The romantic attentions of Robert Lebrun and Alcee Arobin bring her to life, but her awakening is far more than physical: it is spiritual, social, and personal. She begins to take her art more seriously, takes a lover, moves into her own apartment, rejects social conventions that do not suit her, and allows herself to admit that she is not a maternal woman.
Edna chooses to follow her natural inclinations rather than letting her culture's restrictive standards prevent her from living the life to which she has awakened. To learn who she truly is, she is willing to risk becoming a social outcast: "By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am." There is little she can do with her self-knowledge, however, especially in the insular Creole community of New Orleans.
The publication of The Awakening caused great alarm in a society still clinging to the rigid moral codes created during the Victorian era, the period in the 1800s when Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain. Chopin's book was never banned, but her literary reputation was seriously damaged by the critical and public outcry over its content, specifically over Edna's romantic relationships with two men outside of her marriage, her unwillingness to be a wife and mother, and her refusal to conform to society's expectations.
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