The novel opens with the Pontellier family-Léonce, a New Orleans businessman of Louisiana Creole heritage his wife Edna and their sons Etienne and Raoul as they take a vacation on Grand Isle at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico managed by Madame Lebrun and her sons Robert and Victor.Įdna spends most of her time with her close friend Adèle Ratignolle, who cheerily and boisterously reminds Edna of her duties as a wife and mother. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern works of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams. The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics.
It is one of the earlier American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension.
Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899.
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