Kate Chopin’s absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who, during a summer holiday, begins to question her conventional life. In this path-breaking novel, Chopin speculates more daringly than any before her about the consequences for middle-class women of late-nineteenth-century society’s unleashing of female desire. Celebrated today as a key text in American literature, it scandalized early critics and, precisely because of its boldness, jeopardized Chopin’s career. In this annotated, modernized edition-specially tailored for twenty-first-century readers-Rafael Walker highlights Chopin’s awareness of the privileged class’s exploitation of the the less-privileged, and includes a number of neglected stories that foreground Chopin’s feminist proclivities.
Table of Content
Contents
Introduction by Rafael Walker iii
The Awakening 1
Emancipation. A Life Fable 139
A Pair of Silk Stockings 141
Miss Witherwell’s Mistake 146
Désirée’s Baby 155
The Story of an Hour 161
Wiser Than a God 164
Biographical Timeline 174
About the author
Rafael Walker is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He has published on a wide range of topics in American literature, including Kate Chopin’s fiction.
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