When Léonce prepares to travel to New York City on business, he sends the boys to his mother. The doctor advises Léonce to let her be and assures him that things will return to normal.
Léonce eventually talks to a doctor about diagnosing his wife, fearing she is losing her mental faculties. She starts to isolate herself from New Orleans society and to withdraw from some of the duties traditionally associated with motherhood. Edna gradually reassesses her priorities and takes an active role in her own happiness. When summer vacation ends, the Pontelliers return to New Orleans.
The narrative focus moves to Edna's shifting emotions as she reconciles her maternal duties with her desire for social freedom and for Robert. When they fall in love, Robert senses the doomed nature of such a relationship and flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture. At Grand Isle, Edna eventually forms a connection with Robert Lebrun, a charming, earnest young man who actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. The novel opens with the Pontellier family-Léonce, a New Orleans businessman of Louisiana Creole heritage his wife Edna and their sons Etienne and Raoul as they take a vacation on Grand Isle at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico managed by Madame Lebrun and her sons Robert and Victor.Įdna spends most of her time with her close friend Adèle Ratignolle, who cheerily and boisterously reminds Edna of her duties as a wife and mother. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern works of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.
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 is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics. It is one of the earlier American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension.
Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899.
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