The Awakening (Annotated Keynote Classics)

By Kate Chopin and Michelle M. White

Shocking and scandalous in its day, this novel of a young woman's artistic and sexual awakening is now revered as a captivating and sensual feminist classic. Edna has it all, a loving husband, two adoring little boys, summers at the beach with friends, a life of luxury - but something

• Language: English
• Publisher: MMW Books, LLC
• Release date: Oct 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781949611137

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.

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KeynoteClassics.com

The Awakening

by

Kate Chopin

With Annotations by

Michelle M. White

Table of Contents

Introductory Key to

The Awakening

The Awakening

Topics for Discussion or Essays

Major Works of Kate Chopin

Bibliography

Introductory Key to

The Awakening

The choices Edna Pontellier makes in The Awakening will sometimes make you cheer and sometimes make you cringe. It is this ambivalence that makes Kate Chopin’s masterpiece such a pleasure to read. You may find yourself judging her decisions, and critics who reviewed the novel when it came out did the same. Edna’s rebellion against society’s expectations of her as a woman in the 1890s was highly controversial.

Classic novels are time-tested explorations of universal themes, and some, like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, also allow us to travel back to a specific historical period and take a detailed look at what life was like in a certain place. The Awakening is a particularly good example of this because of its excellent use of realism and regionalism. Realism aims to depict accurate observations of life and nature and often highlights aspects of a localized culture and dialect in the literary form called regionalism. Of course, the characters and circumstances are fictional, but the authors themselves are living and writing within a certain frame of reference that is inevitably reflected in their stories. Literary devices like imagery, metaphor, and symbolism allow us to recognize broad and general truths about life, humanity, and emotion. Symbolism provides a way for authors to make a point through entertaining stories without being obvious or preachy. This Introductory Key will help you to recognize and interpret such literary devices as well as provide some information about the time and setting of The Awakening and Kate Chopin’s life. Having this basis of understanding before beginning the novel will help you to appreciate its many layers and get more out of the story.

Kate Chopin was born in 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother was of French-Canadian ancestry, and her father was an Irish immigrant who was successful in business. She had two sisters who died in infancy and two half-brothers from her father’s previous marriage who died in their twenties. She was five years old when her father died in a railroad accident, and she was raised in a household with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of whom were widowed. Kate attended Catholic school and learned French, German, and English; she read European literature in these languages with a particular interest in books that dealt with the female perspective. Kate Chopin came of age in the poverty-stricken post-Civil War South, but her family was comparatively well-off. Missouri was a slave state and her father had two slaves working on their horse farm when she was young. Missouri did not secede from the Union, but it was occupied by Union troops during the war. One of Kate’s step-brothers fought for the South and died from illness.

Five years after the war, when Kate was twenty years old, she married a successful cotton businessman named Oscar Chopin (no known relation to famous Polish composer Frédéric Chopin). Kate and Oscar took a three-month-long honeymoon in Europe before settling to live in New Orleans, where The Awakening takes place, and began to raise a family. The couple enjoyed the theatre, opera, and horseracing, and they vacationed, like the characters in The Awakening, at a Creole resort on Grand Isle. After a poor cotton crop in 1879, they moved to northwest Louisiana. Oscar owned property in the small town of Cloutierville, and they opened a general store there. This French village had a large population of African Americans and Creoles, or people of French ancestry who were born in America. Creoles were known to be somewhat insular, and as an outsider, Kate tended to be more independent than was acceptable in this rural community. In The Awakening, Creoles are distinguished from the Protestant, mainly English Americans who moved into the area from other parts of the United States, like Edna, who is an outsider among a Creole population. Characters in the novel who are Cajun, a term derived from the Acadians, are rural, poor people who settled in Louisiana after they were forcibly removed from modern-day Nova Scotia when their land was transferred from French to British hands in 1755.

