Chopin, Kate - Dieter Schulz (essay date spring 1993)

Dieter Schulz (essay date spring 1993)

SOURCE: Schulz, Dieter. “Notes toward a fin-de-siècle Reading of Kate Chopin's The Awakening.” American Literary Realism 25, no. 3 (spring 1993): 69-76.

[In the following essay, Schulz explores similarities between The Awakening and other works written at the end of the nineteenth century.]

The ending of Chopin's The Awakening signals Edna Pontellier's failure to resolve the conflict between her urge toward self-realization and the constricting conventions of society. Most critics, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has remarked, treat the novel “as a problem novel that cries out for a ‘solution.’”1 They see Edna's conflict in cultural terms—in the framework of late Victorianism and the post-bellum South—or as a version of the Romantic quest for transcendence. From these perspectives, Chopin's protagonist appears as either a failed New Woman or a failed...

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