SOURCE: Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. “Kate Chopin's The Awakening: An Assault on American Racial and Sexual Mythology.” Southern Studies, 26, no. 4 (1987): 304-12.

In the following essay, Elfenbein contends that Chopin challenged American racist and sexist notions about sexuality in The Awakening.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) shocked its nineteenth-century readers by presenting without comment the adultery of Edna Pontellier, a wealthy, white American wife and mother adrift in Creole society. The shock was so great that the novel went unread for almost sixty years. Recent critics have tended to blame the literary double standard, which prohibited female authors at the turn of the century from broaching topics available to male authors, for the opprobrium Chopin suffered. But it was the cultural chauvinism of Chopin's contemporaries that was primarily responsible for their adverse reaction to The Awakening.

For much of Chopin's audience the troublesome issue of female desire was resolved through a...