The Awakening (novel) - Style

Style

Kate Chopin's narrative style in The Awakening can be categorized as naturalism. Chopin's admiration for the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant is evident in The Awakening, yet another example of the enormous influence Maupassant exercised on nineteenth century literary realism. Chopin's novel bears the hallmarks of Maupassant's style: a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures.

However, Chopin's style could more accurately be described as a hybrid that captures contemporary narrative currents and looks forward to various trends in Southern and European literatures.

Mixed into Chopin's overarching nineteenth century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper class pretension, reminiscent of direct contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and George Bernard Shaw.

Also evident in The Awakening is the future of the Southern novel as a distinct genre, not just in setting and subject matter but in narrative style. Chopin's lyrical portrayal of her protagonist's shifting emotions is a narrative technique that Faulkner would expand upon in novels like Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury.

The plot looks forward to the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and the plays of William Inge, while Edna Pontellier's emotional crises and her eventual tragic fall look ahead to the complex female characters of Tennessee Williams's plays.

Aspects of Chopin's style also prefigure the intensely lyrical and experimental style of novelists such as Virginia Woolf and the unsentimental focus on female intellectual and emotional growth in the novels of Sigrid Undset and Doris Lessing.

Perhaps Chopin's most important stylistic legacy is the detachment of the narrator.