The Awakening: Complete, Authoritative Text With Biographical & Historical Contexts, Critical History, & Essays from Five Contemporary Critica. Perspectives (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) Review
I read this book about a year ago. The stark feminism in it hardly shocked me, because even Anne of Green Gables is written from a somewhat feminist viewpoint. Yes, feminism has been around since the fall of man.
Kate Chopin is an excellent writer, of course, and she paints a complete picture without an excess of words in The Awakening. Besides these assets, however, I found myself greatly disliking the book, simply because it represents principles absolutely opposite to my own, to those that are rooted in the Bible. However, my opinion of the book changed when I reached the end. Edna was so controlled by her emotions and so vainly searching for satisfaction outside of right standards that she ended up absently committing suicide. What a profound ending this is: the path of feminism seems bright and colourful, dashing and daring, until the end, when one realises that all one's life has been spent on nothing but feeling good. Feelings may be nice, but what is left when the feelings are gone? Without mentioning the fact that Edna betrayed her husband and abandoned her precious children, the fact that Edna ruined and cut short her own life is a harsh enough lesson for any woman to read.
The truth is that if one is not content where one is at, one will not be content anywhere else.
And then there is this to consider: maybe Edna deemed it worth her while to fritter her life away doing whatsoever she pleased, and die before she could really reap the consequences. If so, she forgot that death is not the end, for humans have eternal souls, and hers must go someplace. If she spent her life defying God, then where must hers necessarily go to?
The Awakening: Complete, Authoritative Text With Biographical & Historical Contexts, Critical History, & Essays from Five Contemporary Critica. Perspectives (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) Overview
This revision of a widely adopted critical edition presents the 1969 Seyersted text of Kate Chopin's novel along with critical essays that introduce students to The Awakening from the perspectives of feminism, gender (new essay), new historical, deconstructionist, and reader response criticism. An additional new essay demonstrates how various approaches can be combined. The text and essays are complemented by introductions to The Awakening and to the criticism, a glossary of critical terms, and (for the first time) contextual documents.
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Customer Reviews
Not the right ISBN Number - Angrycustomer2010 -
I tried getting the advertised ISBN number for The Awakening twice and Amazon still managed to screw it up. Why list the book as a version that it is not?!! The listed ISBN was 1438260997, but what I recieved was 1438260990. I needed the exact version so that I could share the same page numbers as my reading group, but now I have to scramble to find what we are talking about. Very dissapointing service. The customer service rep sent me a generic e-mail (probably computer generated) saying that the same mistake would not happen again, but it did. I am never using this website again.
The Awakening - Danielle E. Thomson - Lakewood, Co
Arrived a bit later than we thought and not so much in the condition that was advertised.
New Orleans, Grand Isle, in late 1800's - Robert Boudet - New Orleans area
An excellent account of New Orleans society in the late 1800's and how they spent their summers on Grand Isle, a remote barrier island. Today Grand Isle, a commercial and recreational fishing village, is being seriously affected by the BP oil spill.
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