The Awakening caused a commotion when it was released a year before 1900, and it has continued to be both an influential and controversial novel here in the early 2000s. I really enjoyed reading the Awakening; I think it’s my favorite book of any book I’ve had to read in my college career. I had heard from a friend that it was an interesting novel, and I was eager to find out for myself (even though she had given away the ending so I knew what was going to happen). It was a quick read, which is always nice, but it wasn’t that it was not a book of substance. Between the back of the book and what my friend had told me about the novel, I knew that it was something different than what was coming out of the time period at the time, but I couldn’t really understand why it was so controversial. But after finishing the novel, I understood completely. It would have been very scandalous for a married woman of the time period to move out of the home where her husband and their children resided, and to conduct affairs with younger men. While now it would be considered just another interesting novel, perhaps even a sort of cliché romance novel, back then this was a serious crime against society. What I find most interesting about the novel is the way it can be applied to many different types of criticism, such as feminism criticism, new historicism, reader-response, and more.
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