The Awakening by Kate Chopin: in review

This was a reread for me and I loved it just as much the second time around. The first time I read "The Awakening" I was in high school. I connected with many of the narrator's emotional movements, woman-to-woman, but had limited life experience and immaturity stunting my reading experience. This time, as a 28 year old married woman, reading about a 28 year old married woman, I only had the difference of cultural setting and time period challenging my imagination.

Kate Chopin is an artist of words. She paints rich pictures by layering plot movement, meticulous description, and complex emotion into the same sentence. Her novel was controversial when it was released for its feminist ideas and "indecent" plot line for its audience in the early 1900s. Interestingly enough, the plot line is void of dramatic action (no explosions, murder, or mystery within these pages), yet its gripping content propels the reader to read and read. What happens in the novel? A privileged woman goes to her beach house in grand isle with her husband and kids, she learns to swim, she hangs out with a friend, gets a crush on the friend, picks up painting, moves back to be city home, frustrates her husband, gets an apartment, stirs up a bit of scandal, her friend has a baby, and then, finally, a dramatic- tragic- end. K. An affair. Nothing new in classic literature- just ask Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. So, what makes this novel different? Character development, emotional growth, and honest, effective, description of what lies within many people's hearts. Chopin's writing style, the point of view, makes the reader become Edna. The reader feels the angst, the butterflies, the disappointment,  the excitement. Chopin makes the reader understand how it feels to live in a time where the  traditions of the culture could be oppressive even when they appeared pleasant. Her take home message translated into a present day slogan could read, "Live Free or Die Trying".

4.5/5-- .5 subtracted because I wish she could have figured out a way to allow our protagonist to have a more victorious ending without sacrificing the symbolism of the ending. (I will end with cryptically, as my goal is to lessen my spoilers.)