kadınların çerçevesi çizili, her zaman başka birinin bir şeyi olmasıyla şekillenen bir dönemde yaşamanın herkes için kabul edilebilir olmadığını anlatmış. ergenlik kavramını kullanmam yazara hakaret gibi algınlansın istemem fakat ben kitabı okurken evli, 2 çocuk sahibi bir kadının ergenlik dönemini hayatının yanlış bir döneminde yaşadığını hissettim. ortaya çıkan iş biraz zayıf olsa da kitabın yazıldığı dönemi göz önünde bulundurduğumda yine de Kate hanımı takdir ediyorum.

assigned reading is good, actually.

probably i never would have thought to pick up this novella from a million years ago unless i had once been made to read it, but not done so really, and ultimately felt a lasting low-level guilt that would motivate me to revisit it 6 years later.

and that was an enjoyable scenario by and large, so.

this is my argument.

anyway. this is a good feminist text. it's not as magically still equally relevant as a room of one's own, nor is it as charming or funny or beautifully written, but still. that feels like an unfair standard.

i will say, though, if you're in the market for a short and feminist novella-ish thing from a hundred-ish years ago, i have to recommend that one over this.

but why not both?

bottom line: a rare win for public education standards!

----------------
currently-reading updates

welcome to Emma Rereading Books She Half Read In School And Definitely Didn't Do Justice

WOW

probably the most beautifully written book i've ever read, plus so much feminism it makes me weak. I adore this book and I am going to be buying my own copy soon so that i can reread and reread and reread it until I die.

An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day.
*
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
*
She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.
*
The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.

این کتاب رو پارسال نصفه نیمه رها کردم،امسال دوباره سعی کردم بخونمش از نظرم خیلی داستان ضعیفی داشت و کمی منو یاد کتاب آنا کارنینا انداخت.

Truly amazing - a fascinating exploration of gender and marriage in late 19th century American society, compelling and thought-provoking and beautifully written.

“Uma certa luz começava a despontar vagamente dentro dela: aquela luz que ao mesmo tempo que mostra o caminho, o proíbe.”

A história desenrola-se de uma forma lenta em volta de uma protagonista, umas vezes caprichosa, mundana, outras tantas desalentada com a vida.
Gostei da escrita, da ousadia da autora na abordagem de certos temas para a época mas a história, em si, não me cativou.

The Awakening is certainly an important novel. Published in 1899, this novel was a forerunner in many ways. Undoubtedly, Chopin crafted one of the early works of feminism, when she wrote the story of Edna, a young woman experiencing ‘awakening’. By creating a literary heroine who is undergoing spiritual, psychological, emotional and sexual awakening, Chopin challenged not only the social views of her time, but social identity as such. Moreover, I do believe that The Awakening is neither reserved for one (female) gender, nor a strictly feminist book, for it can be read as an individual search for personal identity and freedom. It is a novel that has aged well and still holds many valuable lessons. I’m not disputing its rightful place in the early feminist cannon, I’m just saying that I think there is something quite timeless about it.


The writing as such is quite beautiful. From the very start, Chopin does a great job of creating the tone and the atmosphere. The novel opens up with Edna who is vacationing on Grand Isle with her kids. The feeling of summer is very much present in the writing. At Grand Isle, Edna falls in love with Robert. Their ‘falling in love’ is well written and credible. Once Edna returns to her home, she is a changed woman. Chopin depicts different settings with precision. Her portrayal of characters is attentive and well rounded. It is not as intimate and in-depth as I would have perhaps liked, but Chopin does do a great job with the characterization. She portrays the inner struggles of Edna Pontellier with care. Edna, a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage, is showed to us, not just as a woman but even more importantly as a human being. What I liked most about this novel is how human Edna felt. Edna is not idolized, she never feels like a victim. I loved Edna even when she seemed selfish, perhaps at those times most of all. There is little doubt that Edna’s awakening happens as a result of searching for her own identity within herself and not within her family role. His refusal to take part in social activities is surprisingly modernist. Edna prefers not to entertains, she refuses to receive guests, and once she is ‘awaken’ she actually prefers to spend time by herself.


I would say that in the course of this novel the life story of Edna Pontellier, a young woman searching for her identity (as it is often case with great stories) grows into something universal. When I first learned about this novel, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about it, but I was proved wrong. Edna got under my skin. It is not only Edna, though. This novel has a unique taste and flavour. Take that passage about Edna’s experience to listening to classical music for example. After her awakening, Edna can experience music fully. Still, her awakening comes with a price. I felt like Edna was becoming almost an artist, had a potential to become one at least, just by the virtue of daring to search for her identity within herself. Nevertheless, can a woman live her life only for herself? This book raises many interesting questions. Edna’s eventual separation of sexuality and love for instance, could be interpreted as something quite modernist.


