I read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening twice in high school, but I haven’t touched it since.
Normally, I write book reviews, but this is more of a book forward, a book impression, a book remembrance. I read it for the first time and fell deeply in love with this classic, feminist triumph of a novel, but I’ve been scared to return. As a young woman, it came to me while I was in the midst of my own battle against the patriarchy, man, and family for freedom of self. My uncertainty to open its cover once again is out of fear. Fear of what I will find it would do or maybe what it wouldn’t do. Would it mean the same thing it did to sixteen year old me as it does to twenty-nine year old me? Not only am I stronger and more broken, I have been of this world longer with its misogyny, laws, patriarchy, double standards, abuse, and more. I’m also a more experienced reader. So of course The Awakening won’t mean the same to me today as it did a decade ago, but I was scared it would mean less.
Literature with a capital ‘L’ arrived on my bookshelf when I was eight. I was an overachieving priss of a child; children’s literature did not speak to me. I love Literature because I didn’t get it right away. It demanded an understanding of the vocabulary, history, culture, and more in which it was written and set. I yearned for knowledge. Literature made me do the research; in a time before Google and the internet, it was an interactive experience as I read one book surrounded by a dictionary and encyclopedia. As much as I loved Literature, I craved more. I craved seeing myself on the page. Even as I kid, I knew I was not being represented in the pages I so loved. There is very little written by women. More exists than meets the eye, but even as an educated reader and researcher, finding older works by women takes effort outside of Dickenson, the Brontës, Alcott, and Austen. It was years before I found Woolf, Morrison, Eliot, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Duras, Wharton, Cather, Plath, Lee, Stein, Beauvoir, Angelou, Gaskell, Lennox, Stowe, Hurston, and of course Kate Chopin. All of whom have shaped me as a reader, writer, and most importantly as a woman. Chopin was my gateway into a world of writers writing about me, my plight, my pain, my existence in a world not meant for me. Even a hundred years later or more, the words these women wrote represented my place in the world. Chopin wrote in the late nineteenth century, and she rocked society with her daring works about the internal and external lives of ordinary women daring to live.
The Awakening was the first book I ever felt a deep connection with. I was a young reader beginning to understand the importance of Literature, representation, feminism, activism, and more. I was starting to come into my own as a thinker with a vagina. I was beginning to grasp at what it meant to walk this earth as a woman. A lover of Literature and history, I was probably more aware than most fifteen year old girls of women’s historical lack of autonomy. Historical being the key word. I did not feel equal, and I wanted equality, but I knew it wasn’t mine. Even with my fundamentally better understanding of history, I had yet to grasp the whys or the hows or the history or the culture or any of it. I just had a feeling. This book came into my life when my life was changing from bad to worse to what I would eventually title “Hell”. As I read The Awakening, I was struck by the realization that I knew very little had changed for women. I could wear pants like the boys, but I would never be like the boys. I was a girl. America had never been the land of the free.*
Four months after I experienced my first sexual assault in the lunch room by a school administrator. Four months after I told my mother. Four months after she told me to keep quiet and see if it would happen again. Three months after my first kiss at the Winter Formal because my mother told me I had to or I wouldn’t have a boyfriend anymore. Three months after I realized no one would protect me. Two months after I realized I was only worth something connected to a man. I was a freshman in high school. I was experiencing my first tastes of being a woman.
I picked up The Awakening.
It was the summer I turned sixteen. I had new boyfriend because that’s what sixteen year old girls do. But I had no faith in men. No faith in women. No faith in family. No faith in people. I felt utterly alone. With no one to protect me, to understand, to hold my hand, I was accepting that to be a woman was to be alone.
What I had read in history was not at all in the past. Nothing had changed really. Being a woman meant being an object for male consumption. Some took gently. Some did not. It would be another year before I learned how much they could and would take without permission, without waiting, without caring I was human. And if I turned to women, they would not protect me if they believed me at all. My mother taught me that.
At sixteen, the next seventy years looked like a lonely, losing battle. What was the point? Did all women feel this way? Why weren’t they do anything about it? I was years away from understanding the nuance of internalized misogyny and all the culture shit we are taught to swallow, believe, conform to, and uphold as women. But I already knew existing like that in this world was not for me, and so I already had a few suicide attempts under my belt. I had very little desire to live even before the first of many men took what he thought was his right.
And then Edna walked along a Grand Isle’s beach and dared to yearn for more than motherhood and wifedom. We were separated by a century. We were separated by experience. We were separated by so many things, but I understood her. She didn’t save my life, but I felt seen. I felt validated.
I reached out to my fellow bibliophiles asking for their opinions on The Awakening, on Edna. The few who had read the book hated Edna. They found her shallow and selfish. The ending was completely unrealistic. What woman with a life of leisure would walk into the ocean? What wife would leave her husband? What mother would choose death over her children? To me, it was the perfect ending to her story. I was frustrated by the vitriol. How could they not understand? She was alone and desperate, leading a meaningless life.
The Awakening was the first time I saw a female character with any emotions or internal life I could comprehend and identify with; probably because she was the first woman written by I woman I had read. Edna was the first, but many have come after her.
My concept of womanhood has evolved over the last thirteen years. I am no longer the optimistic sixeen year old, but I’m no longer the devastated sixteen year old. All is not completely lost, though I have a dismal view of the present and near future. My world view is complex, and I know I am on a lifelong search for my place and role in society. Not all share my view of womanhood, nor should they. But I will continue to fight for every woman. As a twenty-nine year old, I know my life has seen challenges many have never and will never seen, but it has also been blessed in many ways. Pain is not a competition. I acknowledge my many privileges and disadvantages. Pain is not the only thing I have known, but pain is still central to my experiences as a human and as a woman.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and Edna gave me validation. Someone understood. 122 years ago, a woman knew the pain I knew and dared to want more.
I am not going to review The Awakening. For so many reasons, one of which being: I don’t want to. Another being: It would be a very long review. My fears ended up being unfounded. The book means more to me as a grown ass woman than it did as a teenager. I found the nuances, narrative, and storytelling far more enthralling than I had thirteen years ago. Not only did I fall more in love with Edna, I fell out of love with her husband, paramour, and female companions. What had seemed like a love story years ago is anything but today. It isn’t romantic but deeply depressing. I could identify the tragedies with the eye of an analyst and the heart of a woman and the mind of a partner. I saw the craft in Chopin’s work and the soul in her story. The Awakening spoke to me in new and more powerful levels.
Edna is very much alive.
bisous et обьятий,
RaeAnna
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*This is being written from the perspective of a white woman as I look back at the views I had as a teenager exploring my own place in this world as a woman through the knowledge, resources, and books I had at my disposal. It would be several more years before I learned the term “intersectionality” and began applying it to my own life, views, feminism, and activism. Up until that point, feminism and racism were uniquely separate issues because that is all I knew. Black women suffered racism. Black women suffered feminism. I wanted equality for everyone: men and women, Black and white and Asian and Hispanic and everyone in between. I was more apt to identify as a humanist than a feminist. My fundamental beliefs have remained the same, but my terminology has expanded to better encompass and express my desires for intersectionality, equity, and advocacy.
