Literary Works That Shape Our World: A Critical Analysis - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Analysis of “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin

The Awakening: A Woman Walks into the Ocean and Literature’s Never the Same

You don’t forget Edna Pontellier. Not really. You can shelve the book. You can make it through six other novels with vaguely similar covers and titles (The House of Mirth, The Portrait of a Lady, etc.). But then something will happen—maybe a humid afternoon where you want to lie down in water and not come out—and suddenly she’s there again, barefoot and reckless, walking into the Gulf, not waving, not even really drowning. Just—done.

What makes The Awakening so eerie isn’t just its ending (though yeah, that’s a literary kill shot), but the tone of it. The cool, almost affectless rhythm. The refusal to scream. If this were a contemporary novel, it’d be pitched as “a woman quietly ghosts her entire life,” and someone would slap a minimalist cover on it and call it feminist autofiction. But Kate Chopin wrote it in 1899, which makes it... insane. A period piece that reads like a moodboard for dissociation.

There are books that feel like products of their time—fossilized, polite, curtsying before every opinion. This one doesn’t. Chopin didn’t just write ahead of her time (ugh, that phrase)—she wrote in a tone that makes time irrelevant. You can feel it even now, this strange emotional flatness that reads, if you squint, like freedom.

But let’s rewind.

Let’s Talk Context (and Yes, We Have To)

Picture this: turn-of-the-century America. Not quite the Victorian repression of England, but still deeply allergic to female autonomy unless it involved moral virtue, housekeeping, or occasionally painting watercolors “for pleasure.” Women were property. Sexual agency? Not a vibe. And if a married woman with children started murmuring about freedom or desire, she was basically asking for exile—or, you know, a misdiagnosis and a bedrest prescription.

Chopin drops The Awakening into this cultural compost pile like a lit match. The backlash was immediate. Critics didn’t just dislike the novel—they called it “immoral,” “unwholesome,” and, in some cases, “a failed experiment.” Bookstores didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat. Libraries quietly vanished it. Chopin’s reputation tanked. She’d published a few popular short stories before this (respectable, regional, Creole-accented tales), but The Awakening? It was too raw. Too bodily. Too... not sorry.

It’s not hard to see why. Edna Pontellier isn’t punished in a didactic, Victorian way. She doesn’t spiral into madness or get run over by a carriage (though there’s definitely a pathos-by-water ending). She doesn’t regret. She resists melodrama. There’s something almost luxurious about her detachment—as if, for once, the tragic heroine gets to pick the lighting and soundtrack.

Realism, But Make It Nervous

This is where literary context gets juicy. The Awakening gets lumped into American realism—which, okay, fair. It tracks mundane details, has little patience for romantic flourishes, and is more interested in internal weather than external drama. But Chopin’s version of realism is like... realism if it got blackout drunk with French symbolism and decided to start therapy the next morning.

Compare it to, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (realism with boyhood swagger), or Sister Carrie (ambition and ruin in the big city). Chopin’s world feels smaller, tighter, more humid. Everything is beach houses, parlor visits, muted conversations, and long walks that mean more than they say. There’s barely a plot. There’s just Edna, waking up in slow, disorienting layers—like she’s discovering she has skin.

Which is maybe the point. This is a novel about noticing yourself too late. About sitting in a room you’ve always lived in and realizing the wallpaper is hideous, the furniture’s wrong, and your husband is a man you could walk past on the street without blinking. The tragedy isn’t what happens. It’s that nothing changes except Edna—and that’s not allowed.

Feminist Critics Went Feral (Eventually)

Of course, by the 1970s, second-wave feminists had discovered Chopin and went, “Wait—how did we sleep on this?” Suddenly, The Awakening was canonized. Required reading. A case study in proto-feminist literature. Edna became a symbol: of repressed female sexuality, of patriarchal chokeholds, of the costs of liberation. A woman who chooses herself—and pays.

But even among feminists, there’s mess. Some read Edna as a heroine, others as a narcissist. Some think her final walk into the sea is triumphant; others call it cowardly. Some mourn the children she leaves behind. Others see them as part of the machinery that crushed her. There’s no consensus—and that’s why the book lives.

It’s also why it annoys certain readers. Edna isn’t likable. She doesn’t sacrifice nobly. She doesn’t apologize for wanting more—more art, more intimacy, more solitude. She’s restless and dreamy and slightly elitist. She sleeps with a man out of boredom. She builds a new home and names it the “pigeon house,” as if even her independence needs a cage metaphor. She’s complicated—and complicated women still get scrutinized harder than straightforward martyrs.

Kate Chopin: Not Who You Think

Here’s where it gets spookily autobiographical. Chopin wasn’t some sheltered lady dabbling in fiction. She was a widowed mother of six by age 32. She ran her late husband’s business, managed debts, and lived in Louisiana, observing Creole society with razor-sharp clarity. She read Darwin, Goethe, and the French naturalists. She didn’t flinch.

And then she wrote The Awakening, seemingly from a place of eerie calm. The prose isn’t loud. It’s more like water under a locked door. Quiet, inevitable. You can’t stop it. Chopin’s biographical outlines show a woman who understood both constraint and the craving for escape. She’d been Edna, maybe. Or maybe she’d watched dozens of Ednas collapse under expectation and decided: let’s not lie about how that ends.

She died five years after The Awakening was published. No grand comeback, no late-life vindication. Just... silence. Which makes the novel feel even more ghostly.