The plot may resemble Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but only on the surface. Both women are married unhappily, both of them fall in love and decide to pursue a love affair outside of their marriage. Both of them defy the society. However, I didn’t see The Awakening as a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The plot of these two novels may be strikingly similar, but the writing style is quite different. I feel like Chopin’s writing style owes more to French writer Maupassant, then it does to Tolstoy. In other words, Chopin is more a naturalistic than a realistic writer. Her portrayal of characters does have an occasional note of animalism. There is also something pessimistic about the way Chopin views society, something makes me think of Maupassant. Moreover, despite many similarities between Anna’s and Edna’s upper class life, one can’t dispute that Chopin has created a unique character. Edna is a great character in her own right.

I'd like to give this book ZERO stars, but it's not an option. This is hands down the worst book that I've ever read. I will never say that again in a review, because this one wins that prize.

BIG SPOILER AHEAD - Be warned.

I had to read this thing twice in college, and it is a horrible story. We are supposed to feel sympathy for a selfish woman with no redeemable qualities. Just because her marriage is bad it does not give her the right to be a lousy, despicable person. Get a divorce? Yes. Find new love? Yes. Abandon your children, be completely self-absorbed, commit adultery, and drown yourself? No, no, no, and no. This is my problem with the book. Drowning oneself and leaving one's children without the guidance of their mother is a tragedy. The book would have you believe it is a triumph. This is the irredeemable flaw in the book.

It is also physically impossible to die the way she did. You cannot float to the bottom of the ocean. Your body will force you to swim and fight. It is a scientific fact that you cannot drown yourself without a struggle. She would have struggled in the end. Yes you can swim out so far that you can't make it back in and would drown in the process. But no, you can't just sink to the bottom. It would be a horrible, gagging, gasping, throwing up salt water, kicking your arms and legs fight.

The writing itself is nothing special. It's not bad. Chopin is not a bad writer on a technical level, but she is no expert either.

I hate to be the one raining on the parade, but this is the most overrated book I have ever come across.

In a hearing I observed once, the husband testified that he had tried to have his wife served with his petition for divorce in the Costco parking lot. The wife went running across the parking lot to avoid service, and her eight- and ten-year-old kids ran after her, dodging traffic and jumping into the wife’s car as it screeched out of the parking spot. The husband filmed them on his iPhone, shouting, “You’ve been served! You’ve been served!”

The judge commented that it was troubling to watch a video of the kids running through a dangerous parking lot and asked the woman why she ran. The woman replied, “I don’t believe in divorce, your honor.”

The judge said, “Well, ma’am, it’s not like the Easter Bunny: it exists.”

There is that point in a woman’s life when she wakes up suspecting that the fairy tales she grew up with were not telling the whole story, that there is life beyond the sunset at the end of the movie and that life is not easier than life before the sunset. And, there are any number of stories in which that anvil falls on a character’s head. Tolstoy writes the cautionary morality-tale version in Anna Karenina, Flaubert writes the pastoral tragedy version in Madame Bovary, and Elizabeth Gilbert writes the self-involved douche version in Eat Pray Love, to name a few. But, then, The Awakening. This one is my favorite. This is the beautiful one.

For example, there is this:

"Do you know Mademoiselle Reisz?" she asked irrelevantly.

"The pianist? I know her by sight. I've heard her play."

"She says queer things sometimes in a bantering way that you don't notice at the time and you find yourself thinking about afterward."

"For instance?"

"Well, for instance, when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. `The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.'”

All the women in this book are birds: clucking hens, sheltering their brood; decorative birds in cages; and Edna growing wings and trying to fly away. I love the image of women as birds because I think it is so vivid in showing a woman’s disconnect with society. Just the image of a bird in a cage is something out of place, confined where it should be free. It is unwelcome and unnatural out of the cage, but unable to leave. The movie Moulin Rouge uses the image, too. Where Ewan McGreggor’s character is the traditional Orpheus, whose gift is his song, Nicole Kidman’s is the woman as a bird. “Oh, we will,” she says to her own pet bird, “We will fly, fly away from here!” I don’t know where this metaphor originated (sirens?) or how it became what it is in these stories, but I think it is poignant.

And it is poignant that, clearly, the only end for a bird escaped from the cage is death. A woman defying tradition and prejudice, as Mademoiselle Riesz says, is unwelcome and must have particularly strong wings to fly away. But, all of these stories that imagine something beyond tradition have Thelma and Louise endings. Women who wake up and realize that they are unwelcome in society as they are, who realize they can’t pretend to be what society wants anymore, can only conceive of suicide as the alternative. And, in The Awakening, at least, Edna’s death is not cautionary or punishment. It is just the only conceivable alternative in a society that offers nothing for women but marriage. Interestingly, Eat Pray Love is the only story I can think of on this topic that doesn’t end in the woman’s death, so that is perversely hopeful.

