It will examine his depiction by Kate Chopin and trace his role in the novel. This paper, therefore, will deal with the function of one of “Edna’s men” – Doctor Mandelet. Albeit playing important roles in the process of Edna’s emancipation – her coming of age – in the novel, The Awakening ’s male characters – Léonce Pontellier, Edna’s father who is referred to only as “the Colonel” (Chopin 177), Robert Lebrun, Alcée Arobin, and Doctor Mandelet – have been largely ignored by scholars and thus received very little critical attention. In their analyses of The Awakening, modern critics and scholars have predominantly concentrated on the protagonist Edna Pontellier and other female characters as well as on issues of gender, symbolism and allegory, Chopin’s literary influences, the novel’s classification with regard to naturalism, realism, and modernism, and generally its place in American literary history. Today, critics laud Kate Chopin for the richness of detail of the novel and concur that her work is “intellectually, emotionally, and critically compelling” (Davidson x). The Chicago Times-Herald, for instance, described Chopin’s novel as “sex fiction” (1 June 1899, 9), while Literature called it “an essentially vulgar story” (“Fiction”), and the Providence Sunday Journal even declared that “he purport of the story can hardly be described in language fit for publication” (4 June 1899, 15). Failing to see the novel’s profound implications, they consequently misunderstood and misinterpreted The Awakening. Contemporary reviewers were shocked and appalled by the novel’s then scandalous themes of female self-determination and selfhood, sex, and suicide.

For the most part, she was not regarded to be a serious writer. It was only rediscovered by feminist literary critics among others in the 1960s and 1970s.ĭuring her own lifetime, Kate Chopin was at best mildly praised by her contemporaries and at worst harshly condemned for her novel The Awakening (Cf. Lifted into the Olympus of literature in the second half of the twentieth century, Chopin’s work had been largely ignored at the turn of the century and was forgotten by mid-century (Skaggs 5-11 Davidson ix-x). Her works are recurrent subjects in high school and university literature courses, her local-color short stories have been anthologized repeatedly, and her most famous work, The Awakening (1899), has become part of the American literary canon. The Southern writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904) is considered today to have been one of the most important women writers in the United States.

The awakening 1899