A new biographical approach / An etiquette/ Duties of the wife -- Avoid all cause for complaint -- Beware of confidants -- Influence of mothers -- Reception days -- Rules for summer resorts -- Flirtation and increasing fastness of manner -- Musicales -- The street manners of a lady -- Places of amusement -- Formal dinner parties -- Dress to suit the occasion -- Dress for receiving calls -- Carriage dress -- The full dinner dress -- Costumes for country and sea-side -- Bathing dresses -- Fashion plates from Harper's Bazar -- Creole women / [Southern womanhood] / Are women growing selfish? / The American wife -- Summer flirtations -- A strike for liberty -- Women and suicide -- From Women and economics / [Conspicuous consumption and the servant-wife] / Editor's note : History of the criticism of The awakening -- From Book News (March 1899) -- From The mirror (May 4, 1899) -- From the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat (May 13, 1899) -- From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (May 20, 1899) -- From The Chicago Times-Herald (June 1, 1899) -- From The Outlook (June 3, 1899) -- From The Providence Sunday Journal (June 4, 1899) -- From The New Orleans Times-Democrat (June 18, 1899) -- From Public Opinion (June 22, 1899) -- From Literature (June 23, 1899) -- From The New York Times (June 24, 1899) -- From The Los Angeles Sunday Times (June 25, 1899) -- From The Pittsburgh Leader (July 8, 1899) -- From The Dial (August 1, 1899) -- From The Nation (August 3, 1899) -- From The Congregationalist (August 24, 1899) -- Letters from "Lady Janet Scammon Young" and "Dr. Dunrobin Thomson" -- Chopin's "Retraction" -- [The unlikely awakening of a married woman] / [Influences upon the novel] / [An American Madame Bovary] / [A forgotten novel] / [The southern woman in fiction] / From The American 1890s / [Contrasting forces in the novel] / [Kate Chopin and the American realists] / [The ending of the novel] / Local color in The awakening / [Kate Chopin and Walt Whitman] / [Edna and the "Woman question"] / [Romantic imagery] / [Narrative stance] / [Thanatos and Eros] / Edna's suicide / The problem of the one and the many -- Edna Pontellier : "A solitary soul" / [Feminist or naturalist?] / [Progression and regression in Edna Pontellier] / [Language and ambiguity] / [The second coming of Aphrodite] / [Sexuality, maternity, and selfhood] / [Language and female emancipation] / [American racial and sexual mythology] Anna Shannon Elfenbein -- [Gender, race, and region] / [Women of color in the Awakening] / [Chopin and American women writers]