Chapter 10 - Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier, and the Predicament of the Intellectual Woman in New Orleans

Summary

Kate Chopin’s classic The Awakening can be interpreted through the lens of Chopin’s own intellectual and social development to show how the novel tells a story at once similar to and different from that of its author’s life. In this reading, the main character of the novel begins as a figure with almost no exposure to the realm culture and ideas, but develops a keen appetite for independent thinking and undergoes, in the course of the novel, an education – one that, at the end of the book, is perhaps only really beginning in earnest. Chopin’s own development is both mirror and foil to that of the novel’s heroine.