, free indirect discourse to move seamlessly between narrator and Edna, and a systematic use of symbolic patterning — water, music, birds, clothing — that operated below the level of explicit statement. The reader is never told that the sea represents Edna's desire or that the birds represent the woman-artist's condition. The connections are made to work through repetition and association, and the result is a book that reads on its surface as a plain narrative of a failed marriage and underneath as a dense network of correspondences that the 1899 reviewers were neither trained nor disposed to follow.
The second element of her strategy was to exploit the ambiguity of the Creole setting. By locating the novel in the Louisiana Creole world — a Catholic, French-speaking subculture within the Protestant American mainstream — Chopin gave herself a certain distance from the reviewers' default expectations. Creole women were already understood by the American reading public as slightly other: more sensual, more musical, more open about physical pleasure than their Anglo-Protestant counterparts. Chopin could describe an afternoon of mild flirtation between Edna and Robert Lebrun on a Grand Isle beach, or an evening of wine and music in a New Orleans drawing room, and count on the reader to understand that such things were a little more relaxed in this particular milieu. The strategy let her bring her heroine to the edge of scandal within a social frame where the edge was closer to the surface than it would have been in a Boston or New York setting.
The third element was the refusal of authorial commentary. Chopin does not tell the reader what to think about Edna. She does not judge her, punish her, or redeem her. She lets the events unfold and the symbols accumulate, and she leaves the final interpretation — tragedy, liberation, breakdown, suicide, sacrament? — to the reader. This refusal was the element that enraged the reviewers most. They expected the novelist to condemn Edna's choices; when the novelist declined, they read the silence as endorsement, and when they read it as endorsement they turned on the book. Chopin had calculated that the artistic integrity of the refusal was worth the reputational cost. She was correct about the integrity. She underestimated, or accepted in advance, the cost.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was the end of her career. The reviews of The Awakening — in the St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, the St Louis Republic, the Chicago Times-Herald, the Providence Sunday Journal, The Nation, and the national literary press — were overwhelmingly negative. The book was called "nauseating," "sex fiction," "unwholesome," "not a healthy book." Her St Louis literary circle, the Wednesday Club, reportedly withdrew its welcome. Her publisher quietly withdrew her forthcoming story collection. Magazine editors who had previously bought her work began declining it. Chopin wrote a short, careful public response in Book News in July 1899 in which she claimed with apparent sincerity that she had not meant to scandalise anyone and had merely wanted to follow Edna through her choices — a response that reads, now, as a dignified refusal to plead guilty to a charge she did not accept. But she wrote very little fiction after that. Her diary and letters suggest the rejection stung her more than she allowed her friends to see. She died in August 1904, shortly after returning home from a long day at the St Louis World's Fair, and the obituaries that appeared mentioned her as the regional writer of Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie and barely referred to the novel at all.
The recovery was slow and then sudden. Per Seyersted's Complete Works in 1969 made the novel available in a serious scholarly edition and provided a biographical study that placed it in context. The second-wave feminist literary criticism of the 1970s took up the book as one of its foundational American texts. By the 1980s The Awakening was being taught across the American university system as a central work of nineteenth-century American fiction. Contemporary criticism has continued to find new things in it — the symbolism of the Creole setting, the significance of Adele Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz as doubles, the ambiguity of the final scene — and the book is now understood as a work of substantially greater formal ambition than its initial reviewers were capable of recognising. Its influence on later American women's writing is diffuse but real: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and after them the whole tradition of American fiction about female interiority owe the book something, even where they are not in direct conversation with it. More immediately, The Awakening established a specific literary task — the frank examination of a married woman's desire for a life beyond marriage — as a task that American fiction could undertake, and every subsequent novel that has undertaken it has done so in a territory Chopin opened.
The Reading
Edna Pontellier is twenty-eight years old, the wife of Leonce Pontellier, a New Orleans businessman of Creole French descent, and the mother of two young sons. The novel opens at Grand Isle, the Gulf Coast resort where the Creole families of New Orleans spend their summers and where the wives and children stay for weeks at a time while the husbands come down from the city at weekends. Leonce is attentive, prosperous, and entirely certain that his wife is a possession — not in the manner of a cruel man, but in the manner of a correct one. He treats her well because she belongs to him and the social order requires good treatment of one's belongings. He gives her generous sums of money, he brings her gifts when he returns from business trips, he worries when she is ill, and he has never once considered that she might want anything he has not already thought to provide. Edna, for most of her adult life, has accepted this arrangement half consciously, as the terms of a life she more or less chose and in which she more or less participates.
