Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' was a real bestseller at the turn of the 19--20 centuries.
In 70--80s years of the last century, with the development of feminists' criticism of the language and literature, when the society felt the need to reconsider the role and destination of women, this brilliant masterpiece regained its reader. It can be called the American 'Madame Bovary' because of the closeness of these two novels in showing the woman soul and attempting to reveal its mystery. 'The Awakening' was written almost half a century after Flaubert's great novel, and by a woman; and we dare to claim that a woman writer can guess the deeply hidden desires and passions of a soul of another woman with greater degree of preciseness. 'The Awakening' is the novel which can be ranged among the books of Jane Austen, Bronte sisters, and Virginia Woolf. The novel brings forward the topics of inequity between sexes. A young Louisianan woman whose life seems absolutely happy and carefree, a devoted wife and mother respected by the society, feels increasingly tired of 'observing les convenances' and finds herself in search of something new and exciting. At first all her inspirations are only dreams, but one day she meets young Robert and completely looses her head. She sacrifices family (the value especially treasured by the Southern literature and the Southerners.
Edna Pontellier's quest for selfhood seems essentially both selfish and reasonable and eventually turns out to be neither: it is, in fact, paradoxical. On the one hand, of course, there are the elements of selfishness: thinking only about herself, leaving the family with young children, living in the present.
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