Book Club Guide

The Awakening

Key themes

Female selfhood and the social structures that deny it
The body as a site of knowledge the mind has been trained to ignore
Art, solitude and what a woman gives up to achieve them

About this book

Edna Pontellier, a married woman summering on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, awakens to her own desires and autonomy, refusing the roles of wife and mother that her society demands. Condemned on publication in 1899 and largely forgotten, the novel is now central to feminist literary history and to discussions of women's freedom and selfhood.

Published in 1899, The Awakening was condemned by critics as immoral and Chopin largely stopped writing afterward. It was rediscovered in the 1960s by feminist scholars and is now central to American literature courses.

Discussion questions

Edna's awakening unfolds in stages — sensory, artistic, sexual, political. What triggers each stage — and is the process cumulative or are these separate discoveries?
The novel ends with Edna swimming out to sea. Is this a suicide, a liberation, a defeat or an assertion of selfhood that refuses compromise — and does the novel want you to decide?
Robert is the man Edna loves, but he leaves rather than stay with a woman who will not conform. How does the novel present his failure — as cowardice, as a different kind of integrity, or as simply the limit of what the era allowed?
Madame Ratignolle represents one way to be a woman in this world — devoted mother and wife. Does the novel present her life as enviable, imprisoning, or simply different from what Edna needs?
Condemned on publication in 1899, The Awakening was out of print for decades before feminist scholars recovered it in the 1960s. What does its original suppression tell us — and what does the recovery suggest about who controls the literary canon?