I care about people’s relationships a lot. Probably too much at times. Relationships seem like these delicate, mysterious aliens to me, and we should whisper around them so we don’t scare them away. That is one of the main reasons I hate weddings – because so often you have this new, fragile relationship, and what do people decide to do to it? Smash it with the sledgehammer of planning a giant event that symbolizes the most bitter and painful emotional vulnerabilities of everyone in the general vicinity. The relationship might be beautiful and strong going into a wedding, but after getting piled with the emotional baggage of the families and friends involved, it is something else entirely. It is just off the rack, but threadbare already from wear and strain.

And a marriage, a wedding, is not a relationship. A marriage is a contract. A wedding is an event. A divorce is a dissolution of a contract. A relationship is something else. A relationship exists or doesn’t exist outside of any events or licensing. Sometimes a wedding is too heavy for a relationship to bear, and sometimes a marriage is too heavy for it. It often looks to me, when people get engaged, like they are trying to subscribe to a certain type of relationship and the engagement is the subscription form. But, as far as I can tell, relationships are wild and can’t be subscribed. And, nobody knows how strong they are but the people in the relationship, and sometimes not even them.

But, also, if you are Edna, if you are living your life, going along, and then you suddenly realize that you are not living your life, but that you are in some kind of costume and acting in a play: devastation. None of your relationships exist, but the people around you have relationships with the character you played. And there is no going back. You've already betrayed them, and you didn't even know it, and they've already betrayed you by not realizing you weren't you. When you start realizing who you are, there is too much momentum to turn around. You are already out of the cage and flying away, whether your wings are strong or weak, whether the wind is for you or against you.

In Kate Chopin’s world, I think, divorce was like the Easter Bunny, like the sunset that a woman could swim towards but not see beyond. The end of this story, to me, is a rejection of that world, which held nothing for Edna. It is a demand for something else. It is sad, yes, because it is appalling that there was nothing for her, but it is not wrong or unfair, I think. While I do not think the story is cautionary to women, I do think it is cautionary to the world. It says, what you hold for us, with your rigid, gendered propriety and your cages, is not enough. We are more, so the world needs to be more.

And I think it has become more. I think, as a woman, that while I was funneled toward Edna’s sad, empty life, I have been able to reject it, strong wings or not, and decide to be a real girl with real relationships, not just the meaningless façade of engagement and marriage and divorce. There are other options now because of books like this. It is not easy or perfect, but it is something real, something that exists.

This review is being posted mainly because of the awesome backstory. I actually had to read this twice in high school and didn't care for it much either time.

But, here comes my great story!

When I was a sophomore in high school I went out with this girl who eventually dumped me and gave the reason that she was only going out with me until the guy she really liked showed interest in her. A real downer!

Fast forward to senior year . . .

I was in theater and I just so happened to do shows at the all girls school where the aforementioned girl went. After a performance (I was Albert Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie), she came up to me and said that she needed to talk to me and that she was interested in me attending prom with her!?? WHAT!?? I hadn't talked to her in a couple of years . . . my mind was blown!

I said yes, but I was skeptical . . .

While at prom she sat me down for "the talk". She said that she felt terrible for what she did to me. She said that while reading The Awakening, she started to realize that I was really good to her and being the place holder for this other guy was not fair to me. *VINDICATED!* She wrote an essay about what she had done to me and how the book had opened her eyes (an awakening, perhaps???). This essay ended up winning some sort of state-wide competition. *Feeling pretty great by this point!*

Epilogue

She came up to me at the end of the prom and asked me if she could leave with another guy who she has been kind of interested in for awhile . . . (you can't make this stuff up!) So, I got my vindication, but history repeated itself - at least I wasn't officially dating her this time!

Kate Chopin toda su vida enfrentó la ambivalencia cultural de una Louisiana en suelo estadounidense pero con corazón francés, un ambiente mixto pero unido en lo que las mujeres de cierta categoría debían o no hacer, o decir o comportarse.
Inclusive su vocación fue sugerida como remedio a sus enfermedades por un doctor que le recomendó distraerse con la escritura, a una edad madura pero no tardía y en ese escribir encontró la vía para expresarse de manera libre, tan libre que escribió El despertar un libro que la sepultó como escritora y la hizo dudar de su propia existencia.

Edna una joven casada de 29 años con dos hijos y su marido viven en New Orleans, ese verano están en un pueblo isleño llamado Grand Isle, donde llegan varias familias conocidas.

Robert hijo de Madame Lebrun en cuya propiedad están los cottages donde se hospedan, es un joven de 26 años, soltero y experto caballero educado que siempre toma bajo su ala alguna mujer soltera, casada o viuda para hacerle compañía y compartir chascarrillos de la vida.

En este momento comparte honores entre Edna y Adele otra mujer casada joven con hijos y embarazada.

