Here is another book that surprised me. I did not like the writing style at the beginning, but by the end I liked exactly that, the writing, very much. The writing is descriptive, right from the beginning, but when it starts not only the places and scenes are described, but also we are told the personality traits of the involved characters. Here is the classical problem of being "told rather than shown". After the initial presentation of the characters, only then do we begin to observe them. At the same time the tone becomes sensual, beautiful and moving. It starts out choppy. Maybe this is not a bad technique, to first introduce the disparate characters and then to add depth to each one? You begin to watch them and to understand their emotions. It is Edna, and the other female characters you watch, more so than the male figures. But what I liked about the book was the writing.

This is a book of early feminism, published first in 1899. The constricts are those placed upon women during the Victorian era – husband, social standing, children and “what will people say”! We watch the "awakening" of a woman; she becomes aware of her own identity, and her right to have her own identity.

The setting is New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast.

This was my first Librivox audiobook. I want to thank Leslie and Sandy for their help in learning how to download it and for their lists of good Librivox narrators. Elizabeth Klett, narrates this. To tell you the truth, I didn't like the narration at first. I found it too rapid, I had to learn who was who and so I had a terrible time with the rapid speed. But then, just as I grew to like the writing style, I grew to like the narration too. Sometimes you have to acclimatize yourself to a narrator, and sometimes the narrator has to get into the feel of the story. I will not shy away from this narrator. She is very good, albeit a bit fast for me. I need time to think when I listen to a book.

Then there is the ending...... I am not so sure I like it, but you will be surprised. I guarantee that. Again, it is not the plot that makes me like this book, but rather the feeling the writing conjures. I felt Edna's awakening.

A good book, and I recommend it.

"Gerekli olmayan şeylerden vazgeçerim; çocuklarım için paradan vazgeçerim, canımdan da vazgeçerim ama kendimden vazgeçmem."


Toplumsal normların dışına çıkmak isteyen bir kadın Edna, eş olmak, anne olmak istemiyor. Yazıldığı dönemde Uyanış çok tepki çekmiş, sansüre uğramış. Ama Chopin fikirlerini söylemekten geri durmamış.

The setting and time of this novel is News Orleans, 1899. A married wife with two children feels trapped by her situation (free to be nothing more than a caring mother and obedient wife who has to play by society’s rules). One night her husband seems to command her to do something, and she snaps…how dare he talk that way. Her husband is not really a bad man, but he just comes to expect his wife to better his lot in life and attend afternoon teas and such…her father who is a retired Confederate colonel tells the husband this:
•tYou are too lenient, too lenient by far, Leone. Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife. Take my word for it.

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

Wait, isn't this something that we would read in O magazine these days? When are we "mom" enough? Can we really have it all? Gosh, haven't we heard all those questions before? What makes The Awakening really interesting( and perhaps ageless) is Kate Chopin was talking about a wife and mother living in 19th century Louisiana. How can it be possible that we're in the 21st century( with better conditions) and we are still asking ourselves these questions?

What married woman would enter into an adulterous affair? What drives women to embark on that path? Another friend of mine from university was OBSESSED with this question and as a married woman herself, enjoyed asking the other women in her class, myself included. I wonder all these years later if she ever found the answer. In The Awakening, our main female protagonist, wife and mother of two, Edna Pontellier, draws closer to a local man and although the relationship ends before it can be consummated, forbidden love hangs in the air. But that summer sets Edna on a course of "awakening" that rocks the foundation of her marriage and the society that surrounds her.

Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight—perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.

Can you just imagine the scandal when this book was released? Even now, just as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary ( just to name two) managed to set readers apart, Kate Chopin certainly had 'tongues wagging' over things that would have seen completely unforgivable for a woman.

There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.

As a reader, when I was a 19 year old university student and today as 35 year old high school teacher, the scene in this story that I will never forget is that of Edna's husband and the doctor. The doctor decides to give the husband some " sound medical advice."

let your wife alone for a while. Don’t bother her, and don’t let her bother you. Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism—a sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or causes which you and I needn’t try to fathom.

