Reading Guide

From The Awakening and Selected Stories

Author Kate Chopin

Introduction by Kaye Gibbons

Edited by Nina Baym

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The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin

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1. Many contemporary readers may feel that The Awakening articulates a clearly feminist agenda. Do you agree with this reading? Why or why not?

2. Discuss the Creole and Cajun influence in Kate Chopin's stories. How does Chopin's identity as a regional writer inform her work?

3. Critics have said that one of Chopin's most persistent themes is the interaction between one's sense of self and one's obligation to community. How does this dynamic play out in The Awakening?

4. How do you feel Chopin judges Edna in The Awakening, if at all? How do you interpret the meaning of the novel's ending?

5. What do you feel is the significance of the novel's title? What is the awakening of which the title speaks?

6. What do you think Edna means when she tells Ad?le, "I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself"?

7. Do you think Edna benefits from her expanded
sexual consciousness? What do you think Chopin thinks?

Publisher Modern Library

Categories Classic Fiction Literary Fiction Short Stories Fiction Classics

Kate Chopin (1851-1904) did not begin to write until she was thirty-six years old. Up to that time, her life gave no hint of either literary talent or literary ambition. Yet after the publication of her first stories in 1889, she enjoyed ten years of a productive, serious, and fairly successful career. Her first novel, At Fault (1890), had difficulty finding a publisher, so she brought it out at her own expense and sent review copies to important journals. Her short stories—close to a hundred of them—were published for the most part in prestigious national magazines. They gave her a solid reputation as a gifted 'local color' writer—that is, an author specializing in the depiction of a particular region of…