The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories
1899
The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories
1899
In 1899, Kate Chopin wrote a novel so dangerous it nearly destroyed her reputation. A century later, it stands as the founding text of American feminist literature. Edna Pontellier arrives at Grand Isle for a summer with her husband and children, expecting nothing more than the dull rhythm of married life. What she finds instead is herself, the startling, terrifying discovery that she is a person with desires, ambitions, and a hunger for freedom that no one ever told her she was allowed to feel. Robert Lebrun is the catalyst, but the awakening is entirely her own. Chopin renders a woman's emergence from societal coma with prose so lush and precise it feels almost transgressive: Edna's resistance, her sensuality, her slow recognition that compliance will cost her everything. The eleven short stories collected here demonstrate Chopin's remarkable range, from the gothic terrors of "Desiree's Baby" to the uncontainable desire of "The Storm." This is a book about the most dangerous thing a woman can do: want more.
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“The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies””
— Kate Chopin
“She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.””
— Kate Chopin
“The trouble is," sighed the Doctor, grasping her meaning intuitively, "that youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.””
— Kate Chopin
“Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets?””
— Kate Chopin
“In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight”
— Kate Chopin
“Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual.””
— Kate Chopin
“Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul. The physical need for sleep began to overtake her; the exuberance which had sustained and exalted her spirit left her helpless and yielding to the conditions which crowded her in.””
— Kate Chopin
“Robert's going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning, out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.””
— Kate Chopin
“I've been working like a machine, and feeling like a lost soul.””
— Kate Chopin
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-awakening-and-selected-short-stories-f9e6033d-7e6e-4707-a54d-22d16897f161"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-awakening-and-selected-short-stories-f9e6033d-7e6e-4707-a54d-22d16897f161)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-awakening-and-selected-short-stories-f9e6033d-7e6e-4707-a54d-22d16897f161][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-awakening-and-selected-short-stories-f9e6033d-7e6e-4707-a54d-22d16897f161Cite this book
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Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-awakening-and-selected-short-stories-f9e6033d-7e6e-4707-a54d-22d16897f161.Chopin, K. (1899). The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-awakening-and-selected-short-stories-f9e6033d-7e6e-4707-a54d-22d16897f161Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-awakening-and-selected-short-stories-f9e6033d-7e6e-4707-a54d-22d16897f161.
