The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

By Kate Chopin

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin. Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating mixed reaction from contemporary readers and criticism.

The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern masterpieces of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.

Kate Chopin's narrative style in The Awakening can be categorized as naturalism. Chopin's novel bears the hallmarks of Maupassant's style: a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures. This demonstrates Chopin's admiration for the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant, yet another example of the enormous influence Maupassant exercised on nineteenth-century literary realism. However, Chopin's style could more accurately be described as a hybrid that captures contemporary narrative currents and looks forward to various trends in Southern and European literature. Mixed into Chopin's overarching nineteenth-century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper-class pretension, reminiscent of direct contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and George Bernard Shaw.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9783736801264

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was an American writer. Born in St. Louis, Missouri to a family with French and Irish ancestry, Chopin was raised Roman Catholic. An avid reader, Chopin graduated from Sacred Heart Convent in 1968 before marrying Oscar Chopin, with whom she moved to New Orleans in 1870. The two had six children before Oscar’s death in 1882, which left the family with extensive debts and forced Kate to take over her husband’s businesses, including the management of several plantations and a general store. In the early 1890s, back in St. Louis and suffering from depression, Chopin began writing short stories, articles, and translations for local newspapers and literary magazines. Although she achieved moderate critical acclaim for her second novel, The Awakening (1899)—now considered a classic of American literature and a pioneering work of feminist fiction—fame and success eluded her in her lifetime. In the years since her death, however, Chopin has been recognized as a leading author of her generation who captured with a visionary intensity the lives of Southern women, often of diverse or indeterminate racial background.