“How to free oneself but still be meaningfully connected to others” and how not to, is presented several times during the story and Edna has to realize that living a New Woman’s life is harder than expected, especially when one has the dream of a fairytale love and a life in freedom. Consequently, she chooses freedom instead of slavery, starts to change her life, and breaks out of society’s expectations. Faced with the issues of self-hood, gender-roles and the lack of independence she discovers her own desires.Įdna does not “want anything but (her) own way” any longer and cannot hold back her needs and wishes for music, art, independence, freedom, and sexual satisfaction as well. Those months on Grand Isle and the given circumstances back in town, provoke her to think about her life, which consists of being a mother-wife without an own identity and without any rights.

During her summer stay at Grand Isles she collects a lot of new experiences and gets to know some new friends, for example Robert, with whom she falls in love with. On the contrary, she is already having new society ideas – the ideas of a New Century’s Woman. Between the centuries Edna Pontellier is trapped in New Orleans’ upper-class, the Creole society, with its old fashioned thinking. The novel ‘The Awakening’ contains the story about a respectable woman of the late 1800s. Today it belongs to the canon of important American Literature. The scandal about ‘The Awakening’ spoiled its chance to become popular at first and so it did not come to public attention till the 1960s, when feminist movements took place. Since female writers were supposed to “stick with ladylike subjects” Edna’s story was not desirable, and men did not want to let women get any revolutionized ideas about ‘New Woman fantasies’. Many readers, mostly men “who wished women would remain at home”, were shocked how Chopin, who was seen as a “regional writer”, could publish such a rebellious novel. Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”, which is today seen as an “important early feminist text”,, was published for the very first time in 1899. Women’s role at the end of 19th centuryģ.1.

The awakening novel