Study Guide to The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. As a feminist novel of the American South at the end of the nineteenth century, The Awakening highlights individual expression and freedom and what the desire for it can cost the person who wants it. Moreover, Chopin was reviled and ostracized by polite society in St. Louis because of the actions of The Awakening’s main character. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Chopin’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO KATE CHOPIN

 

BILINGUAL BACKGROUND

Born to an Irish father and a French mother, heir to two great literary traditions, Kate Chopin, whose maiden name was Katherine O’Flaherty, was born in 1851 and lived in St. Louis for the first twenty years of her life.

She was the only daughter of her father’s second marriage to Eliza Faris, who was the daughter of a Huguenot father from Virginia, and a French mother from Missouri. Captain Thomas O’Flaherty was a successful businessman who became the director of the Pacific Railroad. Chopin’s early childhood appears to have been very happy until her father was killed in a train wreck when she was only four. Thereafter, she was brought up in a household of strong women, all widows. Her matriarchal great-grandmother regaled the young Kate with wondrous stories, told in French, and the child grew up completely bilingual. A series of tragedies in the family were devastating to the child. She lost her brother, Thomas O’Flaherty, who drowned, and a beloved half-brother, George, in the Civil War, and mourned them for many years. One of Kate Chopin’s daughters, describing her mother’s personality, would say later that these early tragedies had left a “stamp of sadness on her that was never lost.”

A LIBERATED HUSBAND - FOR HIS TIME

On a visit to the exciting city of New Orleans, Kate met her future husband, Oscar Chopin, who seems to have been an extraordinary man, for his time. He was a successful cotton broker, adored his wife for her independence and fine mind, and allowed her the sort of freedom that was rare in those days. Even on her honeymoon in Europe, Kate took solitary walks, always observing, watching people, noting settings, and actually, displaying all the attributes of a writer. The young couple spent three months in Germany, Switzerland, and France, and then returned to live in New Orleans, a city that seems to have fascinated Kate. She continued her solitary walks, observing the Creole society, the mixture of Cajun, Blacks, Mulattoes, Germans, Italian, Irish, who populated the city, and gave it an exotic flavor. She was particularly intrigued by the Blacks whose songs and racy French, patois filled with superstitious lore, stimulated her early writings. The climate of New Orleans gave the city a Southern European flavor and the foliage of jasmine and magnolia trees filled the city with sultry fragrance.

THE SETTING FOR THE AWAKENING

With her Irish ear for music and story, this city was a catalyst on the young woman’s imagination, and laid the groundwork for her work as a local colorist. Summers spent on the islands off the coast of Louisiana gave Kate the setting for her controversial novel, The Awakening.

New Orleans had many cultural riches to offer a receptive young wife. Kate attended the Academy of Music, the two opera houses that the city boasted, the theaters. She was herself an accomplished pianist and knew and responded passionately to music. The local newspapers often included excerpts from the works of Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, Baudelaire, and since Kate was an avid reader, she became familiar with these great French writers.

The Chopins had six children. Kate is remembered as having been a loving and conscientious mother. Oscar Chopin began having troubles with his business, and in 1880, he was forced to move his family to Cloutierville, a Cajun area in western Louisiana. Her husband’s misfortune turned out to be Kate’s fortune, for it was here that she learned more about the Cajuns (descendants of French exiles from Acadia, now Nova Scotia), and began collecting the lore of a region that was strange, exotic, and relatively unknown to the rest of the country. The mixture of French, African, Spanish, and English spun a magic web that captured Kate’s imagination and to which she responded with sympathetic understanding. During the yellow fever epidemic that took four thousand lives in New Orleans alone, Oscar Chopin died, leaving Kate a young widow with six small children. She was only thirty. For a year after her husband’s death, she remained in Louisiana, tending her husband’s business, but her mother wanted her to return to St. Louis, and so in 1884, she sold the business, and returned to the city of her birth. In June 1885, Kate’s mother died suddenly, leaving her now all alone, except for her children.

URGED TO WRITE FICTION - AS THERAPY

A friend, Doctor Kolbenheyer, who had been her obstetrician and was now her family doctor, urged her to write fiction. He believed that her letters to him, written while she was living in Louisiana, had literary merit. In the hope that writing might help her overcome her depression at the loss of her husband, and might even give her a little income, the doctor urged her to put down some of her impressions and memories of the years she had spent in Louisiana.

She wrote in the family living room, surrounded by her children, and only worked a few mornings a week. She was an avid card player, and once again began to attend the concerts, plays, and recitals that she had always enjoyed. In time, her home became a sort of French literary salon for distinguished women in St. Louis. Her “day” was Thursday.

Her first work in print was in a progressive Chicago magazine called America which published her poem titled, “If It Might Be,” on January 16, 1889. Stories about Louisiana plantation life were published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and in the Philadelphia Musical Journal. Her first novel, At Fault, probably published at the author’s expense, did not sell well, but it foreshadowed Chopin’s later writings, with its theme of individual freedom and what the desire for it can cost the person who wants it. After 189, she began to sell to magazines like Century, Youth’s Companion, and Vogue. Her reputation developed as a regional writer of local color and with the publication of Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, she became very well regarded as an exquisite writer of minor tales.

