El despertar y otros relatos

Kate Chopin's protagonists are women overwhelmed by mental burdens, who reject the mandate of motherhood as their sole destiny, who seek an identity beyond the domestic sphere, who rebel against their economic subordination or the stigma of colonialism and whiteness, and who, above all, desire: another man, another woman, a pair of silk stockings, to paint, to swim, for their husbands to die. They all want something that is yet nameless: not romantic love, not rebellion, but something more difficult to articulate and more difficult to forgive. They want to be the subjects of their own stories. Writing about this dissatisfaction between 1894 and 1899 earned Kate Chopin repudiation and censorship. The six stories and the novel that make up this volume produce a different kind of vertigo: the realization that we remain trapped in the invisible violence of others' expectations and the difficulty of being masters of our own desires.