SOURCE: Yaeger, Patricia S. “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening” Novel 20, no. 3 (spring 1987): 197-219.

In the following essay, Yaeger argues that language, not sexual liberation, is the element that makes The Awakening a “transgressive” novel.

Despite the academy's growing commitment to producing and publishing feminist interpretations of literary texts, insofar as feminist critics read Kate Chopin's The Awakening as a novel about sexual liberation, we read it with our patriarchal biases intact. Of course The Awakening's final scene is breath-taking; Edna Pontellier transcends her circumscribed status as sensual entity—as the object of others' desires—and stands before us as her own subject, as a blissfully embodied being: “… she cast the unpleasant, pricking, garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her...