avatarKimberly Carlson Aesara

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Critics Said Her Book Was “Poison and Morbid” So She Never Wrote Again.

Today her novel is read in university classrooms across America.

Kate Chopin photo from Wikipedia.

Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening was called poison and morbid by critics.

The story follows the life of a submerged wife and mother who discovers her sexual self, her artistic self, and herself as her own person.

The book was published in 1899 — Chopin never wrote another novel — and was re-discovered in 1969. This time around critics read the book as being ahead of its time, honest, poignant, and revolutionary.

Today, along with many of her short stories, The Awakening is read and studied in colleges and universities across the United States.

It was in college that I came to know Chopin. Her book The Awakening caused a major shift in tides in my life. Attending Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, I changed my dream of wanting to be a country western star to dreaming of being a writer. Reading The Awakening I felt seen; I felt understood. I was stunned that words and story could cause such intense feelings inside of me.

I felt I was Edna Pontellier, Chopin’s daring protagonist.

She started writing when her husband died.

Near her home of St. Louis, Missouri, Kate met Oscar Chopin at the age of nineteen. They soon married. They moved to New Orleans and had five children. When they started having financial problems, he moved the family to a small town of about 700 people in Louisiana. There he opened a store.

She struggled to live in the provincial town. Still her artistic nature soaked in the smells, music, and people. Louisiana later would become the setting for many of her stories and The Awakening.

Her husband died in 1882. He left her little money. She worked the store until it failed to make enough income. With her children, she moved back to St. Louis to be closer to family and again to live in a city that offered her more stimulation.

Kate was one of the few women at the time who was fortunate to have been educated as a child. In St. Louis, her French grandmother made sure she learned French, literature, and music. This gift would end up serving her.

She was a natural intellect and hungered for stimulating friends and company. In St. Louis, she had literary salons in her home once a week. It was during this time she was encouraged to write.

She learned that a short story could pay her $15–$30, while a novel could pay $100–$200.

Money was a motivator to start writing stories. She learned that the readers of The Atlantic and Vogue enjoyed local color stories. So even though she had moved back to her hometown of St. Louis, it was her stories set in New Orleans that the publishers wanted.

Her first short story was published in 1889. Ten years later, after one novel, two short story collections, and being published in The Atlantic and Vogue, The Awakening was released in 1899.

Criticism bleeds her passion to write.

The novel, The Awakening was met with few positive reviews, but mostly the reviews shamed her. Edna challenged what society wanted and thought men needed in a wife. Chopin does not shy from the deep passion in Edna Pontellier, her protagonist. Readers are clear that she does not feel remorse for finally awakening, for practicing her art, and for having an affair.

Kate Chopin never wrote again after the criticism she received. I guess her awakening was the brutal fact that society wasn’t ready for honest, raw, and tumultuous feelings that enveloped Edna Pontellier.

Kate became depressed. She died five years later at the young age of 59 from a stroke.

Below is one example of a letter that Kate Chopin received criticizing her novel.

Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, USA

Is all this relevant to us 124 plus years later?

Her novels and her short stories look closely at women’s roles in marriages and in homes.

In many ways, women have grown, and outgrown, those old ideals. It is largely because women like Chopin stepped out and wrote, or spoke, that helped pave the path for women to be more dimensional, for women to express themselves inwardly and outwardly as complete without a man.

Yet, women still have a way to go to be thought of as equals in many relationships. In The Awakening, she illustrates that Edna is another of her husband’s possessions. She questioned if it was right for a man to “own” his wife? She also asked can a woman be more than a wife and mother? It is a question that many women still find themselves asking today.

Yes, we can. But at what price? Can we be a wife, a mother, and a teacher, or a banker, or a writer, or a doctor and still meet the needs of our children? of our partners? of our careers and passions? And if so, at what price? Again are we losing ourselves?

These are questions that still need to be asked and explored and because of this her work is still largely studied and enjoyed.

“Critics and scholars in many countries have discussed her work in over 400 journal articles as well as in at least 60 books and 160 PhD dissertations. Artists have created plays, films, songs, operas, dances, screenplays, graphic fiction, and other art forms based on her work.”

Dog-eared quotes from my copy of The Awakening.

“In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relation as an individual to the world within and about her,” Chapter VII.

“The years that are gone seem like dreams — if one might go on sleeping and dreaming — but to wake up and find — oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life,” Chapter XXXVIII.

Last note.

I have wondered why the harsh criticism of The Awakening in the light that many of her short stories also reveal a woman’s need to be seen as complete and complicated and intelligent and artistic as our men, our husbands, brothers, dads, or friends. I suppose because in the novel she is more blatant.

I think too of her as I work for $30 a story. I think the best we can do is to honor her work, honor contemporary women’s work even if at times they reveal something we don’t agree with or are not ready to hear.

For me, I know I would not be writing today if she hadn’t written The Awakening. This is the power of the written word, of story.

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Revolutionary
Criticism
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Womens Literature
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