“Her position in the universe”: The Awakening’s Edna Pontellier and New Orleans

This study culminates in an examination of Kate Chopin’s depictions of New Orleans in her most well-known narrative, the 1899 novel The Awakening. Of the thirty-nine chapters in the novel, twenty-two are set in the city, and the other seventeen take place at the summer resort of Grand Isle, which had been a favorite resort among New Orleans residents but was decimated by a powerful hurricane by the time Chopin wrote The Awakening. We already know how Chopin loved cities; her deep appreciation resonates from the pages of her commonplace book, where she exalted:Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Chopin had an innate appreciation of city life, and the nine years she spent as a young, married woman in New Orleans profoundly shaped her adult life and authorial imagination. A widow, she wrote The Awakening almost twenty years after she had moved back to St. Louis. “Louisiana,” Emily Toth has written, “was an education for Edna Pontellier, as it was for her creator” (“Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier” 122).