In 1882, Kate lost her husband to malaria. At 32 years old, she was left a widow with six children between the ages of three and twelve. She left New Orleans to go back to St. Louis to be near her family. She continued to enjoy reading and began socializing the in literary culture of the city, and a friend encouraged her to begin writing. Throughout the 1890s, she was a prolific author, publishing two novels, over one hundred short stories, and even some music and poetry. Kate Chopin died in 1904 from a cerebral hemorrhage. A list of her work can be found at the end of this book.

Chopin wrote stories of local color, a style popular in in the late 1800s, which was made famous by Mark Twain in his short stories and novels. Frequent travel during the civil war brought a new awareness of differences in dialect and customs in various regions of the country. Things were changing rapidly, and a large population was moving from the country to the cities, from farm to factory, and from the east coast to new western territories. The railroads made transportation faster than ever before and the new telegraphs allowed news to travel at unprecedented rates. Factories and railroads made consumer goods more available and affordable. More and more people attended public schools, increasing the literacy rate, so magazines and books of fiction were exploding in popularity. Books of music made the sounds of Wagner and Chopin accessible to parlor pianists, and artworks by famous painters like Claude Monet and Edgar Degas were on display in new public museums. Labor unions were fighting for rights, and women were increasingly involved in movements for change like the prohibition of alcohol and the right to vote. The pace of change led to a feeling of being caught between tradition and progress, between individuality and conforming to conventions of society. A strong sense of nostalgia among middle- and upper-class fiction readers and a desire to preserve memories of what seemed to be a passing way of life led to the popularity of regionalism in literature.

At the end of the nineteenth century, realism was also becoming important in art and literature. It shows the day-to-day experience that makes up reality and how people relate to one another within the context of their time and place. Realism is often used in contrast to romanticism, which is the emotional experience of life rather than life as it actually is. The Awakening has elements of both. Some characters are mainly realists, and some are romantics, and some switch back and forth. Try to identify these contrasts as you read and make a note of them. Naturalism refers to the effects the environment has on the choices characters make. Their urges, lust, and passion are natural in contrast to social conventions, and are instinctual rather than deliberate choices. Natural locations like the sea also often have significant meaning. It is interesting to note that in 1893, just a few years before The Awakening was written, there was a devastating hurricane that hit the southwest coast of Louisiana, killing over 2000 people and wiping out the islands of Chêniére Caminada and Grand Isle, two important settings in this story.

The last decade of the 1800s is sometimes referred to as the gay nineties, and the gilded age. It was a time of financial excess hiding extreme poverty behind the scenes, especially in the Jim Crow era in the American South. The main characters in The Awakening are of the gilded, or gold-plated leisure class. They spend their time and energy on acquiring and displaying the newest and best of everything. They were under considerable pressure to impress others with fine manners and conspicuous consumption. Social activities and displays of wealth were very important as a way to promote a couple’s standing in the community and could mean success or failure in business. To keep up appearances, a large part of a woman’s week was spent calling on other ladies and maintaining her social network, which also supported her husband’s business ties. Each woman had her own reception day in which a few hours of the week were set aside for her to stay home and receive callers to her home. Corsets and multiple layers of fashionable clothing were worn by women, even in the intense heat of a Louisiana summer. By wearing fancy clothing, a lady made several things clear: she is in the upper class, she can afford the best fabrics and most current fashions, she has ample time to change into a different elaborate dress for each activity of her day, and that she isn’t spending time in manual labor. The upper classes were not to engage in productive work, whether to keep house or to earn money.

Supporting this gilded lifestyle was an array of servants taking care of day-to-day household and personal needs. These working men and women were mainly new immigrants or African Americans who toiled in other people’s homes seven days a week for very low pay, and then went home to care for their own homes and families. In The Awakening, domestic workers are viewed from the perspective of the wealthy people they serve, and are often referred to as the mulatto, or quadroon, as if only the skin color of their parents define them, depicting a widely accepted attitude among the upper classes in the 1890s. This is an example of how reading books from past eras can show us life from a specific historical perspective. Such books help us gain understanding of how things came to be as they are and the ongoing nature of social progress.