Ciertos libros se inician con el personaje principal en una orilla llena de calma, una persona entre tantas que vive según su época, su espacio, su estatus, y aquí viene los bombos y platillos, sin saber que están a punto de entrar en una inmensa ola que los va a revolcar, sin saber cómo saldrán de esa situación, es decir si la experiencia los cambiara y si así fue, descubriendo en que sentido, y de que tamaño es el impacto en sus vidas de tal cambio. Este libro es uno de esos.

Edna es de una familia de abolengo de Kentucky educada en la fe presbiteriana, mas estadounidense imposible, su marido el Sr Pontellier es criollo y de familia católica, menos estadounidense imposible. Como llegaron estos dos seres a unirse, quien sabe, lo cierto es que tienen una vida tranquila, confortable, y muy predecible.


Pero hay un problema, Edna, esta mujercita tan apacible, atractiva, hasta ahora ha vivido sin sobresaltos de ningún tipo, y aunque a través de este pensamiento se intuye distinta, no es consciente del todo, hasta que punto lo es.
Ella es consciente de que Adele, una de sus amigas cumple con estos parámetros y al compararse con ella, entiende que ella nunca podría ser así.

“Las madrazas parecían abundar. Resultaba fácil reconocerlas, revoloteando con las alas extendidas y protectoras cuando cualquier peligro, real o imaginario, amenazaba a sus crías. Eran mujeres que idolatraban a sus hijos, adoraban a sus maridos y consideraban un alto privilegio anularse como individuos y desarrollar alas como ángeles de la guarda.”


Y si Robert es el catalizador que remueve el interior de Edna, en su compañía y ante su presencia, ella empieza a sentirse distinta:

“Sólo podía darse cuenta de que ella, su actual yo, era de algún modo distinto de su yo anterior. Aún no sospechaba que era ella la que, mirando con otros ojos, estaba aceptando dentro de sí misma nuevas circunstancias que influían en su entorno y lo transformaban.”


Adele la amiga intuye los sentimientos de Edna hacia Robert, y sin decírselo directamente, apela a sus hijos para contener o limitar los sentimientos de Edna, y se enfrascan en una discusión, a la cual Edna desnuda su pensamiento, explicándose de esta manera:

“Renunciaría a lo accesorio. Daría mi dinero, daría mi vida por mis hijos; pero no me daría a mí misma.”


Robert viaja a México de forma inesperada, en otras palabras se comporta como un caballero ante una mujer casada, Edna no se explica porque el se fue sin decirle, aunque entre ellos no ha pasado nada ni de palabra ni de hecho.

A pesar de ello Edna regresa distinta a Nuevo Orleans, se olvida de las convenciones, al diablo las visitas, la familia, el marido, los hijos, los compromisos, la cena, etc. Se dedica a pintar, a soñar, a visitar a una señora que conoció en el veraneo, que tocaba excepcionalmente el piano y con ideas raras, algo solitaria, que se vuelve su amiga, también dedica tiempo a pasear sola, a entrar a cafés y disfrutar de una comida, cosas nuevas, excitantes que reafirman su estrenada existencia, por primera vez en la vida se siente ella, sabe que existe, qué hay alguien adentro que puede disfrutar, reír y ser, sin que alguien más le diga como o que.

El marido vuelto loco, su mundo de cabeza, consulta a un viejo Dr, que le receta deje tranquila a la esposa, ya se le pasará……

“Es decir, él no se daba cuenta de que Edna estaba en el proceso de ser ella misma y que desechaba día a día ese yo ficticio que asumimos como un disfraz con el que aparecer ante el mundo.”


Edna sigue rompiendo reglas, convenciones, tomando decisiones a su conveniencia y gusto, peligrosamente se hace amiga de un joven con muy mala fama que se enamora de ella, aún entre todo esto, regresa Robert quien se encuentra en una encrucijada y deberá tomar decisiones.

Al final todo termina donde inicio en ese pueblito costero lleno de playa y redención.

Sería un error comparar a El despertar con Ana Karenina, con Madame Bovary o con La regenta, en estas últimas priva la estética, el dramatismo, el arte, otras cuestiones importantes pero distintas.

En El despertar hablamos de una exploración del yo, de un nacimiento, del percibirse a uno mismo como un ser, como alguien que importa por el mero hecho de estar, de ser consciente de mi, sin ser un apéndice o una extensión o una utilidad para alguien más o por alguien más o a pesar de alguien más.

No nos confundamos, si, Edna se enamora de Robert y si, eso la ayuda a asumirse, a estar feliz en su piel, pero eso no la determina, por qué más allá de ese amor, sea concretado o no, ella no volverá a ser aquel ser triste sin conciencia de si misma.

Como conclusión, la obra es poderosa, trasmite mucho, para mi es un grito