Edna Pontellier, wife of Laconce, a successful Creole
businessman in New Orleans, has adjusted, over six years of marriage, to her
new life and home. Accommodating the expectations of her husband and the upper
society of New Orleans, she meets, while vacationing at a nearby Island, Robert
Leburn, with whom she becomes infatuated. This young man sparks memories of her
youthful infatuations, and she begins to unravel, socially and sexually.
Chopin came to prominence as a local colourist author,
presenting the variety of the South and Louisiana in the late 19th Century. Stories
like "The 'Cadian Ball" and "Désirée’s Baby" are fine
example of this tradition, with the latter highlighting the preoccupations with
miscegenation. Other stories, such as "Emancipation: A Life Fable",
"Story of an Hour" and The Awakening reveal a focus of Chopin for
which she become noted for after her death: a growing consciousness of the
restraint of women within society. It was her place as an outsider in this Creole
New Orleans (originally from Missouri) that provided Chopin with the distance to
observe the vibrance of middle class creole society and, like Edna in The
Awakening, to see through the pretences and social fictions. What makes The
Awakening unique is that although born out of this local Colour, intellectually
it is at home in two literary traditions: the feminist writers of the 19th
century, such as George Sand, and fin-de-siecle literature, best known in the
English speaking world through Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, with its
preoccupations with degeneration but also of new beginnings and new hopes. The
social and sexual critique comes not only from her unique position with her new
home, but also in the richness of ideas that travelled from far off and helped make
sense of these constraints within her fiction.
Deeply personal while at the same time socially relevant,
The Awakening and Selected Stories provides unique insights into both the
author’s and our society.
Andreas
