Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, shocked readers in 1899 and the scandal created by the book haunted Kate Chopin for the rest of her life. The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two sons living in conventional Creole society. Unlike the married women around her, whose sensuality seems to flow naturally into maternity, Edna finds herself wanting her own emotional and sexual identity. During one summer while her husband is out of town, her frustrations find an outlet in an affair with a younger man. Energized and filled with a desire to define her own life, she sends her children to the country and removes herself to a small house of her own: "Every step she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to 'feed upon the opinion' when her own soul had invited her." Her triumph is short-lived, however, destroyed by a society that has no place for a self-determined, unattached woman. Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and woman's opportunities in an oppressive world.

It is in The Awakening, published in 1899 that Kate Chopin finally came into her own as a novelist. Ironically, it marked the end of her critical reputation and literary career. By degrees discovering her sense of self as a person and an artist, the novel's protagonist, Edna Pontellier, slowly emerges from her semi-conscious state as wife and mother and "awakens" into full-blooming vibrancy and womanhood by the novel's end. However, 1899 America was not ready for either Edna ( who, realizing that she would not ever be accepted or permitted by the Creole society which she habitat's to be her own person,) or for Kate Chopin, who had the audacity to write about female oppression and a woman's emotional and sexual needs at a time when neither subject was acknowledged. A barrage of critical abuse and personal ostracization followed the novel's publication and, unfortunately for her later admirers, extinguished her period of creativity. Kate Chopin died four years later, in 1904, from a brain hemorrhage, obscure and bitter.

She began writing seriously at the age of 39, when she would have already experienced many maturing life situations. She found her central focus rapidly, and wrote stories whose colorful characters and lush settings often masked the seriousness of their themes. Not greatly involved in the politics of her time, she was nonetheless influenced by such classic masters as Maupassant who would have awakened her, the artist, to ideas such as personal liberty and freedom.

These intellectual observations coupled with her early life experiences enabled her to produce stories that were both entertaining and which questioned the social mores and standards of her time. And, just as Edna Pontellier chose to end her life rather than submit to a less than full human existence, Chopin chose to end her literary career rather than submit to a less than full artistic existence, producing very little after the publication of The Awakening and dying soon after that. Thus, Chopin's life and literary career were an ironic parallel and salute to her most famous and notorious character.