Moody and whimsical? Indeed! The Awakening certainly reminds me of the beautifully written The Yellow Wallpaper as both highlight the opinions of what a "woman ought to be." The ending bears a striking similarity to Chopin'sThe Story of an Hour in that beautiful hint of irony that delivers sadness with it as well.


So many readers have stated it so much better than I, but The Awakening certainly still deserves our attention.

It is nineteenth-century New Orleans. Twenty-something-year-old Edna Pontellier is realizing that she does not want to be a wife or mother--at a time when women are seen as property. Edna takes a vacation with her controlling, albeit very successful husband, Mr. Pontellier (I don't recall his first name ever being used...) to the Gulf of Mexico where she suddenly finds her heart's desires?...Ok, maybe more like where she discovers herself. She goes from dutiful to insolent, from loyal to self-fulfilled. She runs across one man, and then another, and then moves out of her home...but alas, it is young Robert who captures her heart.

When she refuses to be ordered around like a child, it is so disturbing to her husband, that he wondered if "his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally."

Things get a bit humorous when her husband consults his doctor regarding his wife's mental condition:

"She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women; and--you understand--we meet in the morning at the breakfast table."

The old gentleman lifted his shaggy eyebrows, protruded his thick nether lip, and tapped the arms of his chair with his cushioned fingertips.

"What have you been doing to her, Pontellier?"

"Doing! Parbleu!"

"Has she," asked the Doctor, with a smile, "has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women-super-spiritual superior beings? My wife has been telling me about them."


After all this speculation, however, what ends up happening to Edna in the end seems to work against her character.

Putting aside Edna's condemnation of the conformist society she lives in alongside the husband whose sole concern is "keeping up with the Joneses," it is interesting to see the alloy of Anglo and Creole cultures. I also loved some of Chopin's descriptions: (i.e.: "The stillest hour of the night had come, the hour before dawn, when the world seems to hold its breath. The moon hung low, and had turned from silver to copper in the sleeping sky.")

HOW NOT TO HELP A NOVEL READER

He looked at Edna's book, which he had read; and he told her the end, to save her the trouble of wading through it, he said.

ORIGINALITY IS NOT THE POINT HERE

If you piled up all the novels about marital infidelity you would… well, you’d need a team of assistants with engineering skills and probably ninja powers, plus some hang gliding experts when the extendable ladders reached their limit, and then a lot of expensive final assistance from the NASA International Space Station because the pile would reach to the moon.

So I can’t recommend this novel for its original theme. Reviewers at the time called it the American Madame Bovary. In fact it got a bad reception all round. They were shocked by the boldness of Edna, our heroine, who never loved her husband, can live cheerfully without seeing her two kids for months at a time, and gets to kiss two separate men who aren’t her husband.

This was 1899, not the swinging sixties, and it was New Orleans, not Paris when it sizzles, so Edna’s awakening to the possibilities of life outside bourgeois convention was never going to be a frenzied spree of threesomes and hot tubs and alfresco shagging exploits. But there is no doubt Edna does get to shag one of these kissy guys. This is how Kate tells us :

He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom.

That’s hot, isn’t it.

HATING ON EDNA

Aside from the implied extramarital sex the reviewers hated on Edna for her less than maternal desire to park the kids and get on with her painting. But actually, you see guys in books doing this all the time, Brideshead Revisited springs to mind, but any story featuring a boarding school will do. Edna got clobbered for being seen to breathe a sigh of relief when the kids were off her hands. She makes oddball statements like :

I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.

Elsewhere Kate is fiercer and less ambiguous

The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.

Such a kicking was dished out to The Awakening that it faded into obscurity for 50 years and was rediscovered and then became a classic, whatever that means. So Kate Chopin lines up with the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, Nick Drake, Rodriguez and, of course, Herman Melville (you couldn’t give copies of Moby Dick away in 1920).

PROBLEMS OF A RECALCITRANT WIFE

Kate is funny, She has a glinting, wicked, stiletto-between-the-ribs humour, especially about ghastly husbands. Edna’s other half moans to his doctor

She’s making it devilishly uncomfortable for me…she’s got some notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women

And she point-blank refuses to go to her sister’s wedding :

She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth. Nice thing for a woman to say to her husband!