Contemporary reviews of The Awakening criticized it not for racial concerns but for its unapologetic depiction of a woman who defies the moral conventions of the day as well as for its controversial ending. The novel was revisited in the nineteen sixties, at a time when traditional gender roles and restrictions were unraveling, and it has become an important classic that historically explores the female perspective.

In the nineteenth century, the woman question was a political issue posed by men that arose as women became increasingly educated at the same time as the industrial revolution drew middle class men away from the farm and into the marketplace for employment. Women were expected to dedicate themselves to maintaining a happy home and family while men were to focus on making money in the outside world. This worldview allowed men to keep the workplace free from female competition and maintain their status as the head of the household while theoretically protecting women from the harsh outside world of business and politics. If a woman was not content to sacrifice her own needs to fit into her prescribed role, she was thought to be either a failure or mentally unstable. Both men and women were under pressure to keep up these appearances, especially within the upper-class society of southern Louisiana where this novel takes place.

In the 1890s, women were beginning to rebel against this cult of domesticity and advocate for social causes and political rights. Kate Chopin was not known to participate in feminist advocacy. Nevertheless, her fiction presented the experience of women from the perspective that she was familiar with, and her stories encourage people to look at the world without the bias of social conventions or standards of behavior and to be independent thinkers. Her characters are often strong women who fight against the constraints imposed on them and search for their own personal truth outside the prism of convention and cultural expectation. Chopin’s first novel At Fault, is about a woman who struggles with the conflict between personal happiness and the moral conventions of the day. The original title for The Awakening, The Solitary Soul suggests that same conflict. In her short story, The Story of an Hour, a woman exalts in the freedom she acquires after hearing of the death of her husband. Chopin’s stories often deal with women who either suffer from their submission to male authority or rebel against it.

The Victorian period of the late nineteenth century was also known for sexual suppression. Only loose women or prostitutes were allowed to enjoy or even think about sex, and even discussing the topic with one’s husband was taboo. A novel like The Awakening had to be very circumspect if it was to address matters of sexuality. Kate Chopin, if she wanted anyone to read her book, especially women in 1899, couldn’t explicitly say, and then they had sex. You will have to read between the lines to recognize scenes in which characters are intimate with each other. Sex is alluded to in classic literature (and old movies) through subtle symbols. You’ll have to be on the lookout for these references if you want to catch the underlying subtext. Sometimes things like fluttering curtains, waves, or something moving in and out, indicate more intimate moments than what is plainly described. These literary devices were also employed because in the nineteenth century, novels were often published as serials in monthly magazines which may be read by the entire family. Adults in the know understand the sexual reference, but to the children it is just a flower blooming.

Another common device that good literature employs to reveal important themes is transitions and contrasts. This may be a change in location, a change in a character’s demeanor, or a change in the weather. Contrasts between scenes or settings tend to point to key ideas. Often there is a character who is the complete opposite of the main character. This device is known as a foil and is used to point out certain personality traits or actions taken by the protagonist. Additionally, many passages in The Awakening that signify important moments or insights are written in more poetic prose. Recognizing literary clues like this will help to decode sometimes cryptic elements of a novel.

If you can learn to read literature with an eye for understanding themes, symbols, and patterns, it will become more rewarding. The Awakening has many wonderful examples of symbolism that point to deeper meanings. A book would be rather bland if the author said, Here comes a scary part; however, It was a dark and stormy night… is much richer and serves to create an image and mood. If you notice a particular word or phrase that repeats in a novel, it probably symbolizes an important theme. In the first chapter of The Awakening, there is a passage that reads, Farther down, before one of the cottages, a lady in black was walking demurely up and down, telling her beads. This lady in black shows up in several scenes and you’ll need to consider what she symbolizes. The phrase telling her beads refers to praying the rosary, which is an indication that she is Catholic, as are most of the Creoles in the novel. You might also consider what the color black might symbolize, as well as the reference to religion. Pay attention to other aspects of the scenes where this lady turns up. Whenever you come across something like