The Awakening Characters

Edna has her hands full looking for love and romance. She’s got a husband and two lovers. This seems excessive, and even more shocking considering that Edna used to be very sexually repressed...

Ah, Robert, you good-looking lover of married women. What do we have to say about you? Let’s see…Robert is handsome, charming, and seems to have fallen in love with the beautiful Edna P...

By the standards of his day, Leonce Pontellier is the perfect husband. He gives Edna plenty of money, sends her care packages, and indulges her hobbies. Furthermore, he makes a good living and is a...

Adele is Edna’s close friend and almost complete opposite. As the supreme example of a "mother-woman," Adele represents the ideal that Edna is supposed to imitate. Adele spends all her time c...

A pianist of extraordinary skill, Mademoiselle Reisz is an odd duck in society due to her homely and unfashionable appearance, as well as her lack of a husband. She is most responsible for EdnaR...

Mothers, lock up your daughters. Alcee Arobin has a well-deserved playboy reputation, and he introduces Edna to various physical pleasures that Chopin leaves to our imagination.

Doctor Mandelet is the Pontellier family physician who is surprisingly perceptive as to the real causes of Edna’s strange behavior.

We see these lovebirds on Grand Isle, but they remain nameless and faceless. The two lovers are characterized only by their various sweet and romantic actions. They seem joined at the hip and, stra...

Another vacationer on Grand Isle, the lady in black follows the young lovers around with patient, resigned solitude. She’s depressing, and functions largely to remind us that young love doesn...