A “Cry of the Dying Century”: Kate Chopin, <i>The Awakening</i>, and the Women’s Cause

Kate Chopin's 1899 novel(la) The Awakening has elicited a multitude of scholarly responses since the beginning of the revival of Chopin studies at the end of the 1960s. 2 Although feminist critics' enthusiastic embrace of Chopin and her work has influenced The Awakenings reception across the divided terrain of literary criticism, current views of the novel's position on the "women's cause" still vary greatly. Some scholars categorically label the feminist readings of the text anachronistic. Harold Bloom's 1987 interpretation, which focuses on the narcissistic and autoerotic nature of the female protagonist Edna Pontellier's sexual awakening, articulates such a non-feminist standpoint with particular clarity: "The Awakening, a flawed but strong novel, now enjoys an eminent status among feminist critics, but I believe that many of them weakly misread the book, which is anything but feminist in its stance" (1) . In this respect, Nancy Walker's reading from 1979,