The Awakening (Penguin Classics) by Kate Chopin - 1991

The Women's Press, 1991. Paperback. Used: Acceptable. Our cover is different. The Women's Press. 1991. A minor masterpiece, The Awakening was a scandalous book when it arrived from the turn-of-the-century presses. With a heroine who found her husband dull, married life dreary and confining, and motherhood to be bondage, this revolutionary book is still relevant to many. This concise supplement to Chopin's The Awakening helps students understand the overall structure of the novel, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and culutral perspectives of the author. From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, shocked readers in 1899 and the scandal created by the book haunted Kate Chopin for the rest of her life. The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two sons living in conventional Creole society. Unlike the married women around her, whose sensuality seems to flow naturally into maternity, Edna finds herself wanting her own emotional and sexual identity. During one summer while her husband is out of town, her frustrations find an outlet in an affair with a younger man. Energized and filled with a desire to define her own life, she sends her children to the country and removes herself to a small house of her own: "Every step she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to 'feed upon the opinion' when her own soul had invited her." Her triumph is short-lived, however, destroyed by a society that has no place for a self-determined, unattached woman. Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and woman's opportunities in an oppressive world. How could any woman not like this book? I am FAR from being a feminist, but- WOW! Ms. Chopin was ahead of her time in describing the oppression of women and how they were considered nothing but an extension of their husbands. She ventured where few female authors dared and boldly expressed the idea that if a woman wasn't free to be herself it was better, not only for her, but for all around her, that she were dead instead of living as someone that she was not. Suicide was a little extreme, but what other choice did Edna have in that time period? Ms. Chopin's ideas of liberation and identity and equality are still applicable today. A woman must become someone before she becomes someone's wife. 0-7043-3822-X. Paperback - 1991 - good condition - - . Isbn 070433822X.