The Awakening
Kate Chopin (1850–1904), 1899
★ 3.69 from 235k ratings on Goodreads
A New Orleans wife discovers desire and her own opinion, and refuses to give either back. Condemned in 1899; it now reads like a self being invented. The voice is exact and inward, with a slow pull of longing under a surface of social calm, and moments of quiet defiance.
Feels like longing, melancholy and defiance.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you're drawn to quiet, interior stories about a woman pushing against marriage and convention. The 1899 prose and social assumptions can feel dated, so it may ask for patience.
Why read it
Its clear-eyed look at a woman choosing her own desires still lands, and the prose stays exact even when feeling runs high.
Pages from the book
The double life most people lead without ever giving it a name.
Mrs. Pontellier was not a woman given to confidences, a characteristic hitherto contrary to her nature. Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions. The first time your body does something you didn't know it could.
But that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence. She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water. Looking at your own arm as though it belonged to someone new.
Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing the greater part of them. She bathed her face, her neck and arms in the basin that stood between the windows. She took off her shoes and stockings and stretched herself in the very center of the high, white bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed, with its sweet country odor of laurel lingering about the sheets and mattress! She stretched her strong limbs that ached a little. She ran her fingers through her loosened hair for a while. She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh. Kate Chopin.Chopin, widowed at thirty-two, ran a country store in Louisiana before turning to fiction, and translated Maupassant, whose cold, exact narration shaped her own.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Awakening for me?
- You may like it if you're drawn to quiet, interior stories about a woman pushing against marriage and convention. The 1899 prose and social assumptions can feel dated, so it may ask for patience.
- What is The Awakening like?
- The voice is exact and inward, with a slow pull of longing under a surface of social calm, and moments of quiet defiance. Feels like longing, melancholy and defiance.
- What should I read after The Awakening?
- If you liked The Awakening, try The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë).
A taste of the feed
Looking at someone you shouldn't, knowing precisely what it will cost.
No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face; I could not keep their lids under control: they would rise, and the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
Jane Eyre · Charlotte Brontë
The moment a wife becomes a stranger in her own kitchen.
Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist-bone of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins. To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream before waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.
Ethan Frome · Edith Wharton
To feel young and ancient at once, and find the day dangerous.
She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
Mrs. Dalloway · Virginia Woolf
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