SOURCE: Stone, Carole. “The Female Artist in Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Brith and Creativity.” Women's Studies, 13, nos. 1-2 (1986): 23-32.

In the following essay, Stone views Chopin's birth imagery in The Awakening as symbolic of the birth of Edna Pontellier as an artist.

When Kate Chopin's The Awakening was published in 1899 critics attacked its depiction of a heroine who sought sexual pleasure outside of marriage and condemned Chopin for “failing to perceive that the relation of a mother to her children is far more important than the gratification of a passion which experience has taught her is … evanescent.”¹ But The Awakening is even more radical in its treatment of motherhood because it questions the assumptions that childbirth and child care are a woman's principal vocation, and that motherhood gives pleasure to all women.

In Chopin's era childbirth was considered a woman's noblest act; to write of it otherwise was...