The “I Hate Edna Club”

The Awakening had barely been published, in April 1899, when the first stirrings of Ednaphobia—the morbid fear and hatred of Edna Pontellier—began. The very first review, essentially a plot summary in Kate Chopin’s hometown St. Louis Republic, called The Awakening “the story of a lady most foolish” and concluded that “the woman who did not want anything but her own way drowned herself” (Toth 220).