“The primary concern of Kate Chopin’ s fiction is the celebration of female sexuality, and the tension between erotic desire and the demands of marriage, the family, and a traditional family.” Because of the explicit treatment of these topics, being taboos at the time, her novels had a problematic position in the canonization-process, and received very harsh critics. Change came with the appearance of feminist criticism.
Her best known novel, The Awakening, was published in 1899. It “traces the psychological and sexual coming to consciousness of a young woman” . It is a frank account of a woman’s sexual and spiritual awakening, adultery and suicide. Chopin’s concern is not simply what women do to themselves, but also with what society does to them. In many ways, we can make out the allusions to Chopin’s life as a child. Her mother was a French Creole, and her father an Irish merchant. After her father’s early death, she “grew closer to her maternal grandmother” , who told her stories including “extramarital romance and interracial marriage, which gave the young girl an unusually complex view of the world.”
Critics compared the novel to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Willa Cather “complained that Edna P

According to Wendy Martin’s essay, “many contemporary critics and students romanticize Edna’s suicide as an act of self-assertion, as a transcendence of earthly limitations.” They say that “on the one hand, she is a romantic absolutist and will not compromise her vision of freedom; on the other, she is defeated by convention.”

The ending of the novel is, in a way, logical. I do not think that after her awakening Edna had another choice than killing herself. She reached to many things during the few months, and returning to her old life and to her husband would have been a defeat. She won against the old-fashioned society in a way, but she could not stay alive in the misunderstanding around her.

“Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman.” She developed an ambivalent feeling towards motherhood and her children. She was fond of them “in an uneven, impulsive way”. She loves them, of course, but cannot imagine her life spending all of her time with them, bringing them up, as a Southern woman is expected to do. Her children meant a sort of limitation for her, “their absence was sort of relief”. She could not think about her children as the only purpose of her life.