Chopin, Kate - Carole Stone (essay date 1986)

Carole Stone (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: Stone, Carole. “The Female Artist in Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Brith and Creativity.” Women's Studies, 13, nos. 1-2 (1986): 23-32.

[In the following essay, Stone views Chopin's birth imagery in The Awakening as symbolic of the birth of Edna Pontellier as an artist.]

When Kate Chopin's The Awakening was published in 1899 critics attacked its depiction of a heroine who sought sexual pleasure outside of marriage and condemned Chopin for “failing to perceive that the relation of a mother to her children is far more important than the gratification of a passion which experience has taught her is … evanescent.”1 But The Awakening is even more radical in its treatment of motherhood because it questions the assumptions that childbirth and child care are a woman's principal vocation, and that motherhood gives pleasure to all women.

In Chopin's era...

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