El Despertar

When it was first published in 1899, The Awakening surprised readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were baffled by Chopin's daring portrait of a woman trapped in a suffocating marriage, seeking and finding passionate physical love outside the confines of her domestic situation. In addition to its unusually frank treatment of a then controversial subject, the novel is widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a "quite uninhibited and beautifully written work, anticipating D. H. Lawrence in his treatment of infidelity." Although the topic of marital infidelity is no longer shocking, few novels have probed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, art, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening.