The Awakening

A 1899 novella by Kate Chopin about Edna Pontellier, a married Victorian mother who experiences an awakening of her sexuality and creativity while vacationing on an island with her husband.

This begins when she meets a young man named Robert and develops an affection for him that is well beyond any love she feels for her husband. As the vacation progresses she becomes more and more distant from her husband and children, doing things like sleeping in a hammock rather than in bed with him and spending all day painting. Even after the vacation ends, Edna is a changed woman and cannot let go of what she discovered. The revelations about herself and her marriage cause her to question Victorian gender roles and the life she feels like she has unquestioningly walked into.

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Contains Examples Of:

• Babies Make Everything Better: Believed by Adele. Questioned heavily by Edna.
• Courtly Love: What Robert and Edna have, although Edna does seem to desire a physical relationship with Robert.
• Driven to Suicide: Edna.
• Foil: Adele to Edna. Adele and Mlle. Reisz are also this to each other.
• G-Rated Sex: The sex scenes are so G-rated students tend to completely miss them. The great irony of this is that when it was written the book was so raunchy it almost wasn't published.
• Hysterical Woman: Mr. Pontelier thinks Edna is this, but the psychiatrist he calls to examine her encourages him to leave her be.
• The Ophelia: Parallels can be drawn between Edna's death and the death of Ophelia.
• Sex as Rite-Of-Passage: Edna's affair with Alcee is part of what finally makes her unwilling to continue the life she has.
• Spoiled Brat: Victor Lebrun, Robert's little brother who wants Edna for himself, despite only being 19.
• Sympathetic Adulterer: Edna.
• True-Blue Femininity: The Farival twins wear white and blue, said to be the "Virgin's Colors".