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Introduction

Kate Chopin's The Awakening, first published in 1899, is a disturbing, complex, and glaringly truthful novel. It's not a simple read for a lazy weekend nor can it be considered, as Chopin's very earliest works were, a regional story by a nineteenth-century Southern lady. It must be read with alert and concerned eyes because the wealth of Edna Pontellier's story lies in the symbols of the landscape, the cadence of the language, ultimately in the many things that go unstated—to be discovered by the reader's heart. It demands constant trolling for clues and meaning in the dangerous and murky waters of the Louisiana gulf country.

The Awakening, and indeed Chopin's entire body of work, is governed by her desire, in her words, to describe "human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it. " At the turn of the century, however, America was not necessarily receptive to this departure from the norm. This was a time when only a few groundbreaking writers, such as Whitman and Maupassant, were delving into new fictional territory, and pushing the limits of the treatment of sexuality in literature.

From the very beginning, Chopin's writing was praised and admired, but objections were frequently raised "on moral grounds. " Her earliest collection of short stories, Bayou Folk, did, however, establish her as a writer of "local color," a popular literary form during the nineteenth century, in which authors wrote about their particular region of the country, exotic or quaint. Chopin described the people she encountered in Louisiana—Creoles, Cajuns and Negroes—where her marriage to Oscar Chopin had brought her.

Bayou Folk and her other early work was welcomed by publishers and critics although they were sometimes shocked by what they saw as the "coarsenesses" in it. The critic for the Atlantic nonetheless grasped that her "passionate note" was "characteristic of a power awaiting opportunity. " Perhaps the opportunity Chopin was waiting for was literary recognition because the success of Bayou Folk seemed to have a liberating effect on her. In a period when the widespread opinion was that fiction should be pleasant and wholesome, Chopin in her characteristically bold way wrote about suicide, murder, alcoholism, desire, passion and infidelity—uncharted territory for most, especially women writers.