Have you ever wondered what the lifestyle of nineteenth-century women was? They were independent, career women or were typical housewives who cooked, cleaned, looked after the children and cared for their husbands. Did women of this era express themselves freely or did they simply do what society expected of them? Kate Chopin was an author who wrote several stories and two novels about women. One of his famous works of art is The Awakening. This novel created great controversy and received negative reviews from literary critics due to Edna's portrayal of Chopin's women throughout the book. The Awakening is a novel about a woman, Edna Pontellier, who is a confused soul. She is a typical housewife trying to find herself and break free from her undesirable lifestyle. Edna has been married to her husband for six years and has two children. Her husband, Leonce Pontellier, is the "baker" of the family. He is a businessman who pays all the income and makes sure his family is financially stable while Edna takes care of the children, cooks and keeps the house clean. Marital duties do not satisfy Edna. Mrs. Pontellier spends the summer in Grand Isle with her children as she does every summer. She meets a man named Robert Lebrun and realizes that she is not impressed with his life. When she leaves for Mexico, Edna meets another man who is interested in her but she doesn't feel the same way, judging by her actions, Edna's husband assumes that she has some kind of mental problem because he is not impressed with how she is behaving. care of the home and children (Chopin, humanistic text, 28-99)Towards the end of the novel Edna returns to the Grand Isle to swim at the beach...... Linda Carter and Lillian Dunmars Roland. 2nd edition, Boston, Pearson Custom Publishing Humanities Review 10, no. 3 (Summer 1956): 263, 267-693 Justus, James H." The Awakening of Edna Pontellier." Southern Literary Journal 10. n. 2 (Spring 1978): 108-1114. Kinnison, Dana. “Female Resistance to Gender Conformity in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. (1899) Women in Literature, Reading through the Lens of Gender. Ed. Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber. Forward by David Sadker. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut. Greenwood. 2003 (22-24)5. Skaggs, Peggy, "The Relation of the Awakening to American Regionalism, Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism," Approaches to the Teaching of Chopin's "Awakening," ed. Bernard Kolaski York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988. (83-84).