Wednesday, June 19, 2024

The Awakening by Kate Chopin


The Awakening is one of those books that I've meant to get around to reading for years.  I don't think I was missing anything.  This book is tied with Kim by Rudyard Kipling for least favorite book of the year.  I'm aware of the book's prevailing reputation as a landmark of early feminism - please don't think I'm against books that explore the complexities of women's issues, emotions, and social limitations in the 19th century, as this is an area of interest for me.  I'm simply against this book.  

Set in New Orleans in the late 19th century, the novel tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a Kentuckian transplant to Creole society who grows to resent marriage, motherhood, social obligations, and pretty much the world.  I feel that Chopin used Edna to indict society for the constraints placed upon women, in terms of limited social freedom and under-education.  I'm just not sure that Edna is the ideal Poster Girl for this story.  Narcissistic, capricious, and immature, Edna fails to win my sympathy.  She cares very little about her children, or anyone else, really - except her lovers, who are the worst sort of losers.  Edna's judgment, sense of self-awareness, thoughts, and feelings are stunted and under-developed, and Chopin tries to makes this society's fault, in the same century that gave us the likes of Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Mary Seacole, and the novels of Jane Austen. 

At the end of the book, Edna walks into the sea, seemingly to do away with herself, because society has no place for a freethinking woman of superior sensibilities like her - or at least it seems that this is the narrative Chopin is asking us to accept.  I would never begrudge any woman the need to develop a sense of personal identity - but Edna's seems to be framed in terms of a resentment and self-absorption that I found off-putting and, for me, undermined the success of the novel.

Read for The Tea and Ink Society 2024 Reading Challenge (Category: Southern Fiction) - also on my Classics Club list