SOURCE: Ewell, Barbara C. “The Awakening in a Course on Women in Literature.” In Approaches to Teaching Chopin's The Awakening, edited by Bernard Koloski, pp. 86-93. The Modern Language Association of America, 1988.

In the following essay, Ewell explains her approach to teaching The Awakening.

The Awakening may be the quintessential text for a course in women's studies. Greeted with polite dismay at its publication in 1899, revived and hailed as a lost classic sixty years later on the crest of the most recent women's movement, the novel offers a paradigmatic tale of a woman's abortive struggle toward selfhood in an oppressive, uncomprehending society. Who could ask for a more rousing exemplar of the fate of women who seek personal integrity in a world that reduces womanhood to role-playing? Or, for that matter, of the fate of women writers who dare to reveal the “life behind the mask” of conventional...