Tuesday Book Club: ‘The Awakening’ by Kate Chopin

Tuesday, February 20, 2024
10:00 am - 11:30 am

The Tuesday Book Club meets on the third Tuesday of every month (with an exception here and there). We discuss a wide variety of genres but focus on popular fiction and nonfiction. Contact Amy Carroll Acarroll@cc-pl.org with any questions.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Awakening, originally titled A Solitary Soul, is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South.

It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women’s issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating mixed reaction from contemporary readers and criticism.

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 can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern masterpieces of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.

Cold Spring Branch