The Awakening by Kate Chopin

'It would have been a difficult matter for Mr. Pontellier to define to his own satisfaction or any one else's wherein his wife failed in her duty toward their children. It was something which he felt rather than perceived, and he never voiced the feeling without subsequent regret and ample atonement.
...
In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The motherwomen seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. '

[Spoiler alert:I can't write about this small book without alluding to major plot points, you have been warned.]

It was the title of this book that made me include it as a substitution book in the My Year of Reading Dangerously challenge; I had visions of descriptions of a Lady Chatterley-style sexual awakening that I didn't have the stomach for. And the blurb on this book does explicitly compare the impact of this book with Lady C.
The 'awakening' of the title is not just a sexual one, though; that is a part of it but a part where a delicate veil is drawn (it happens 'off-page', as it were). Personally I found this much more to my taste than the rather gruesome descriptions that Lawrence puts his readers through.
The awakening of the main character is a sensual one, in the widest sense. All her senses come to life during the summer on the Grand Isle where she stays with other well-to-do French Creole families from New Orleans.
Edna Pontellier comes from Kentucky but is married to a Creole, and part of the story is about her difference to the society in which she mixes. Married with two children, she does not know what love is until she falls for Robert Lebrun, and this goes in tandem with her senses awakening, for instance with noticing the natural beauty in her surroundings, or sobbing at a well-played piano sonata. She is waking up from a life of mental torpor and becomes not only a sensual woman alive to the world but an artist.
In parts the book is beautifully written, with an occasional unexpected use of language which I presume is colloquial. The descriptions in the first section of the book on the island really convey the image of languid summer days, and these parts were a joy to read.
However, one thing I disliked about the writing was that Chopin constantly introduced new descriptions of characters who have been in the book from the start. At page 80 of a book only a little over 100 pages long I don't need yet another physical description of the main character. It seemed as though the author was worried that the image that the reader had in their head might not match her own picture of her heroine; it felt controlling, as though she was unwilling to trust in the intelligence of her readers.
I can see why this book could have deeply affected a lot of women. Edna's strike for independence was admirable, she refuses to efface herself and put herself behind her husband and children, shaking off cares about social mores as she makes her own way. She demands to be free and the book traces her journey to be truly free from the roles of wife and mother that society has imposed upon her, neither of which roles she fulfills very well as the book makes clear. She breaks out and chooses her own destiny up to the point when she finds that she cannot push against society any further.
It is clear that it is not just her awakened passion for Robert that causes this change; during the same summer she developed a deep friendship with a woman, Adele Ratignolle, and this relationship is just as important in Edna's journey to freedom. It is this friendship which breaks down the reserve that Edna had always had as an outsider in the Creole community and that appears to trigger the release of the other feelings that she had never before allowed herself to experience. It is not that Adele is a role model, on the contrary she is one of the mother-women referred to in the quotation above, but the establishment of this intimacy appears to allow Edna to begin to recognise her own feelings.
This was a very different time for women, and the independence that we take for granted today was not a possibility for a lot of women at the end of the nineteenth century, and that is what makes this book so important; I can recognise this, but on a personal level I did not find the main character likeable.
I felt much more sympathy for Lady Chatterley, trapped in a loveless marriage with a man becoming more and more unpleasant, forced to live in a part of the country she dislikes. In contrast, Edna seems to have drifted pointlessly and selfishly through her life up to the point of the book. She appears completely self-absorbed and unimaginative. She patronisingly feels sorry for her friend when she observes her domestic happiness, assuming that Adele has not woken up to life as she has. At points when Edna was overcome with the ennui of her existence, I wanted to give her a good shaking.
When she broke away from her married life she became a little more sympathetic to my eyes but even then she drifted into a relationship with an unsuitable man, one whom she recognised was not genuine in his protestations of his feelings, and seemed unable to give her life any more direction. She takes the tack of independence not so much because she knows it is right, as because the wind seems to blow her there; I think this is what I found irritating about her, she was capricious and completely led by whim rather than making a determined stand against the stultification of her life.
I suspect this is one of those books that I should have read when I was a teenager, while at the brink of life and all it could bring. It is a book that demands that feeling that everything is out there for the taking if you can only get to it.