The Awakening

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Summary: View into early Society
Review: A beautiful, beautiful view into the early 20th century society and ways of thinking. Anything less than 4 stars is robbery!

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Summary: Successfully reaches the depths of a woman's complexity
Review: Of all the books I've read in my lifetime, this is one in which the cover has worn most thin. Interestingly, I have a male friend who has read it an equal number of times and we revisit this story quite often as if it were an anchor to our awareness (awakening?) of female sensuality in a restrictive role-oriented society. I highly recommend locating the critics' edition as it comes with sketches of turn-of-the-century etiquette, courtship rules and fashion worn by women of Edna's social class. Despite the cultural changes between 1899 and 1999, today's female is still faced to some degree or other the challenge of maintaining a singular identity while filling the role of mother, daughter, sister, lover.

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Summary: A women's battle with society in the 1800's.
Review: To a woman in the nineties the actions of Mrs. Pontellier would not seem abnormal. But to the Creole society they were extremely unorthodox. We thought that this was a slow moving story with no excitment. In order to enjoy this book you would have to put yourself back into the mindset of a women in the 1800's.

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Summary: Seems like a copout
Review: I thought the language and story were beautiful until the last page. Suicide seems like a copout. Isn't Edna a victim of her own choices, no matter what influence society may have had on those choices? Doesn't she have a responsibility to her children? Don't self-discovery, self-confidence, and freedom require some degree of discipline? Or is that a contradiction?

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Summary: A courageous tale of a awakened woman
Review: A lovely story about a woman who "awakens" to her life, her bland life. Suicide in the end is her choice of the end, courageous or not, you have to read the book to decide.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding late 19th century novel.
Review: A brave piece of work written in the late 1800's. What makes this book outstanding is its theme and imagery. Chopin articulated very well a woman continue in the traditional gender role but at the same time develop a sense of who she is, i.e. outside of family, outside of husband, outside of children? Here, Edna could not and thus the story has a tragic ending (I should just say suicide since the "utopianpessimist 4/28/99" let the cat out of the bag already!!!). I agree with a previous reader that at first it seemed like a pathetic ending. On the other hand, one must look at the context of Edna's situation and the circumstances in her life. This book should be part of every woman's library

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Summary: MISGUIDED PERCEPTION LEADS TO AWAKENING
Review: At first glance, I was not one to champion Chopin's "The Awakening" as a great display of feminism. I thought it tediously leading to a climax and then found it drift off from my original perception. Compared to other great "pro-women" works, (A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler by the masterful genius Ibsen), Chopin had Edna gain a great insight of personal reflexion and understanding of traditional society, and then to end her glorious discovery with suicide? Pathetic, was the first word that came to mind. I believed that if Edna had truly "awakened", she would have ventured into sexist society and clashed without fear to those opposed. Yet, unlike Nora, I found Edna respected no such "duties to herself" beyond wife and mother, and proved feeble of the complexity in self-realization. However, upon looking at this novel again, I have come to realize the brillance of Chopin. Edna is more suited to be compared with Hedda Gabler, a psychologically callous, yet stong character, and found Edna to be wildly unstable mentally. Her frequent crying instances made me embarassed to think I had missed such blatant signs. And now I can appreciate or at least come to observe that Edna had traveled one path for so long, that it seemed impossible to stray to another. (The other leading completely the other direction). Because I am only 16, I suppose I have wild fantasies of self-proclamation and determination , still Chopin became a true leader of female liberation in a time, most thoroughly against it.

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Summary: What's so good about this book?
Review: This book has been called a masterpiece by many literary scholars, but I failed to see what's so good about it. The irony lies in the fact that it's difficult to stay awake during The Awakening.

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Summary: The awakening; should be called the abandoning
Review: It is a great mystery to me why female supremists love and adore this book. Kate Chopin's character Edna ruins the lives of her children by selfishly taking her own. Does a woman really demonstrate her strength by wimping out in the face of life?

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Summary: Newspaper Woman Goes Bananas
Review: Kate Chopin was a 48-year-old newspaper woman from St. Louis, Missouri, when she wrote this lovely idyllic evocation of New Orleans and a nearby Gulf Coast summer resort for Creoles a century ago. "Creole" is a word with several different meanings, but Chopin uses the word to refer to the French-speaking population of New Orleans (except for the French-speaking descendants of the Acadians, whom she refers to as Cajuns). But the heroine of the piece, Edna, is unfortunately a bit of a dullard - pretentious, vain, unpleasantly coy - and a bit intolerant too. It is very difficult to warm up to her. The author has not a smidgen of critical detachment from Edna, in fact she dotes on her embarrassingly, and even though the book is written in the third person it's painfully autobiographical. It's hard to see how this book could have created so much widespread and continuing academic interest, even if it was touted as a feminist classic, at a time when the feminist movement was badly in need of classics. When The Awakening was published (in 1899), Chopin was vilified for having written a scandalous, amoral book, sales were abysmal, and she apparently restricted herself to little stories from the newspaper from then on. The Awakening is the only work for which she is remembered. "Miss Highcamp played some selections from Grieg upon the piano. She seemed to have apprehended all of the composer's coldness and none of his poetry. While Edna listened she could not help wondering if she had lost her taste for music." "...Life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation."