‘Desiree’s Baby’ is a shattering story about racism. The rest of the stories collected here with The Awakening are extremely good and tend to cover similar themes around conflicts between the needs of women and the conventions of society. The end of the story is a kick in the stomach. Instead of falling into degradation, Edna is buoyed up by her experience, awakened and renewed paradise is glimpsed, but only glimpsed as a possibility, never achieved, because this is still the nineteenth century and Edna’s actions lead to a tragic conclusion, not because of her weakness, but because of the weakness of others.

Chopin also cleverly rewrites “the fall”. It contains an incredibly vivid and familiar description of what it feels like to fall in love for the first time. As Susan Gilbert notes in the introduction to my edition, Chopin uses careful changes of style to enact the changes that occur within Edna – the text loosens and becomes more experimental as Edna moves through her sensual and emotional journey, and we move with her, drawn into her internal world. Edna is not a particularly “nice” woman she’s a complex person with conflicting emotions and drives. I think it’s a very mature work full of emotional truth. It’s also interesting that the only woman who is represented as completely free and fully creative is the coded lesbian, Mademoiselle Reisz. Edna Pontellier is only able to come into her own as a creative person when she decides to leave her marriage, become independent and pursue her relationship with her lover, Robert Lebrun. For Chopin, marriage represents a moral and spiritual dead-end in which women cannot thrive because it necessarily involves men imposing their wills upon them. The Awakening is very much a fin de siècle novel it’s shot through with a sense of change and instability, and a profound questioning of conventions, especially conventional morality. The outrage with which it was greeted by critics destroyed Chopin’s reputation as a writer. In 1899 Kate Chopin published The Awakening, the story of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother who falls in love with another man and “awakes” to the possibility of a new life of erotic and spiritual freedom.

Gaining ground joan barfoot