Themes, Symbols, Whatever—Let’s Talk About Birds

Yes, the birds. Everyone always mentions them, and for once, the English class crowd is right. The opening parrot in a cage? Obviously metaphorical. The sea birds at the end? Same. But the point isn’t just “birds = freedom.” It’s birds = noisy, beautiful creatures whose wings are mostly ornamental unless they’re willing to leave the house. Edna’s not just caged. She’s disoriented when the door swings open.

Also: the ocean. It’s freedom, death, sensuality, oblivion. It’s the first place Edna learns to swim. It’s the last place she visits. You can’t get more poetic than that, but Chopin resists the urge to over-describe. No purple prose. Just a slow walk, a memory of children’s voices, and a sentence that stops your breath: “There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”

That’s it. No exclamation marks. No italics. Just nature, continuing without you.

Why This Still Hurts (and Matters)

People talk a lot about literary catharsis. But The Awakening denies that. It offers no cleansing, no justice, no epiphany wrapped in a bow. Just tension. A woman realizes she wants a life she cannot have—and then, she stops asking.

We’re not supposed to be okay with that. Especially now, in a cultural moment obsessed with redemption arcs and #maincharacterenergy. Edna doesn’t get one. She gets to leave. And that feels weirdly radical, even now. Not because she’s punished for her rebellion, but because she never begs.

In a way, Edna’s silence is louder than all the speeches about freedom, feminism, and female rage. She doesn’t monologue. She acts. And then—nothing. The reader is left to flail.

Which is, honestly, the most honest thing Chopin could’ve done.

What lingers after The Awakening isn’t just Edna’s story, but the refusal to explain it to you. That’s part of the brilliance—and the unease. We’re so used to moral signals, to the author stepping in with a wink or a warning. “This is tragic because...” “This matters because...” Chopin does none of that. She hands you the facts, the mood, and then backs away like someone slipping out of a party early. Figure it out yourself. Or don’t.

And it’s that restraint—that almost clinical distance—that keeps the book from veering into sentimentality. Edna doesn’t break down crying over her lost children. She doesn’t write letters. She doesn’t scream at Robert, her maybe-lover, for abandoning her again. She simply steps out. Literally. She strips off her clothes like she’s done with the whole performance. Woman, wife, mother, mistress—off, off, off.

Which is why The Awakening isn’t just about female autonomy. It’s about the terrifying blank space that comes after you claim it.

Who Are You When No One’s Watching?

What do you do when you get what you want and it’s... nothing? Not joy, not clarity. Just a quiet room and no one left to perform for. Edna finds herself, and what she finds is a void. That’s not liberation in the self-help, 2020s Instagram way. That’s liberation as rupture. As in: your previous life can’t continue, but nothing’s lined up to replace it.

That’s where the real discomfort lies. Not in the sex or the selfishness. In the boredom. Edna gets what she wants—independence, time, space, art, a place of her own—and she still feels trapped. She throws parties and decorates her pigeon house and kisses men and swims alone, and none of it sticks. None of it changes the fact that she is fundamentally alone in a world that doesn’t recognize her new shape.

She is, in a way, a proto-modernist character stuck in a realist shell. She’s Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway before Mrs. Dalloway was even a blueprint. She’s existential. She’s structurally off. She wants... what, exactly? Not marriage, not motherhood, not even really Robert. She wants to want, but there’s nothing in the world she’s allowed to want that feels like her.

So she walks into the ocean. Not because she’s weak. Because she can’t lie to herself. Not anymore.

The Afterlife of Edna Pontellier

And that’s maybe why The Awakening keeps coming back in waves (no pun intended, but... okay, fine). It haunts college syllabi and feminist theory books and BookTok accounts and Reddit threads that start with “Does anyone else think Edna is kind of a narcissist?” The answer is yes. And also no. And also: that’s not the point.

Edna isn’t there to be liked. She’s there to break something. The literary mold. The reader’s comfort zone. The whole tidy narrative that says female desire must be either fulfilled or punished. What if it just exists? What if it gnaws at you and then leaves?

The real shock of The Awakening is how contemporary it feels. You could lift Edna out of 1899 New Orleans and drop her into a modern novel about a thirtysomething in Brooklyn or Barcelona, and the beats wouldn’t change that much. The malaise, the affair, the failed art career, the ambient loneliness—it’s all still here. We just have better furniture now.

The Thing No One Likes to Admit

Let’s say it out loud: Edna is not a feminist icon in the way people want her to be. She’s not assertive. She’s not strategic. She’s not even especially ethical. She abandons her kids. She lies to her husband. She treats the men around her like disposable emotional experiments. If we met her at a party, we’d probably think she was cold. Or aloof. Or insufferably melancholic. But also magnetic.

And that’s the point. She doesn’t deserve our empathy. She forces it. Or at least forces us to sit with our own reaction. Are you horrified? Empowered? Confused? Great. Chopin wants your discomfort. It’s the only honest response to a story where every option for a woman is a trap, and escape is the only gesture that isn’t a performance.

Even the writing style mirrors this discomfort. It’s not ornate or loud. It doesn’t try to charm you. It’s precise, unhurried, and vaguely cold—like someone calmly narrating a dream that disturbed them. The metaphors are subtle. The symbols barely announced. You don’t realize how deep the book’s gotten under your skin until you're alone with it, rereading that last page, wondering if she really meant to die or if she just wanted to disappear for a while.

Which, if you’re honest, is something you’ve thought about too. Not death, maybe. But stepping out. Turning your phone off, ghosting your own routine, dissolving into something quieter.

The Awakening gets that. It doesn’t encourage it. But it names it. And sometimes that’s enough.