Awakening and Other Stories

To all outside appearances, Edna Pontellier is a respectable married woman living in New Orleans with her fond, indulgent husband and her two young sons. Beneath Edna’s smooth, graceful face, however, lurks a woman of passion, a woman who will not—or simply cannot—efface herself in the role that her husband expects of her: an angelic being who reveres him, dotes on their children, and obediently erases her individuality in service to the family’s happiness. But one lazy summer vacation and an apparently harmless infatuation will push Edna beyond this quiet, settled life, placing her directly at odds with society’s expectations of what a woman should be. This volume features additional short stories, including works that wrestled with such topics as racial passing, in “Désirée’s Baby,” infidelity, in “A Respectable Woman,” and queer attraction, in “Fedora.”

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was an American proto-feminist writer who specialized in tales about women who rebelled, in a hundred small ways, against Victorian ideals of domesticity. Her best-known work, The Awakening, was widely considered Chopin's masterpiece, but was subject to harsh criticism at the time of its publication for its frank approach to sexual themes. It was rediscovered in the 1960s and has since become a standard of American literature, appreciated for its sophistication and artistry.