![]() ![]() Edna is not a particularly “nice” woman she’s a complex person with conflicting emotions and drives. I think it’s a very mature work full of emotional truth. It’s also interesting that the only woman who is represented as completely free and fully creative is the coded lesbian, Mademoiselle Reisz. Edna Pontellier is only able to come into her own as a creative person when she decides to leave her marriage, become independent and pursue her relationship with her lover, Robert Lebrun. For Chopin, marriage represents a moral and spiritual dead-end in which women cannot thrive because it necessarily involves men imposing their wills upon them. The Awakening is very much a fin de siècle novel it’s shot through with a sense of change and instability, and a profound questioning of conventions, especially conventional morality. The outrage with which it was greeted by critics destroyed Chopin’s reputation as a writer. In 1899 Kate Chopin published The Awakening, the story of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother who falls in love with another man and “awakes” to the possibility of a new life of erotic and spiritual freedom. ![]()
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