The doctor comforts Mr Pontellier

Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism—a sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or causes which you and I needn't try to fathom.

Some other old trout gives up the following wisdom :

“You are too lenient, too lenient by far, Leonce,” asserted the Colonel. “Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife. Take my word for it.”
The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave.

When Edna does finally grab a few pleasurable evenings with a nonhusband, the delicious cynicism is still there

“I'll go away if I must; but I shan't amuse myself. You know that I only live when I am near you.”
He stood up to bid her good night.
“Is that one of the things you always say to women?”
“I have said it before, but I don't think I ever came so near meaning it,” he answered with a smile.

IN THE END

I loved all of this novel, even the ending. I could imagine some readers hurling The Awakening at the wall after reading the last page – I can’t say why naturally – and I sympathise with them but no, this was a great ending.

I could have read this many years ago, it was always there, but better late than never.

I have felt a kind of kinship with Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening since 1st reading it many years ago, particularly since I lived in New Orleans and grew up in Chopin's home city, Saint Louis, the place she returned to from Louisiana with her children after her husband died suddenly of what was termed "swamp fever".


The novel stands out because it establishes a kind of literary frontier, a book that while not perhaps openly "feminist", looks at the role of a woman through a different kind of lens, so much so that it was quickly vilified & even banned when published in 1899.

What causes me to especially embrace the novel after a 2nd reading for a local library Zoom discussion, is the presence of several dominant images & metaphors that I may have failed to focus on initially, all aimed at enabling the main character, Edna Pontellier, age 26, in her quest for an identity not pinned to her husband or defined by her children or even the other women Edna befriends.

I quickly began to think back to the character of Nora in Ibsen's play A Doll's House, written in 1879, just 20 years previous to Chopin's work. Both the Ibsen play & Kate Chopin's novel are seen as iconoclastic in the full sense of the word and both continue to cause a wide range of response, including at the Goodreads site, well over a century after being written.

The novel begins with the sound of a caged bird, a green & yellow parrot, repeating: Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!, roughly translated as..."Go away! Go Away! For heaven's sake!". This initial image represents Edna'a view of her own life, that of a wealthy woman in 1890s New Orleans, cared for by servants but apparently encased in a world of someone's else's making.

An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange; she did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting her fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path they had taken but was just having a good cry all to herself.

There are in fact many references within the novel to darkness, despair, despondence & some apparent mood swings that cause the reader to wonder at a problem akin to a clinical depression, even when spending summers at a Louisiana resort called Belle Isle. Surrounded by the sea, Edna Pontellier finds "the voice of the sea seductive, never ceasing, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abysses of solitude; to lose oneself in the mazes of inner contemplation, with the touch of the sea sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace." To be certain, this stands as foreshadowing for later events.

Early on, we sense that Edna is unsettled, not rooted to her time & place, or one might say, at sea & swimming against the current. Chopin begins by painting a scene in which Edna is learning to swim & in so doing, she seems to over-extend herself, i.e. to swim well beyond her range of comfort in order to test her prowess in the water. She survives & with great effort, makes her way back to shore as onlookers who feared for her safety, wonder at her daring fate while in the water.


Edna is the mother of two children & a very loving but much-absent husband, Leonce Pontellier, whose business ventures take him far from home, including a long stay in New York City in pursuit of a new financial opportunity. While at home, Edna grows bored of the children, who are mostly in the care of a governess and of the activities that other wealthy women in New Orleans routinely take part in.

Increasingly, she explores a more independent life, including spending time with Robert LeBrun, an apparently chivalrous young man about her age but a man who has led a life that seems to have involved following his protective mother's every wish. Edna, in her husband's absence, is also pursued by a man, Alcee Arobin, someone with a reputation for carefree living & involving very casual relationships with a variety of women.

