The Awakening is set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century. This landmark novel was one of the earliest works of feminism and a precursor to American modernism and the great southern novelists such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams. Edna Pontellier struggles to reconcile her views of femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South.