A Note on Kate Chopin's The Awakening as Naturalistic Fiction

Kate Chopin's The Awakening has become, over the last forty years, one of the most thoroughly examined novels in the American canon. In recent decades in particular, as evidenced by the character of the essays collected by Wendy Martin in New Essays on The Awakening and by Nancy Walker in her Bedford Books edition of the novel, it has increasingly been subjected to the heavy artillery of theoretical and cultural analyses. I wish, in this brief essay, to suggest the need in any account of the work to keep to the forefront what I will call its "plain meaning"--that is, the central and powerfully depicted themes which arise out of the relationship of the novel to literary naturalism, the principal innovative movement in American fiction of the 1890s. 1 Like her near-contemporary Edith Wharton, Chopin was deeply responsive during the period just prior to her undertaking a literary career to the major new ideas and fiction of her time, reading fully in Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the French naturalists (Seyersted 49, 85). And although she never set her fiction within the brutish and sordid urban working class world of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, McTeague, or Sister Carrie, she did seek within her own milieu of middle-class Creole life to dramatize, as did Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, the limitations placed on the human will by the biological and social realities within which the will attempts to find its way.