Kate Chopin - The Awakening- the Awakening of the Woman

“The primary concern of Kate Chopin’ s fiction is the celebration of female sexuality, and the tension between erotic desire and the demands of marriage, the family, and a traditional family.” Because of the explicit treatment of these topics, being taboos at the time, her novels had a problematic position in the canonization-process, and received very harsh critics. Change came with the appearance of feminist criticism.
Her best known novel, The Awakening, was published in 1899. It “traces the psychological and sexual coming to consciousness of a young woman” . It is a frank account of a woman’s sexual and spiritual awakening, adultery and suicide. Chopin’s concern is not simply what women do to themselves, but also with what society does to them. In many ways, we can make out the allusions to Chopin’s life as a child. Her mother was a French Creole, and her father an Irish merchant. After her father’s early death, she “grew closer to her maternal grandmother”...