Topics: coming-of-age; feminist; Louisiana
Review by : Liz Inskip-Paulk (www.ravingreader.wordpress.com)
"The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing,
whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in
abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation."
This book (a novel? A novella?) is really the story of a coming-of-age
of an adult woman in Louisiana who is struggling with becoming an independent
person while being married to a wealthy man she doesn’t particularly love. A young male acquaintance named Robert is the
catalyst for her realization of the possibility that she could be happy and
independent, but how to do that, in this world of strict etiquette and gender
expectations?
I had been thinking (from an earlier reading) that this
edition of Chopin’s work was an early Feminist work (published in 1899).
However, then, on further delving, it was pointed out that very few people read
“The Awakening” when it first came out as it was not a commercial success and it
received some pretty awful reviews so it wasn’t republished.
Her other short stories were published and even
anthologized, but “The Awakening” didn’t really receive much positive attention
until 1969 when a volume of her work was republished and regained attention. And this is rather a shame, as this is a good
read with some great descriptions of Bayou coastal life and life in the South.
On reflection, Chopin’s The Awakening’s critical rejection
could also have been to the misogyny of the time – most of the media reviewers
were men (at that time), and as her leading character was a frustrated married
woman who refused to accept the limitations of the woman’s role and instead
chose an alternative way (thus completely rejecting societal mores), it might
not be that surprising that the male reviewers did not embrace this radical
viewpoint.
"Has she," asked the Doctor, with a smile,
"has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual
women—super-spiritual superior beings? My wife has been telling me about
them."
So, yes, it’s a Feminist work but it’s been quite widely argued
that it wasn’t written to bring attention to the issue of feminism,
emancipation or any other cause. Chopin was not involved in any Feminist or
other causes (according to researchers) and it’s argued that Chopin was just
writing the world as she saw it as an artist and writer and not trying to
change the world. She wasn’t using it as a tool to further women’s suffrage,
even accidentally.
However, as I write this, surely it’s clear from even a
cursory reading of this that Chopin believed in the right of a woman to have an
independent life and was a pre-supporter of Woolf’s concept of “a room of her
own”, whether written down or not. And
by so doing, wouldn’t it be logical that she would want all the other freedoms
that would come with that? Or was it the whole concept of individual freedom
that Chopin was admiring and gender was irrelevant? And how would race fit into
that? (She lived for most of her life in Louisiana which was a huge piece in
the slavery industry picture then.)
I don’t know. It’s tough to read something that was written
at the end of the nineteenth century without looking at it with the perspective
of a twenty-first century reader. How can you really ever take that pair of
glasses off because your (own) experience of life has to influence how you
interpret things, especially works as nebulous as art? Perhaps Chopin was
really just writing this to make a buck and there wasn’t any extra meaning to
this whole thing.
Download The Awakening by Kate Chopin at Project Gutenberg|Librivox|
