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The Awakening is generally read as the story of Edna Pontellier's flight from her conventional bourgeois marriage for the sake of a grand passion. Chopin's own comment on the novel, published in the Book News of 1899, suggests that she originally intended the book to have a broader social focus, but that Edna's character eventually eclipsed the original conception of the work:
Having a group of people at my disposal. I thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late. (Chopin, Miscellany 137)
While there is clearly some degree of irony in this comment, I want to suggest that there is also some truth in it. Alongside the melodramatic story of Edna Pontellier's "awakening," Chopin's novel also offers a subtle critique of the contradictions between the everyday practices and the racial and sexual mythology of "a group of people" who comprise a representative slice of New Orleans bourgeois creole culture.
When Edn. Pontellier's disaffection with her marriage drives her to "a little four-room house around the corner" from the Pontellier home on Esplanade Avenue (962). Chopin evokes a site rich with meaning in the cultural geography of New Orleans. In the early years of the settlement of the city, Esplanade Avenue formed the border between the Old, or French, Quarter and the less exclusive Faubourg Marigny. As the city of New Orleans expanded northward in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the upper part of Esplanade became a grand boulevard where the wealthier creoles built large houses that were meant to compete with the mansions of the "Americans" on St. Charles Avenue. Léonce Pontellier's plan to mask Edna's removal from their house on Esplanade with a story that the house was being extensively refurbished would have been part of a building boom on the street in the 1890s, But a "little four-room house around the corner"...