Still Asleep and Mostly Happy that Way: The Awakening (1899) as Socially Critical Text and (and in) Kate Chopin's Time
             Within Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, which was first published in 1899 to mixed (actually, mostly negative) reviews, and then greeted publicly with a great deal of condemnation (Sprinkle, 1995), the main character Edna Pontellier suffers increasing despair and hopelessness, as a married woman of 28 with two small sons. These spring from her realizations that she is unhappy, misunderstood, and, worst of all, alone with her feelings in a traditional Catholic, Creole-dominated social environment in which women's roles, in particular, are especially narrow and truncated. Once Edna knows she returns the younger, enviably carefree Robert Lebrun's attraction to her, she also recognizes, regretfully and with wistfulness for lost youthful opportunities at passion, that she is nevertheless trapped inside a loveless marriage, with responsibilities to small children. All of that spawns the beginning of Edna's sad, slow, lonely, and ultimately fatal, "awakening" that summer at Grande Isle.
             Initially within this novel, Edna Pontellier simply admits, implicitly, to herself if not yet aloud to anyone else, when alone in her bedroom, after she and Leonce quarrel at dinner over its poor quality (he blames her) that she is alienated from her husband and frustrated with mindless, meaningless, mundane married life. Edna, at this same time, has grown increasingly indifferent, to the point of near-hostility, even, about any and all of her expected wifely and motherly roles: from organizing the household and managing the hired help to accepting visits from social callers to making light conversation with a husband with whom she feels nothing important in common.
             The best evidence of all this, is that Edna is content to carry these daily obligations of marriage badly, or ev...