The Awakening

This was my first feminist lit novel. It was written in 1899 so the language wasn't super accessible to me and it took a little more effort to get to the meat of the story. It featured a lot of luxuriated romantic description and I felt like the plot was really like 50 pages long if you cut away the pages and pages of setting description. Ultimately, this was my first encounter with the drowned self-actualized woman motif and I felt extreme pity for Edna. One of my greatest fears is being discounted or feeling trapped, so I easily sympathized with her. Still, my heart hurt a lot when I finished it and it felt very bleak. I felt like I learned a new perspective from this book, but it didn't have any immediate takeaways - however, I did notice that the feminist themes in the book were limited to affluent white women and the role starkly contrasted with the roles of the Black and Hispanic women in the book. I can't help but wonder if that was intentional as a part of the irony of the story, but given the context, I don't think that would make sense. Overall, I rate it 3/5 (really 3.5) stars because I respect the book for its revolutionary qualities and appreciated the depiction of women's relationships in the 1800s. I wish it didn't make me feel so empty after I finished it, but it was good and made me want to read another novel of similar caliber.