Kate Chopin

The Awakening Kate Chopin

Edna Pontellier is an obedient wife and mother vacationing at Grand Isle with her family. Edna becomes close to a young man named Robert Lebrun, a charming, earnest young man who actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. and one of the two sons of an elderly French woman who run the resort where Edna and her family vacationing at. Robert senses the doomed nature of such a relationship and flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture. Edna is lonely without his companionship, but shortly after her return to New Orleans (where she usually lives with her family), she picks up the male equivalent of a mistress. Although she does not love Alcee Arobin, he awakens various sexual passions within her. The narrative focus moves to Edna's shifting emotions as she reconciles her maternal duties with her desire for social freedom and to be with Robert. When Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening, originally titled A Solitary Soul, was first released, it evoked a storm of controversy. Though it was not actually banned, it received public censure across the United States. It was considered immoral and subversive, dangerous to the moral well-being of "innocent" women and too frank in its depiction of female desires and physical needs. It challenged the existing gender roles and created a hitherto unrecognized space for a woman's requirement for self-fulfillment, something which was seen as inflammatory and ruinous to society in general.