Edna's best friend, Adele Ratignolle, warns her against Mr. Arobin & also warns Robert not to pay too much attention to Edna, with the man soon after taking his leave to go to Mexico for business reasons, or so it is said. Edna's awakening involves her apparent love of Robert, while being sensually attracted to both men but mostly, "she just wanted something to happen--something, anything; she did not know what."

After seemingly consummating a passionate relationship with both men, Robert decides that he can not abide sharing even a loving bond with a married woman and Edna is clearly not interested in forging a bond with Alcee Arobin. She concludes that, "by all the codes I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex." With the children away with a guardian, Edna decides to move into a small house nearby the more palatial Pontellier New Orleans home, writing to her husband Leonce to appraise him of her plans.

However, first she plans a rather grand farewell party for ten, a kind of "last supper", or so it seems, as she makes a great effort to entertain some of her closest friends, many of whom wonder about her very unconventional behavior. While sitting resplendently among her guests, Edna

feels an old ennui overtaking her, the hopelessness which so often assailed her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something that announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed. There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable.

*At this point, not wishing to reveal the ending, I am inserting a spoiler alert for those not already familiar with the novel!

The novel's ending is quite powerful, as Edna walks along the white sand, slowly making her way down to the sea and with the waters of the Gulf stretching before her in the midst of a wakeful night, "there was one thing in the world that she desired." Changing into her bathing suit & then tossing it off, Edna takes comfort in the seductive voice of the sea, as overhead "a bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water".


After it publication in 1899, very quickly, Kate Chopin's novel was condemned by most readers & reviewers and the author's contract for another book canceled by her publisher.

120 years later, the character of Edna Pontellier continues to be spurned as selfish, petulant, abhorrent, a social outcast who acted in denial of her role as a loving wife & parent and against the temper of not only her time but all time. But I wonder if something like Prozac might have helped Edna if it had been available? And beyond that, was the novel perhaps designed to state a premise--a passionate cry for freedom, not to offer a feminine role model for the 1890s & well beyond?

One view of Edna's seeming demise is that it can be taken symbolically, instead of drowning herself in order to make an extreme statement about freedom, she somehow summons up the strength to once again come ashore, reborn--though of course in dire need of her forsaken clothes.

When Nora forsakes her husband Torvald & her children, making her exit by slamming the door in Ibsen's play, does she find comfort & freedom in another but more uplifting situation when that would have been a high-risk outcome in Norway in 1879, or does she become a woman kept by yet another man? Did Humpty Dumpty really simply fall or was he pushed? Some outcomes are best left open, to be rendered by the imagination of the reader or the playgoer. And I believe this is the case with Kate Chopin's remarkable novel, The Awakening.

**My fairly recent Simon & Schuster hardcover edition of The Awakening contains some very atmospheric black & white period photos of New Orleans & Belle Isle + two of the author on the covers. ***Within my review, the initial photo image is of Kate Chopin, while the last is a New Orleans street scene in the 1890s.

Published in 1899, "The Awakening" is a story revolving around personal and sexual freedom for women. The book was set in New Orleans and nearby coastal areas where women--and any property they accumulated after marriage--were considered the property of their husbands. Divorce was almost non-existent in that Catholic area.

Edna and Leonce Pontellier are vacationing at a coastal resort with their two little sons. Leonce is a generous husband in material ways, but does not connect well emotionally with his wife. Edna falls in love with Robert Lebrun, a young man at the resort, who awakens Edna emotionally. Robert leaves for Mexico since he realizes that a relationship with a married woman would not have a good outcome in 19th Century society.

Edna befriends two women with contrasting lifestyles. Madame Ratignolle is a perfect wife and mother. Mademoiselle Reisz, a pianist, expresses herself through music and has a very independent life. Edna is unhappy in her life as a wife and mother, even though she has servants to do most of the work in the home. She has the opportunity to rebel when her husband goes on a long business trip and their children are sent to their grandmother's house for an extended stay. She begins a dalliance with Alcee Arobin, a man with a reputation of chasing married women. She asserts her independence by moving out of her large house into a smaller abode, expressing herself in her artwork, and is awakened as a sexual woman. When Robert returns later, she says, "I am no longer one of Mr Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose."