OSTRACIZED FROM POLITE SOCIETY

When The Awakening was published in 1899, the critics were shocked and scandalized by the story of a woman who is passionately awakened by her senses, who leaves her husband’s home, is uninterested in her children, who has an affair, and who desperately wants freedom for herself, refusing to accept the conventional role of wife, mother, society matron, adornment to her husband’s position. Kate Chopin was thereafter reviled and ostracized by polite society in St. Louis. Broken-hearted, Chopin wrote very little after this, and died in 1904.

THE AWAKENING

PLOT AND THEMES

PLOT

The story unfolds gradually in two distinct settings: Grand Isle and New Orleans. Carefully structured to reveal Edna Pontellier’s gradual awakening to a true understanding of her own nature, the story is told chronologically from Edna’s stay at the summer resort on Grand Isle, to her return after the summer to her elegant home in New Orleans, and to her eventual return to Grand Isle where she makes her final decision.

Only one chapter takes us back to Edna’s childhood (chapter 7), when Edna confides in her friend, Adele Ratignolle, allowing the reader some insight into the character’s background; all the rest of the action moves mainly straight ahead, inexorably, to the end.

A series of events takes place in Edna’s life that move the action along, rather leisurely at first, as befits a story taking place in a relaxed summer resort, then picking up speed when she returns to the more hectic tempo of the city of New Orleans, and ending with her return to Grand Isle.

Edna’s flirtation with Robert Lebrun; her difficulties in her marriage and with her children; her sensual response to the exotic surroundings of Grand Isle; her oppression at church services; her shedding of clothing; her mastery of swimming; her response to music; her reluctant return to her duties in New Orleans; her growing friendship with Mademoiselle Reisz, an independent woman; her disappointment with Robert Lebrun; her sexual attraction to Alcee Arobin; her decision to move out of her husband’s house; her return to Grand Isle; are the plot developments that serve to build an accretion of detail that move the story to its culmination. Chopin shows great economy in her choice of plot events; they all serve her purpose: to show how Edna Pontellier awoke and what happened after she did.

THEMES

Escape theme

From the opening screech of the caged parrot outside a pension on the island of Grand Isle, a resort off the coast of Louisiana, the theme of escape from maternal and matrimonial bondage is heard. “Get out! Get out!” screams the parrot, and that is just what Edna Pontellier tries to do.

The constrictions of marriage

Leonce Pontellier is not a brute, and Edna’s life is actually a luxurious one, free from the brutalization of poverty. But at this time (the 1800s) and in this place (Creole society in New Orleans), a woman is severely restricted. Marriage brings with it certain obligations: to husband, to society, to children, to others. Fulfilling one’s own needs is not part of a married woman’s life. She must subjugate herself to her husband and to her family. The husband is much freer. He, of course, works, but that more or less relieves him of the responsibilities of home and family. Although Edna did not have to personally do the cooking, cleaning and so on, it was her responsibility to see that the servants did all the necessary work to maintain the establishment. Edna had to entertain a certain way; she had a day in which she received acquaintances. She had to look a certain way; her husband valued appearances. She was supposed to be skilled in music, art, literature, but not too skilled. Her life was to be devoted to her family. Once Edna realizes how unfulfilling this is to her true nature, she begins to rebel and to try and “get out!”

Constrictions of motherhood

Edna’s two little boys are not clearly characterized. They are just children; interchangeable. We hardly can see any difference between Raoul and Etienne Pontellier. Significantly, they do not cling to Edna; they do not run to her when they are hurt. But they always need something - food, treats, games, time. They get sick; they fall down and hurt themselves. Their needs are constant and demanding. A mother must nurture her children before herself. Edna is not a “mother-woman,” like the other women on the island. She does not immerse herself in maternity. In fact, she is relieved when the children go to visit their paternal grandmother and she gets some time away from their interminable demands. Motherhood, for Edna, is not the exhilarating experience it is for other women. To her, children are a trap.

The constrictions of society

Edna must summer on the island where the other members of the wealthy Creole society stay. She feels like an outsider there, and probably would have preferred another kind of vacation. It seems that she is never consulted. She must go where her husband’s friends and associates go. In addition to spending time with people she is not very comfortable with, Edna also has a “day” during which she must entertain. This is what people in this stratum of society do. When she rebels, and refuses to continue doing this, her husband is shocked. He suspects that she is mentally ill. One must look, dress, speak a certain way in this society. Edna cannot and will not conform. She engages in a flirtation with Robert Lebrun, the resort owner’s son, and makes the mistake of taking it more seriously than she should. In this society, such a flirtation is not serious. Edna should have followed the rules; she doesn’t. She also makes the mistake of allowing another man, Alcee Arobin, known by everyone to be a rouge, to make love to her. This behavior is not countenanced by society.

The pain of rebellion

Edna rebels, but at enormous cost, actually, the ultimate cost, her life. Once she realizes the truth of her own nature, that she is a passionate, sensual woman, who will probably have many affairs, who is not content with her husband, and whose children do not fill all her needs, Edna knows that she cannot continue to live the way she has in the past. She cannot reconcile her own desires with that of her husband and children, and so she ends her own life.

The importance of one’s own identity

Confiding to Adele Ratignolle, the epitome of the “mother-woman,” Edna says that although she would give her life for her children, she will not give herself. Adele, of course, is shocked by this blasphemy and probably doesn’t even understand what Edna is talking about, but Edna knows what she is saying. Children, for Edna, are a constant pulling on her own selfhood. To give herself up to her children means losing herself. This, she says, she cannot do. She is willing to sacrifice everything in order to be a person herself, and not just an appendage, no matter how ornamental.

The ...