Kate Chopin was as much a craftsman as the European writers she, virtually alone among American writers of her day, knew and admired: Flaubert, de Maupassant, Zola. I cannot read “The Awakening” without smelling the salt of the sea off New Orleans, the spicy Creole court bouillon on the breath of the characters, the coffee served in an outdoor garden I cannot read it without seeing the motionless summer sails, the children quarreling over bonbons, the pairs of lovers whose idlings begin to oppress the heroine. I can't make it more clear it's only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”īut even more startling than Kate Chopin's timeliness was her attention to everyday detail. “I would give up the unessential I would give my money I would give my life for my children but I would not give myself. They were women who idolized their chil dren, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.” She her self determines that although she loves her children, she must place expressing her own individuality fore most.

It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. The mother ‐ women seemed to prevail that summer. Along the way she comes to realize that she is “not a mother ‐ woman.

Embarking on a voyage of self‐dis covery as timely as this month's Ms., she has a romantic dalliance with a young intellectual who reads de Goncourt to her, and a sexual dal liance with a flighty roué who, unlike her husband, makes her feel joyous about her body. It is, in brief, the story of a young woman's awakening, one summer at the beach, to dire needs and deep yearnings within herself that go un fulfilled in marriage and motherhood.

I can not read “The Awakening” without having constantly to pinch myself in wonder at how it could have been written over seventy years ago. She did her best writing before the turn of the century she was dead by 1904 yet some of her short stories and her psychological novel, “The Awaken ing,” speak to me as pertinently as any fiction published this year or last. Kate Chopin has been something of an obsession for me since I first read her work twelve years ago. But then, perhaps we women have to think about getting ourselves, our struggles down on paper first, before we can attend to our art.” I ask her whether she has ever read Kate Chopin and she says, “Who?” It troubles me. One friend, a poet, com plains of the book she is reading, “Well, this one lacks style. Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion and Alix Shulman. All my friends at the beach this summer were, to a woman, reading women novelists, mostly Doris Less ing.

The great awakening kate chopin