The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

Certainly controversial when it is was first published, “The Awakening” deals with a woman’s struggle to assert her own identity and to deal honestly with her own artistic and sexual needs. Her search is clearly expressed in the passage, “I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.” Groundbreaking in 1899, it remains an important statement of the human condition; “that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”