Wakening to “The Awakening” by Running Grand Isle
On each of our three days' stay in Grand Isle, I woke up promptly at 6:00 AM before the sun had risen. I threw my workout gear on, laced up my running shoes, and started my hours-long journey jogging down the beach. On the second day of our stay here in this prime Louisiana vacation destination, I decided to run further inland of the island to find a tree to do pull-ups off. While this obsessive workout behavior may very well be a problem I should address, in this situation my obsession allowed me to recognize a key aspect of Grand Isle that I wouldn’t have been able to truly recognize otherwise. Grand Isle is an extremely small island. Running parallel to the ocean, its length is only seven miles long and its width is even less impressive. For instance, when running the width of the island, it only took me a mere five minutes of passing through small, quaint neighborhoods and crossing near-deserted roads to jog from one side of the island to the other. With such a tiny island, there simply isn’t much space for people to spread out.
A Google Street View image of the street I ran down which helped me realized the small width-wise size of Grand Isle. It is important to note this image was taken in 2013 before Ida. Now various houses on the block lay in waste or are under repair.
While a trivial realization, fully recognizing the small size of Grand Isle did help me understand a key aspect of one of the books we read in Grand Isle for bookpacking, Kate Chopin’s "The Awakening". For those not familiar with the book, the story follows the tale of Edna Pontellier, an American protestant who marries into a Creole family in New Orleans. Chopin is discontent with her life as a mother and wife, leading her to try and break free of restraints placed upon her as a woman in a patriarchal society. Readers witness Edna trying to break free first in Grand Isle, a Louisiana coastal vacation island in which the beginning of the story takes place, and later in New Orleans. In the novela, all the various characters introduced in the section of the book set on Grand Isle, including both Edna and the Creole cohort, seem to know each other well from their interactions on the island. They act as if they are one big family when they wade into the ocean together at night, attend church as a cohort, and come together for meals.
While the intimate and near familial connection between the individual characters on Grand Isle can partially be chalked up to a similarity in the Creole characters’ backgrounds as well as their warm and friendly French-influenced personalities, the main factor contributing to the strength of the characters’ bond is simple: space. Not only is Grand Isle a small island, but the houses in which the characters lived were consolidated in one small square section of the island, amplifying the lack of distance between residents. This consolidation of Grand Isle vacation housing was due to the planning of the entrepreneurs who transformed Grand Isle into a vacation destination, who chose to transform the slave cabins of Grand Isle’s old plantation into vacation housing (pictures shown below). Because of this, the vacationers and their residences on Grand Isle which are featured in Kate Chopin’s book were extremely close to one, making interaction – which could likely lead to residents bonding and even forming friendships - between residents not simply likely but inevitable.
Pictures illustrating the layout of the plantation run on Grand Isle from 1816 until its shutdown shortly after the passing of the Emancipation Proclomation (1863). The left image shows how the plantation itself only took up a portion of the larger island, while the right image reveals the close proximity of the slave cabins, which were later converted into the vacation housing in which Kate Chopin’s characters reside in.
It is important to note that the close proximity of Grand Isle vacationers to one another is significant because it is a strange anomaly not found in traditional vacation experiences. Typically, with vacation destinations, vacationers are purposefully spread out to allow residents to enjoy a private or semi-private experience. This is especially true with expensive vacation destinations, where residents pay extra for complete privacy. However, in Grand Isle, this is oddly not the case, as even though it is an exclusive and relatively expensive vacation destination, residents are packed together like sardines in a can. One way to explain this anomaly is that the residents of Grand Isle may in fact want to be close to one another specifically so they can meet other Creoles of similar socioeconomic status. Similar to how today’s billionaires and ultra-rich individuals come together at premier events across the globe to connect with others of similar backgrounds and experiences, these wealthy Creoles may want to do the same during their luscious summer vacations. So, businessmen such as Edna’s husband can fraternize and gamble with fellow businessmen and New Orleans elite at The Club. At the same time, their wives and children can mingle on the beach, in their vacation houses, and at church services.
This sense of community that is created through a lack of space on Grand Isle is highly impactful to Chopin’s story and how it unfolds. In this tightknit community, our protagonist, Edna, meets Robert - who is her love interest and the man whose rejection of her is the final straw that leads her to commit suicide at the end of the book – as well as the many other influential characters she interacts with both on summer vacation in Grand Isle and back in New Orleans upon her return to her home city. In other words, every character that Edna interacts with and helps guide her immense character development through the story is introduced to Edna thanks to the close proximity and corresponding tight bond of Grand Isle vacation community.
The influence Grand Isle’s relatively small size on its community is not only important in Chopin’s book and the time period of the 1850s in which it was set, it also holds relevance in our present. Running around Grand Isle while cursing the absurd heat and humidity of Louisiana all the way, I certainly took note of the size of the island, but I also witnessed how connected this small vacation community was. As I jogged along oak-tree lined southern suburban neighborhoods, I watched as neighbors greeted each other warmly as they drove or walked by. I saw two mothers watch their kids play on the swing set in one of their front yards and locals warmly chatting in the parking lot of the local supermarket before driving off in their large Ford pickup trucks. Running along the beach, I witnessed families setting up beach chairs, speakers, tarps, and food in preparation for a beach day. College students and teens on summer break splashed around in the waves or played a game of volleyball together, enjoying the warm day and the temperate ocean water. There is a sense of community on Grand Isle that I haven’t witnessed or experienced anywhere else I have vacationed. While I’m used to a coldness and lack of interaction between vacationers wherever I travel, the Grand Isle residents seem connected in a way that I believe largely boils down to space. If there’s only seven miles of land to work with and a limited number of residents, people are bound to run into one another and strike up conversation that could possibly lead to friendship, adding to the sense of community on the Gulf Coast island.
Though running is not for everyone, I encourage anyone who comes to Grand Isle to explore the island in one way or another. By doing this, travelers truly get a feel for the size of the island as well as the strong bond that the island’s tonight community holds. Not only will this heightened understanding of Grand Isle allow visitors to better analyze novels set on the island such as Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”, but it will also allow vacationers to better connect with the Grand Isle community for which they are temporarily a part of during their stay. There’s fun to be had on the island, but there’s a lot of learning to be had as well, so be sure to to walk, run, bike, drive, and simply explore this amazing and storied island when you visit.