Book Review

Banned Books : The Awakening

The Awakening
Kate Chopin 
1899

Cited as an early feminist text, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening draws attention to women’s oppression in the US South in the late 19th century through the story of one woman’s experiences. Edna Pontellier, a married woman with children, questions her life upon meeting and falling in love with a younger man-Robert Lebrun. Her awakening prompts her to seek a life of independence outside the constrained roles of wife and mother, the type of autonomy that was frowned on in the patriarchal society in which Chopin lived and wrote. 

Reviewers balked at The Awakening upon its publication. They wrote that Edna Pontellier was a “selfish” character and took issue with the book’s critique of prescribed roles for women, its unapologetic female sexuality, and the suicide-the only way Edna saw herself becoming free-at its climax. The negative response to the novel had serious consequences for Chopin. Frowned on by society, she was prevented from joining the St. Louis Fine Arts Club, and her once ­flourishing career came to a standstill. She struggled to find publishers for new stories, which she had previously placed in leading magazines, and a third collection of stories was canceled by her publisher. In 1902, The Awakening was removed from a library in Evanston, Illinois. Two years after this, Chopin died of a brain hemorrhage. 

As second-wave feminism took off in the 1960s and ’70s, Chopin’s talent was rediscovered, and The Awakening entered the canon as one of the earliest and finest works of modern feminist literature. To date, her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and continues to touch countless women yearning for autonomy. Nonetheless, as recently as 2006, a school board attempted (and failed) to ban The Awakening from six affiliated schools in Arlington Heights, Chicago, for depicting “sexual situations inappropriate for students.”

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