Recommendations
Books Like The Awakening
Best books to read after The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a rediscovered feminist masterpiece about a woman's gradual awakening to her own desires in late nineteenth-century Louisiana. These recommendations extend the experience through other novels about women's autonomy and through American realist fiction that explores what society costs its female characters.
- 1Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's 1937 novel about Janie Crawford's search for self-knowledge across three marriages — the most natural companion to The Awakening in American literature: both are novels about a woman's journey toward understanding herself as a subject rather than an object of others' desires.
- 2Buy
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Plath's autobiographical novel about Esther Greenwood's breakdown and recovery — a mid-twentieth-century woman's awakening to the cost of the roles society offers her, told in a more clinical and less lyrical key than Chopin but sharing The Awakening's fundamental subject.
- 3Buy
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gilman's 1892 short story about a woman whose 'rest cure' for nervous depression drives her into madness — the most concentrated expression of the same argument that The Awakening makes: that the social world's attempt to contain women's minds destroys them.
- 4Buy
A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's 1929 essay arguing that a woman needs money and a room of her own in order to write fiction — the nonfiction companion to The Awakening's argument about what autonomy requires and what its absence costs.
- 5Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's novel about Dorothea Brooke's frustrated desire for a life worthy of her intelligence and moral ambition is The Awakening's Victorian predecessor — a novel that diagnoses the same problem (society's limitation of women's possibilities) with even more systematic thoroughness.
- 6Buy
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Newland Archer's doomed love for the Countess Olenska in Gilded Age New York — a novel about social constraint and the impossibility of escaping it, set in exactly the same period as The Awakening and sharing its interest in what convention costs.
- 7Buy
A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's 1879 play about Nora Helmer, who walks out of her marriage at the end of the play, slamming the door on her husband, children, and social role — the most direct theatrical counterpart to The Awakening's argument about women's need for self-determination.
- 8Buy
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser's 1900 novel about Carrie Meeber, a young woman from Wisconsin who comes to Chicago and uses men's desire for her to advance herself — the American realist novel published the year after The Awakening that takes the same society and the same female desire for more than society offers, but in a decidedly less sympathetic moral framework.
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