The book was very controversial because Edna left her husband and children for her own freedom, a move that would be socially shocking at the turn of the century. Even today, society looks down severely on women who abandon their children. Early in the book, it was stated, "Mrs Pontellier was not a mother-woman." Near the end of the book, it said, "Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night and never lifted....The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them."

The book has wonderful imagery of hunger and food, the draw of the sea, birds in flight, birds in cages, sleeping and awakening. Edna was a woman who could not live with the restrictions of 19th Century society. Finally she hears the call of the sea, "The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water."

If a woman decides out of whim to shun the familial responsibilities of motherhood and wife and become a servant to her passing senses – she should be rebuked. If a man does it – he should be rebuked all the same. Any person regardless of gender, age, or social standing who demonstrate such irresponsibility deserves their chastisement.

I have read a lot of varying responses to this novel and a good deal of them criticizes this book for the selfish irresponsibility of its flawed heroine. And make no mistake; I would be the last person to approve of her actions. However the gravity that this book carries lies not in the heroine’s flawed actions but in her ability to be flawed. Written during the backward 19th century society that not only asks but creeds that women should be the perfect embodiment of macho yearning: subservient, immaculate, modest, sensitive – and to be otherwise was to be unwomanly. Kate Chopin presented the then remote possibility that perhaps a woman defines herself rather than is defined by the conventions and social-edicts around her.

Our heroine, Edna Pontellier, cannot shake this feeling of unease. There lies upon her this great premonition that there exists someone inside her that is neither a wife nor a mother. “She thought of Leonce and the children. They were part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.” And so, driven by affection for another man, she walks slowly along the tragic path of her defiance against her husband and the cruel society that she is part of. Bolder with each step she takes, she slowly comprehends that her war against the world is not just about which man she chooses to love but about her sense of identity as a woman.

There lies the devil. Edna was condemned for there was no victory at hand for her no matter how she struggled. Society did not permit her, a woman, to freely become the person she sought to become – a creature of her own volition. Yet in the face of certain defeat she displayed courage and will power till she had none more to give, defeated by her time.

“The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth. Whither would you soar?”

The 21st century is as unforgiving and treacherous for a woman as centuries past. Patriarchy and misogyny, for all the battles won, have found new ways to contain the gifts of womanhood and shackle her thoughts. But the wind of progress is blowing stronger than it has ever had. Mothers are not just mothers, and wives are much more than wives. There is a clamoring for you to be brave, to lead, to be different, to be flawed.

Will you soar?

#ihatemybf (final boss ORIGINAL)

i was expecting way more chaos but it was still incredible women going off the rails has got to be one of my favourite genres of anything ever

Teniendo en cuenta la fecha en que se publica el libro, 1899, podríamos decir que estamos ante una novela feminista antes de que existiera el femenismo como concepto.
Una mujer, casada y con dos hijos, toma conciencia de sí misma, de su individualidad y empieza a actuar como tal. Y todo ello narrado con sutileza casi poética.
Además, el libro termina con un bello final.

Muy recomendable.

‘Something put into my head that you cared for me; and I lost my senses,’ writes Kate Chopin towards the end of her heartbreaking novel, The Awakening. The story takes place in the late nineteenth-century Louisiana, near New Orleans. We follow our protagonist, Edna Pontellier, as she navigates her journey towards self-fulfillment and independence.

Edna is in a loveless marriage with a husband who sees her as a statuette or a rare painting among his personal “household gods.” Enter Robert, a young man with an aptitude for art who enjoys the company of Edna and always takes the time to compliment her hobbies, accompanies her to the Gulf Coast, guards her while she sleeps, and sings fun lullabies in French.

Robert decides to move to Mexico to pursue a business venture. Edna is shocked to hear about this revelation, and while he is gone, she starts to realize she was in love with him.

“Robert’s voice was not pretentious. It was musical and true. The voice, the notes, the whole refrain haunted her memory.”

Robert promises to write to her while he is away, but instead sends telegrams to Edna's friend because he thinks that she does not care for him. “I realized what a cur I was to dream of such a thing, even if you had been willing.”