Selected Product:
| The Awakening
Mass Market
Author: Kate Chopin
Publisher: Avon
Release Date: 1982-02-10
ISBN-10: 0380002450
ISBN-13: 9780380002450
List Price: $4.50
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
"She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before."
A Statement on Non-Traditional Sensibilities
| Customer Rating: | An interesting portrayal of how non-traditional
women seem to have no options. Awaiting the
modern day version. Who's going to write it???? |
Lovely
| Customer Rating: | I don't know if I have such great memories of this book because my friends I made such fun of it--but most of the books we mock are things we truly enjoyed.
Honestly, we all get a little sick of the depression and the whininess, but essentially this is a deep and thought-provoking novel of early feminism. It's symbolic and beautiful despite all its darkness. |
not so simple, not so obvious
| Customer Rating: | The protagonist of this excellent novel is commonly seen as a victim of the repression and hopelessness of women's desires for autonomy in middle-class American society around the end of the 19th century. This view is easily justifiable, and Chopin does give the reader plenty of pointers toward this interpretation.
But a different and also arguable view is that Edna Pontellier is not so much a victim, but rather a failure. Just what is her problem? Her husband is well off and considerate. He married her for love, and now finds himself with a wife whom he "meet[s] in the morning at the breakfast table." He tells her about his day and she doesn't listen. She's popular among her social set. She has plenty of servants. Even when she unilaterally declares her independence, dropping her social life, neglecting the children and the household, brusquely telling her husband "Let me alone, you bother me" and apparently denying him the pleasures of the marriage bed, he tolerates and indulges her in an even-tempered manner, merely asking for but not even insisting that she manage the household better. She then moves into her own house, leaving her husband behind, and he tolerates that too.
Whatever her problems, what is her program? She lives on fantasies of unrequited love; she lacks empathy for others (including her children); she's egoistic to a fine point. She acts on impulse; her desires are vague. She comes to know what she does not want - to belong to any man - but cannot formulate or pursue what she does want beyond incoherent, fanciful and impractical fragments. She won't pay her dues as wife and mother - even though those dues are very light. She realizes that she doesn't want to belong to any man, and she hasn't the courage to be alone. She takes some steps to change her life, has some partial success, but when she's rejected by Lebrun, the younger man who is too honorable to have an affair with a married woman (whom she has already realized she doesn't want either) she just quits. She's a malcontent without much of a program or much of a spine. The novel's title suggests an irony: Edna wakes up but doesn't know what to do in the world to which she awakens.
Edna's vague desires seem to be for a kind of de-humanized autonomy. Husband, children, friends, society - she experiences all these as constraints. She yearns to re-invent herself, but in a world with no attachments at all. This doesn't exist in life, and so - again without really realizing it - she chooses the only option that will free her from all those clingy attachments - death. At age 28, she gives up. Unable to do anything positive, she commits an act of complete rejection - of everything she has and anything to which she might aspire.
What's going on? If Chopin had wanted to write a simple exposé of woman as victim - the impossibility of a woman's desire for autonomy -- she could have made Edna a bit more gutsy, a bit less dreamy, a bit more positively purposeful. The literature of the time was full of women as victims - Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Manon Lescaut, Marguerite Gautier/Violetta Valéry, etc. etc. etc. None of them were half as sappy as Edna Pontellier. Has Chopin deliberately crafted something deeper and more sophisticated than just a screed about how tough it was to be a woman?
And there are still other possible interpretations - for example the very common one of the woman who acts immorally and is punished for it (see most of the heroines mentioned earlier in this note). Chopin has written a complex and ultimately ambiguous story. Is Edna a victim or is she a failure? Is she justly punished or unjustly repressed? Chopin has given us a game of reader's choice, including the richer appreciation that Edna is both a victim and a failure, both repressed by social norms and punished for violating them. Let the reader enjoy!
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How long have I been asleep?
| Customer Rating: | On the cover page the following sentence caught my eye: "Written nearly one hundred years ago, THE AWAKENING is the compelling story of an extraordinary modern woman struggling against the constraints of marriage and motherhood, and slowly discovering the power of her own sexuality" (Avon Books). And truthfully, yes, that does sum everything up into a nice tidy bow. The novel is primarily about Edna Pontellier a woman in a loveless marriage. Edna wakes up from her half dead sleep once she embraces the emotions she didn't know she could even express. Edna embodies the classic tale of Phoenix: she is completely reborn.
The courage Chopin possessed to write this one hundred years ago is extraordinary. This is a feminist novel without being negative towards men. More than that, she explores feminine psyche in such a way that this novel could have been written in our time. But clearly, as the introductory page indicates, it was written nearly (now over) one hundred years ago. I can see why it was banned from libraries and schools. Edna, our protagonist, stands out from the rest of the Creole characters. Unlike the other women, she is not particularly attached to her children. She loves them of course, but she doesn't dote on them as the mothers (like Madame Ratignolle), nor does she seem to believe that the world revolves around her husband. On the contrary, Edna feels a longing she cannot explain. A belief that there is something more out there than just this. Psychologically this reminds me extensively of "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Everyone else is so quick to diagnose her without even wanting to listen to what she wants! Though we cannot be for certain (since it is merely implied but not stated), it appears that Edna also displays symptoms of depression.
Edna goes through a complete metamorphosis with her character. Her deconstruction begins by getting over her fear of swimming. There is such a beautiful scene with her swimming in the ocean after a party in the evening, with other people swimming and watching her. She keeps swimming until it frightens her how far she has ventured and she returns elated to her husband (who of course only says she didn't really go that far out). The turning point happens later when Robert (another man) returns with her and wishes her a good night and for the first time in YEARS she "felt pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire" (51). It is here that Edna AWAKENS from her half awake-half dead going-through-the-motions life. It is after this scene that her husband and people begin to notice a difference within her.
There are so many memorable scenes in this novel. What I enjoyed the most was seeing Edna's growth as an individual. Instead of doing wifely duties of visiting with her husbands' client's wives, she chose to go to the horse races and gamble (and win). She painted and committed herself to reading more and educating herself. She sold her paintings for money. She bought her own small abode (the pigeon house). She firmly established herself as an independent, career-oriented full person. She loved her children, but felt more at peace when they were gone. There is something to be said about that; not all women, Ms. Chopin may have been saying, should aspire to only be mothers. Why can't women enjoy themselves?
I won't spoil the ending but let me just say that it is very fitting. Even though it is the end of the novel Chopin leaves the readers thinking that Edna's life is just now beginning. Some will disagree, and that's what makes it so powerful. There is an implied ending, but truly we - as only students of literature - will never know for sure. |
Better as an example of feminist lit than as a story
| Customer Rating: | This book has become a feminist lit classic for a reason. It follows the story of Edna, a woman living in Louisiana and married to a Creole, through the span of a little less than a year. In that time, she experiences the "awakening" the title tells about--falls in love (not with her husband), leaves her home and family, and discovers her calling as an artist. On that level, the book works.
But as an actual *story*, well, not so much. Frankly, I found Edna less than sympathetic, especially in her actions towards her children. The ending is abrupt--I won't give it away--and a huge let down after the rest of the book. In essence, the book is building up to...nothing.
All in all, worth reading--but mainly so you can say you've read it. It's good, but nothing special. I read My Antonia around the same time as this, and I much prefered My Antonia. They are sort of similar, so if The Awakening sounds like something you might like but you aren't sure, try My Antonia instead. |
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