The Awakening and its Social Significance

When the phrase, “love conquers all” comes to mind, most people take comfort in such a proposition. However, in Chopin’s, The Awakening, the conquering powers of love are precisely the problem. There are hundreds of stories, Joan of Arc for example, where people die for the love of an idea or an object. There are still several stories—Romeo and Juliet—where the person dies over the proposition of not being able to be with the person whom she loves. Yet The Awakening marks a new chapter in international social history with the whimsical succumbing to and infidelity, the independence and disobedience of a woman toward her husband, and the absence of a society that condemns such behavior. Pretty remarkable for 1890. Pretty predictable for 2003. It had to start somewhere.
There have been countless affairs, back to the Ancient Romans and before or even more recently in books such as The Scarlet Letter. Interestingly, in this book the erers are neither cau...