The summer at Grand Isle changes her in ways she does not at first understand. She becomes friendly with Adele Ratignolle, the most admired of the summer's Creole wives, and Chopin uses Adele to introduce the category of the "mother-woman." The mother-women, the narrator explains, are the Creole wives whose whole physical and emotional existence is organised around husband and children, whose sensuality exists entirely within the frame of reproduction, and whose beauty is the beauty of complete devotion. Adele is the most perfect specimen Edna has ever seen. She is voluptuously fertile, perpetually pregnant or nursing, skilled at piano and needlework and the management of a household, uncomplicated in her affections, and entirely without any gap between what she is supposed to want and what she actually wants. Edna is fascinated and disoriented by her. The disorientation is the beginning of the book: Edna starts to notice that she is not like Adele, that she has never been like Adele, and that the marriage she is in has been built on the assumption that she would eventually become like Adele and she is not going to.
The other transformative figure of the summer is Robert Lebrun, the elder son of the resort's proprietress Madame Lebrun. Robert has a habit, accepted by the Creole community as a harmless social practice, of attaching himself each summer to a different married woman in a game of gallant flirtation. Everyone knows the game. Everyone considers it safe. This summer he attaches himself to Edna, and what begins as the familiar game becomes, for both of them, something else. It becomes something else for Edna not because Robert is a particularly seductive man — he is young, correct, and a little shy — but because his attention is the occasion for a discovery she would have made through other means: that she has desires and a self that have been, without her quite knowing it, kept in a sealed room. She begins to notice her own body. She begins to notice her own preferences. She begins, very slowly, to suspect that she exists as a person in her own right and not merely as a position within a family structure.
The summer pivots on Edna's learning to swim. She has spent her entire previous summer trying and failing to learn; this summer, one night in late July, something releases in her and she walks into the Gulf and swims out into the open water alone. Chopin renders the moment as an awakening of the body. "She was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realises its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence." She swims farther out than anyone has ever swum at Grand Isle, far enough that when she turns and looks back at the beach she is frightened by the distance. The fear and the triumph are the same sensation. She swims back exhausted and lies on the sand feeling herself to be, for the first time in her adult life, a physical entity not defined by anyone else's needs. The sea is established in this scene as the novel's central symbol, and Chopin introduces its voice directly: "The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamouring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude." The sea is desire, it is solitude, it is the self without social structure, and it is also, Chopin lets the reader feel from the first invocation, something that will eventually be asked to receive her completely.
Another Grand Isle figure, Mademoiselle Reisz, enters the story as Edna's counter-mother. She is an ageing, unmarried, somewhat disagreeable pianist whom the resort community tolerates rather than welcomes. She has no husband, no children, no domestic life at all. She lives alone in a cheap New Orleans apartment surrounded by her piano and her sheet music, and she has given her entire existence to her art. When she plays, she plays differently from the accomplished amateur Adele. She plays with force and with the refusal of decorative charm. The first time Edna hears her play, at a Grand Isle gathering, she weeps uncontrollably. Mademoiselle Reisz afterwards tells her, in a tone that is half compliment and half warning, that the artist must possess "the courageous soul" — "the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies." The three women — Adele the mother-woman, Mademoiselle Reisz the artist, Edna in the middle — become the novel's emotional geometry. Edna is being asked, implicitly, to choose between two lives. The implication of the book is that she cannot be either of them and that there is no third option her world has prepared for her.
Robert leaves Grand Isle abruptly in late summer. He does not explain himself clearly. He has arranged to go to Mexico on a vague business pretext, and he departs the same day he announces the plan. Edna is devastated in a way she cannot account for to her husband, who does not notice. She understands, slowly, that the devastation is the measure of how far her feelings had travelled and that she is now committed to a self-knowledge she cannot return from. The family returns to New Orleans for the winter. Edna begins to change the terms of her domestic life. She stops maintaining the Tuesday-afternoon receptions that Leonce's business requires. She dismisses her household cook's aesthetic suggestions and lets the cook's pride suffer. She takes long walks alone. She begins painting seriously — she has always been reasonably talented, and she now starts to treat the work as a vocation rather than an accomplishment. She sells some sketches through her art dealer and earns her own money for the first time in her adult life. Leonce is bewildered and then alarmed and consults the family doctor, who, with the discretion of his profession, tells him that women sometimes go through such phases and that the best course is to leave her alone and wait for her to return to her senses.
Leonce is called away on an extended business trip to New York, and the boys are sent to their grandmother's in the country. Edna finds herself, for the first time in her marriage, entirely alone in the New Orleans house. The solitude is exhilarating and then it is the ground for the next phase of her experiment. Alcee Arobin enters the story. Arobin is a well-known New Orleans man-about-town — dissolute, charming, sexually practised, and attentive to unhappy wives of his acquaintance. He courts Edna with a skill that recognises and accommodates her particular condition. He takes her to the racetrack. He takes her to dinner. He flatters her without effusion. He walks her home at night and stays a little too long. Eventually — Chopin handles the moment with extraordinary discretion, and the reader has to understand from the next morning's prose what has happened the night before — they become lovers. Edna does not love him. She notices the difference between what has just happened with Arobin and what she feels for the absent Robert. Arobin is, the narrator tells us in one of the book's most audacious sentences, "a response to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her" — a sexual fact, unaccompanied by the illusion of romance, and therefore a discovery in its own right. Edna feels guilt for a moment and then feels the more disorienting absence of guilt. She has crossed a line and discovered that the line did not exist where she thought it was.
