Confident of his wife's loyalty and his own place as master of his ménage, he can't conceive of Robert as a potential rival. Mr Pontellier watches his wife and Robert with a benign lack of interest. In the opening scene they've just come back together from the beach, and sit on the porch steps laughing at their private jokes. Robert Lebrun, the resort-owner's son, has attached himself to her like a barnacle.
In the midst of all this, our heroine has accidentally attracted an admirer of the opposite sex. Meanwhile, the Mrs has settled into a languid routine among the well-heeled resort guests. But beyond that, the Pontelliers' family arrangement is not unlike that of a certain class of modern city-dwellers: while the wife and boys summer away from the city, the husband spends his week working in the office, comes out to Grand Isle on the weekends with the family and gets bored so quickly he tends to duck out at dinnertime for cigars and poker with other men. We will obviously have to do something about the "quadroon nurse" who is looking after the children. Skirts will need to be shortened, and bathing costumes radically abbreviated. The guests relax in the deep shade of graceful old water-oaks and stroll through their long, lazy days carrying parasols, which we'll have to replace with sunscreen. The setting of Grand Isle, a summer resort on the steamy coast of Louisiana, stands up across the decades as a perfect backdrop to a story of personal discovery and sexual intrigue. He looks up from his newspaper barely long enough to chide his wife for going swimming in the ridiculous heat and getting sunburned.
In the story's opening scene, her husband Mr Pontellier rocks in a chair on the porch, perusing the stock market reports. It's hard for us now to picture an "Edna" as anything but a silver-haired matron, 80 if she's a day, stalwart bosom like a ship's prow … Let's erase that mental picture before it sinks in.Įddye, then, is an energetic twentysomething, blond, brown-eyed, with two little boys, a husband and a captivating restlessness. Her name in the book, Edna, was common in its time but fell precipitously out of favour after 1941. In the case of The Awakening, our screenwriter's first task would be to rename the pretty young heroine: maybe she'll be called Eden, or Eddye. I sometimes appraise the relevance of a classic, and amuse myself in the process, by imagining the updates required in order to adapt this book to film for a modern audience. T he Awakening was published in 1899, on the cusp of a century that has already come and gone.
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