Literary Pick (**)

The Awakening
Kate Chopin

























I don't understand how people call this is a feminist novel. There's a difference between feminism and selfishness. Here we have a woman, Edna Pontellier, who is married, with two children I believe, and so one day she suddenly realizes she doesn't want to be married anymore, and while her husband is away on business, and the kids are away at grandmas, she decides she's going to move out of the house and into a smaller home a couple blocks away, all nonchalant, like her husband won't mind one bit. I think she even asks her husband what he thinks about this idea..but she then to proceeds to moves out. However, before she leaves, she throws herself a going-away party at her husbands expense (not too independent if you ask me) and starts a series of affairs, one of which is with another married man in her little circle of society.. If it were the husband who had behaved this way in the novel, what do you think the reader would have thought about him? This is not acceptable behavior just because she's a woman. The only oppressive subject in this novel was the protagonist herself.
Kate Chopin is a lovely writer but this story is weak.
The other short stories included in this collection only got worse as they progressed.