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Daily · Classics

The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories

Kate Chopin · novella and short stories, 1899·5 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version5 hrs → 50 sec
  • Her husband hands back her rings like returning misplaced property. On the opening page, Mr. Pontellier looks at his sunburned wife "as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage," then silently takes her rings from his vest pocket and drops them into her palm.
  • She teaches herself to swim in one reckless night. "She could have shouted for joy," Chopin writes as Edna finally lifts her body off the water, then swims so far out that "a quick vision of death smote her soul" before she claws her way back to shore.
  • She stamps on her own wedding ring after dinner. Alone in her room, Edna flings the ring to the carpet and grinds her heel into it, then hurls a glass vase at the hearth just to hear it break: "She wanted to destroy something."
  • Arobin's kiss is the first her body ever answered. Chopin calls it "the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded," a line that indicts the marriage more than it excuses the affair.
  • Robert leaves a six-word note instead of waiting up. She comes home ready to wake him with a kiss and finds only a scrawled line on the table: "I love you. Good-by, because I love you." She lies on the sofa awake until dawn.
  • She walks into the Gulf naked and swims until she can't. In the closing pages Edna sheds her bathing suit on the empty beach, swims out past the point of return, and hears her father's voice and a chained dog barking as childhood replaces thought.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it ends on a swim that mirrors the one 200 pages earlier, so the same physical act that once meant liberation becomes the exit, and Chopin never tells you which reading is correct.

A married woman at a Gulf Coast resort learns to swim, takes a lover, and decides she would rather drown than keep belonging to anyone.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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