The Awakening
Kate Chopin's novel of one woman, one Louisiana summer, and a self she could not put back to sleep
Page 1
On Grand Isle, at Madame Lebrun's pension, the Gulf mornings belong to the guests who fill the row of cottages under the oaks. Léonce Pontellier sits on the porch of the main house with his newspaper, as he does every day, while a caged parrot and a mockingbird quarrel somewhere close by. When Edna comes up from the beach with Robert Lebrun, her parasol tilted uselessly against the sun, her skin burned past any good it did her, Léonce lowers the paper and studies her a moment the way a man studies a piece of property that has taken some damage. He says so, not unkindly. Edna only holds up her sunburned hands and laughs. It is the ordinary rhythm of their summer: Léonce with his cigar and his letters, the children trailing a nurse across the lawn, and Robert, as always, finding some reason to be wherever Edna is. Nobody on that porch yet knows anything has started.
Page 2
That whole summer Edna had tried to swim and failed, splashing and clinging near the other bathers while the lesson never quite took. Then one night, with the guests singing somewhere up on the beach and the Gulf lying flat and silver under the moon, something in her simply let go. She found she could keep herself up. She wanted to swim out farther than any woman at the pension had swum, out past the little flock of waders, out toward the open water and the empty dark beyond it, and for a few strokes the feeling was like nothing she had ever had — her own strength, her own will, carrying her. Then, just as suddenly, a kind of terror took hold of her: the shore looked impossibly far, her arms seemed to fail, and for a moment she believed she might not get back at all. She fought her way in, shaking, and stood at last in the shallow water trying to steady her own breath.
Page 3
Edna and Robert crossed by boat one Sunday to the little island of Chênière Caminada for early Mass. Inside the small close church the heat and the drone of Latin and the press of bodies overcame her, and she had to be helped out into the air before the service ended. Robert took her instead to the cottage of an old island woman nearby, where there was a clean bed and a shuttered room away from the sun. He told her he would wake her in time for the afternoon boat, but he let her sleep the whole day through instead. When Edna finally woke it was late afternoon; she felt she had slept not for hours but for a long, long time, and had woken into a different, hungrier, more her own version of herself. She ate heartily, felt the bread and wine like the first real food of her life, and found Robert waiting patiently for her under a tree outside.
Page 4
Back at the pension, a letter came for Robert, and at dinner that same evening he announced, almost lightly, that he was going to Mexico on business. He gave no real reason beyond that, and did not seem to think Edna needed one. In two days more he was gone. The whole small household of the pension came down to the wharf to see him off on the little morning boat — Léonce among them, shaking his hand and wishing him well, the children waving from the dock. Edna stood a little apart in the crowd, watching him board with his single travelling bag, unable to say anything that would sound like what she actually felt. He waved once from the deck as the boat pulled away toward the mainland, and then there was only the empty brown water where he had been, and the ordinary business of the pension going on around her as if nothing at all had happened.
Page 5
Back in New Orleans for the autumn, the Pontelliers kept their house on Esplanade Street, where Tuesday was Edna's reception day — the one afternoon each week when the whole small world of Creole society expected to find her at home to callers, properly dressed, properly agreeable. One Tuesday, without planning it very far ahead, Edna simply went out instead, leaving the parlor empty and the maid to turn visitors away at the door. When Léonce came home that evening and heard what had happened, he was genuinely puzzled rather than angry — it was not done, people would talk, callers who were turned away twice did not generally come a third time. He asked her, gently enough, where she had been and why the room had stood empty. Edna had no real excuse to give him beyond the plain truth: she had not wanted to stay in, and so she had not stayed in.
Page 6
Edna climbed often now to the cramped top-floor rooms where Mademoiselle Reisz lived alone among stacks of sheet music and a good piano that took up half the space. She came partly for the playing, which moved her more than music usually did, and partly because the old woman kept up a correspondence with Robert in Mexico and would sometimes read out a line or two if Edna asked plainly enough. Mademoiselle Reisz watched her closely while she played, missing nothing — not the way Edna's face changed at certain passages, not what she was really asking about when she asked about the letters. She did not flatter her. She told her instead, bluntly, what it generally cost a person to want more than the ordinary allotted share of life, and that most who tried for it were not strong enough to bear the fall when it came.
Page 7
While Léonce was away in New York on business, Edna rented a small house of her own a few streets from the Esplanade Street house and moved into it quietly, telling almost no one beforehand. She furnished its few rooms to please no one but herself, set up a corner as a proper studio, and gave herself over seriously, for the first time, to her painting. Alcée Arobin, a charming, idle young man of the city who had been calling on her for some time, became a regular visitor there, and before long more than a visitor. Edna did not pretend to herself that she loved him. What she wanted, she told herself, was simply to belong, for once in her life, entirely to herself, and to stop asking anyone's permission for how she spent her days or her feeling.
Page 8
Word came that Adèle Ratignolle's time had come, and Edna, remembering an old promise, went to her at once and stayed through the whole long, hard night of her labor. It was a harder birth than Edna had seen before, and by the time it was finally over both women were worn through. In the exhausted quiet afterward, Adèle, barely able to lift her head from the pillow, took Edna's hand and begged her, with real urgency, not to forget what she owed her children, whatever else she decided to do with her own life. Before Edna could answer properly, or compose her own face, she was sent off into the night to fetch the doctor's final word, leaving Adèle's plea unanswered behind her.
Page 9
Walking home alone through the dark streets, still shaken from the long night at Adèle's bedside, Edna found Robert waiting for her on the gallery of her own small house, back from Mexico without a word of warning. They spoke at last plainly, after months of letters and silence — he told her he had loved her the whole time he had been away, and had run from it rather than face what it meant. For a little while, in the lamplight on that porch, it seemed something between them might actually be possible. Edna left him only long enough to send word about Adèle, and when she came back he was gone. In his place, on the table, there was a short note.
Page 10
Edna went back to Grand Isle alone, out of season, when the pension stood shuttered and the summer guests were long gone from the cottages under the oaks. She walked down to the same beach in the last light of the day, left her clothes behind her on the sand exactly as she had always said she one day would, and walked into the water. The Gulf was cool and empty and closed softly around her as it always had, and she swam straight out, further than she had ever swum before, until her arms grew tired and the shore was a long way behind her, and further still after that, until there was nothing behind her at all.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
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