Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South.

When they fall in love, Robert senses the doomed nature of such a relationship and flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture.

While her husband is still away, she moves out of their home and into a small bungalow nearby and begins a dalliance with Alcée Arobin, a persistent suitor with a reputation for being free with his affections.

When Edna returns home, she finds a note from Robert stating that he has left forever because he loves her too much to shame her by engaging in a relationship with a married woman.

Chopin's novel bears the hallmarks of French short story writer Guy de Maupassant's style: a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures.

Mixed into Chopin's overarching 19th-century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper-class pretension, reminiscent of contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and George Bernard Shaw.

After her father was killed on All Saints' Day and her brother died from typhoid on Mardi Gras, Chopin became skeptical of religion, a view that she presents through Edna, who finds church "suffocating".

Through Edna Pontellier's journey, Kate Chopin sought to highlight the different ways that a woman could be in solitude because of the expectations of motherhood, ethnicity, marriage, social norms, and gender.

Chopin presents Edna's autonomous separation from society and friends as individually empowering while still examining the risks of self-exploration and subsequent loneliness.

In an attempt to shed her societal role of mother and wife, Edna takes charge of her limited life and makes changes to better discover her true self.

Although Edna's journey ultimately leads to an unsustainable solitude due to lack of societal support, "her death indicates self-possession rather than a retreat from a dilemma.

By making Edna's experiences critically central to the novel, Chopin is able to sound a cautionary note about society's capacity to support women's liberation.

As shown through Edna's depressing emotional journey, isolation, and eventual suicide, Chopin claims that the social norms and traditional gender roles of the 19th century could not tolerate an independent woman.

The themes of romance and death in The Awakening aid Chopin's feminist intent of illuminating the restrictive and oppressive roles of women in Victorian society.

Such an assertion would deny any individual agency on her part and misrepresent the synthesis of artistic form and content that serves as a musical parallel to Edna's experiences.

In The Awakening, Edna is fascinated by the musical poet's repertoire, and she is forced to confront the spectral presence of a deeper yearning for something that eventually drives her to commit suicide.

"[10] Some reviews clucked in disappointment at Chopin's choice of subject: "It was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the over-worked field of sex-fiction" (Chicago Times Herald).

Others mourned the loss of good taste; The Nation claimed that the book opened with high expectations, "remembering the author's agreeable short stories," and closed with "real disappointment," suggesting public dissatisfaction with the chosen topic: "we need not have been put to the unpleasantness of reading about her.

Some reviews indulged in outright vitriol as when Public Opinion stated "We are well-satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf.

[10] In 1991 The Awakening was dramatized in the film Grand Isle, directed by Mary Lambert and starring Kelly McGillis as Edna, Jon DeVries as Leonce, and Adrian Pasdar as Robert.

In "Wish Someone Would Care", the ninth episode of the first season of the HBO series Treme that aired in 2010, professor Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) assigns the novel to his class and briefly discusses it with his students.

[4] Louisiana, the setting for The Awakening, was a largely Catholic state where divorce was extremely rare, and women were expected to stay loyal and faithful to their husbands, and men to their wives.

Chopin's The Awakening and other novels in the 19th and early 20th centuries were censored due to their perceived immorality, which included sexual impropriety, an argument supported by the initial reviews of the book found in newspapers at the time.

[14] Nevertheless, Margo Culley stresses that Kate Chopin was not the only woman challenging gender ideologies in this period; writing a novel brought her views into public prominence.