ABSTRACT
The language of the passage becomes lyrically poetic and evocatively sensuous. One of the great triumphs of The Awakening is the superb harmony Kate Chopin establishes between the vivid topography of land and sea-scape and the inner world of her main character. The Awakening is a superb and challenging novel. It challenges a whole tradition of novel-writing by and about women in nineteenth-century American literature. In the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, when writing was one of the few professions open to women, women writers played an extremely prominent part in America's literary culture. The bitter paradox, however, is that she has realized that she can preserve the purity and strength of her newly-discovered freedom only by destroying it. What this in turn implies is that, within the Creole social world of which Edna Pontellier is part, such freedom, such independence, on the part of a woman, cannot exist.
