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Edna Pontellier spends her summers on Grand Isle, a fashionable place for the wealthy. She lives there with her husband and children, in a dull existence with no identity of her own.  But something happens to Edna one summer.  She grows tired. She practically burst with the feeling that she must live before she dies and that she has yet to really lived at all!  She emerges into vibrancy and womanhood only to do the unthinkable in the end.

The story begins with Edna on the beach while her husband, Robert Lebrun, contemplates whether he should spend the evening at his club, which would benefit them socially, or dine with his family.  This is the reader’s first insight to the importance Mr. LaBrun places on his social standing.  It is quickly understood that Edna does not share her husband need for societal gains.  The book grows more intriguing as the tension mounts between Edna and her husband. As long as she takes her social duties seriously, he is happy.  It is when she chooses to ignore her social obligations, however, that their relationship and the story takes its most interesting turn.

In writing The Awakening, Kate Chopin was well ahead of her time.  The novel was met with a great deal of controversy.  Even fans of her work prior to this novel, shunned her.  She was a pioneer creating women characters beyond the role of wife and mother.  She wrote about women’s feelings, sexuality, and independence.  It took America decades to catch up with Kate Chopin.   It is important to add that Chopin used a lot of symbols in all of her work and that The Awakening is full of them.  These symbols serve to add meaning to the text and to underline some subtle points. Understanding the meaning of these symbols is vital to a full appreciation of the story. Some of the major symbols include birds, art, sleep, piano playing, the gulf, the moon, and learning to swim.

Quotes from The Awakening:

“The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth…She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her.”

“For the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lesson the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate.”

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