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Books Like The Awakening
What to read after The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) is a masterpiece of American realism — Edna Pontellier's awakening to her own desires and the impossibility of living within the constraints of Gilded Age New Orleans society. Suppressed for decades and now recognized as one of the most important American novels, it opened the tradition of fiction about female consciousness. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary's romantic self-destruction in provincial France — the European predecessor to The Awakening; both novels follow a married woman whose desires cannot be fulfilled within the social role she has been assigned, and both treat her situation with sympathy rather than moral condemnation; Flaubert invented the approach that Chopin applied to the American South
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's slow descent through Gilded Age New York — the most direct American companion to The Awakening; Wharton and Chopin were writing about the same society at the same time, and both are describing the social machinery that destroys women who will not perform the required roles; The House of Mirth appeared six years after The Awakening and is in direct conversation with it
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Offred in the totalitarian Republic of Gilead — the feminist dystopia that belongs to the same tradition as The Awakening: a woman whose body and life are controlled by a patriarchal system, and who resists; where Chopin's Edna awakens within a historically real social constraint, Atwood's Offred awakens within a deliberately constructed dystopian one
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer, an American in Europe who makes a catastrophic marriage — James is the major American novelist of the same period, and The Portrait of a Lady asks the same question as The Awakening: what happens when an intelligent woman with a genuine inner life is placed in a social world designed to constrain her? James and Chopin answer very differently, and the comparison is illuminating
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford in early twentieth-century Florida, searching for love and self — the African American companion to The Awakening in the tradition of female self-discovery; Hurston published her novel in 1937, and it was also neglected for decades before being rediscovered; both novels are about a woman who insists on her own inner life against a world that wishes to define her from outside
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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood's breakdown and recovery in 1950s America — the mid-twentieth-century heir to The Awakening in its portrait of a young woman destroyed by the gap between her inner life and the social roles available to her; where Edna's constraint is the Gilded Age institution of marriage, Esther's is the 1950s expectation of femininity
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Celie's letters to God across decades of abuse and transformation — Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel belongs to the same tradition as The Awakening: a woman's discovery of her own self and voice within a social world designed to suppress both; where Chopin's awakening is romantic and aesthetic, Walker's is moral, sexual, and religious
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs. de Winter, living in the shadow of the first Mrs. de Winter at Manderley — the gothic parallel to The Awakening's realism; where Edna Pontellier struggles against the social weight of a role she has outgrown, du Maurier's narrator struggles against the psychological weight of a predecessor she can never escape; both novels are about what it means to have a self in a world that has already filled your space with someone else
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