She decides to move out of the Pontellier house. She rents a small cottage around the corner — "the pigeon house," she calls it — pays for it out of her painting earnings and a small inheritance from her mother, and installs herself in it alone. The move is represented as an act of freedom and is also, Chopin lets us see, a limited one. The cottage is literally around the corner from the house she has left. The society that surrounds her is still the society of Creole New Orleans, and the boundaries she can cross are still the boundaries that society has drawn. She has moved; she has not escaped. Several of the Creole ladies stop visiting her. Leonce, informed by letter, writes back trying to preserve the public appearance of normality by arranging for the family house to undergo renovations, so that the move can be explained as temporary. Edna accepts the cover story without accepting the implication.
Robert returns from Mexico. The meeting is awkward at first — he has come back changed, or at least uncertain, and Edna has changed more than he has — but the mutual feeling has not diminished. For a few short hours, in the little cottage, they confess what they have felt for each other since the summer. Robert tells Edna he has dreamed all summer of the impossibility of their situation — he has imagined Leonce freeing her, or Robert himself finding some way to offer her an honourable position as a future wife. Edna cuts him off. She tells him that she is not a possession that Leonce can give away or refuse; she gives herself, or does not, according to her own determination; the children and the husband are not the point. Robert listens and is defeated by the clarity of what she has said. He loves her within the frame of ownership and cannot step outside the frame. He leaves. He leaves a note: "I love you. Good-bye — because I love you." The tragedy is not that he does not love her. The tragedy is that he loves her exactly within the terms of the social order she has spent the novel trying to walk out of, and that he cannot imagine love on any other terms.
Almost immediately after finding Robert's farewell note, Edna is called to Adele Ratignolle's house. Adele is in difficult labour with another child. Edna attends her, at the sickroom's request, and witnesses the ordeal. Chopin keeps the physical detail at arm's length, but the scene is harrowing anyway. Adele, in the grip of labour, grips Edna's hand and whispers through her pain: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!" This is the injunction around which Edna's life has been organised and which she has been learning, over the course of the summer and autumn, cannot continue to organise it. She leaves Adele's house at dawn and walks home through the New Orleans streets knowing, for the first time with full clarity, what her situation requires.
She returns to Grand Isle alone. The season is over. The Lebruns' resort is closed. Only the caretaker remains, and he is surprised to see a guest. Edna arranges for a room and for a meal later in the day and then walks down to the beach. She takes off her clothes. "She cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her." She walks into the Gulf. The final passage is one of the most debated endings in American fiction: "The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace." She swims out, and as she swims she thinks of her husband, of her two boys, of her father and her sister Margaret, of Robert, of Mademoiselle Reisz's music, of Adele's voice calling to her about the children. She swims past exhaustion and the novel closes on her final physical sensations and the receding image of an old terror.
Is this suicide? Liberation? Martyrdom? Ecstasy? The alternatives have been argued over since the book was rediscovered, and the argument is the book's afterlife. What Chopin understood, writing in 1899, is that the alternatives could not be cleanly separated in the world her novel describes. The only form of sovereignty available to Edna in the world she inhabits is sovereignty over her own death. The sea that offered her self-discovery at the beginning of the summer offers her self-termination at the end, and the offer is the same offer — the offer of the self unencumbered, outside the social structure that has defined her as wife and mother and nothing more. That this offer can only be fulfilled by dying is the indictment Chopin is making against the world that required Edna to die to be free. The novel does not offer an alternative ending because, within the terms of 1899 New Orleans, no alternative ending was available. The book refuses the conventional consolations — it does not convert Edna, does not return her to her marriage, does not punish her for her transgressions in the moralising voice of the narrator — and it refuses them precisely because offering them would betray the truth the book is trying to tell. The Awakening is the American nineteenth-century novel in which an unremarkable woman notices that she is a person and then discovers that the world her class and her marriage and her motherhood have built for her contains no room for a person. The world's answer is to call her ill. Her answer is to walk into the sea. Chopin lets the answer stand without commentary and the book, having been killed for it in 1899, has been being read for it ever since.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
The Norton Critical Edition by Margo Culley is the scholarly standard — it includes the full text alongside contemporary reviews, biographical documents, and critical essays that illuminate the book's fifty-year suppression and recovery. The Penguin Classics edition by Sandra Gilbert is a more affordable alternative with a strong introduction.
Norton's authoritative scholarly edition with contemporary reviews and essential critical context.
The Penguin Classics edition — affordable, well-introduced, and widely available.
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