Kate Chopin published The Awakening in 1899 to a reception that effectively ended her literary career. Edna Pontellier is a Kentucky Presbyterian's daughter married to a prosperous Creole businessman in New Orleans, spending the summer at a Creole resort on the Gulf Coast. The social rules of Creole Catholic Louisiana are different from those of her upbringing, openly affectionate, physically relaxed, and in that environment, at twenty-eight, she begins to understand that she has been living inside arrangements she never consciously chose. She learns to swim, has relationships with two men who are not her husband, begins painting seriously, and moves into a small house of her own.
The novel is unusual among American fiction of its period in treating female desire as a serious subject rather than a moral hazard to be resolved through punishment or conversion. Edna's awakening is not primarily sexual, it is a recognition of selfhood, of the fact that she has an interior life that her marriage, her children, and her social role have no structure to accommodate. The men she is involved with are inadequate to her in different ways: Robert Lebrun is kind but ultimately unwilling to disrupt convention on her behalf; Alcée Arobin simply wants to sleep with her. Chopin presents this inadequacy without melodrama; the problem is structural rather than personal.
The novel ends with Edna's death by drowning, whether intentional or not, the text leaves deliberately open. What Chopin makes clear is that the social world Edna inhabits cannot accommodate what she has become, and that no practical alternative presents itself. This ending was the source of much of the novel's hostile initial reception, which preferred its women to be reformed rather than destroyed by the attempt at self-realization. Reading it now, after a century in which the structural constraints it depicts have been partially but not entirely dismantled, one recognizes both how much has changed and how accurately Chopin identified the specific obstacles.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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