The Awakening

Description of the book

Sex, suicide, sensuality, affairs and a woman realising that life must hold much more than just being a wife and a mother. Will Edna follow her desires or will her controlling husband bring her back into line?

Driven by affection for another man, our heroine, Edna Pontellier walks slowly along the tragic path of her defiance against her husband and the cruel society that she is part of. Bolder with each step she takes, she slowly comprehends that her war against the world is not just about which man she chooses to love but about her sense of identity as a woman.

There is that point in a woman’s life when she wakes up suspecting that the fairy tales she grew up with were not telling the whole story, that there is life beyond the sunset at the end of the movie and that life is not easier than life before the sunset.
‘The Awakening’ shocked turn-of-the-century readers. To this day it remains one of the greatest books ever written.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904), born Katherine O’Flaherty, was an American writer of novels and short stories mostly set in the 19th-century American South. Her works deal with themes of the female psyche and women's limited life opportunities in the Victorian era, often in a naturalist style. She was considered controversial in her time, but is now praised as a pioneer of 20th-century feminist American literature.

Her most famous works include the novel ‘The Awakening’ (1899), which explores themes of rebellion against femininity and motherhood at the turn of the 20th century. Adaptations of this title include Grand Isle (1991) starring Kelly McGillis and Adrian Pasdar, and The End of August (1981).