A state of peaceful languor pulls me in and out of a whispering sleep as I sit upon a barricaded porch. The balcony outside is sun bleached and covered with the mangled bodies of countless pests and once-buzzing nuisances, but inside the mesh enclave I am safe. Safe to inhabit my own body, safe to experience bliss, safe to consume the words of Kate Chopin which resonate more deeply after feeling the physicality of Edna Pontellier’s existence in The Awakening.
I received my copy of this novella from a friend last October. I had just met him a few weeks prior, and he gave me this book as a birthday gift. It was an unexpected act of kindness that has persisted in his general demeanor throughout our subsequent friendship. The sweetness reflected here is a difficult one to find: selfless and simple, resolutely human. Coming to Grand Isle, I was reacquainted with this idea of sweetness. The night was thick with mosquitoes and darkness when we ambled in our tightly-packed van across bridges and swamps, eventually arriving in the small town. The trip had lulled me into a cycle of dozing, similar to that later experience on the porch, but this was more dependent on a genuine lack of sleep rather than a comfortable state of lethargy. My final departure from sleep in the van was jolting - we had gone over some rock, and my eyes sprung open, met by Grand Isle’s silhouettes of ominously stilted homes, lumbering and taciturn in their angularity. Their ambivalence to our arrival implored me to stay awake and I sat peering out at these shapes, unaware of the eventual relaxation they would bring. I understood immediately that this unique architecture was formulated as a defense against the disastrous hurricanes so prevalent in this region. I understood their necessity, and then gladly I understood how their necessitated forms gave life to privately sublime occurrences: as we progressed through the vacation homes, I began to witness Sweetness again. A family gathered under one such porch with their brightest flood lights on, dazzling my sleep-sensitive eyes. More remarkable than the light, though, was the situation underneath. Edna’s family, when alone and not in the camaraderie of their summer friends, ate dinners guarded by familial discontent, rife with arguments about race tracks, glimmering displays of crystalline glamor, hurried endings due to songs reminiscent of scandal and passion. No, this was different. It was simple, just a family circled around a newspaper-covered folding table stacked high with the simmered bodies of ocean-dwellers and a host of well-seasoned landfare. A crawfish boil. This is what I had come to Louisiana for: communal experience and visceral pleasures, the culmination and highest form of which being the act of Bookpacking as a group. This entrance, this apprehension turned to affection, would prepare me for the variety of personal emotions and literary concurrences to ensue.
Last summer, I accidentally embarked on my own sort of Bookpacking experience - it traced the trellouses of my own mental landscape, the veins of my own history rather than that of another. I focused my literary attentions on the disdainful ecstasy of girlhood, beginning with The Virgin Suicides in my childhood home, then My Year of Rest and Relaxation as I lolled about waiting to go to New York City, where I lived alone and commuted to work and read The Bell Jar. I relished in these tales of femininity’s inherent melancholy. The Awakening was, in many ways, a continuation of this: a woman’s deeply gnawing desire for individuality precluded by rest, guided by a separation from a (relatively, considering Edna is a wealthy white woman) oppressive society. So, for personal agency. Chopin so poignantly writes, “In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight – perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman” (Chapter 6). The young woman, full of passion and despair, still hopeful for a future yet utterly despondent at her state of reality, might be the most apt creature in the world to grapple with such ideas.
However, while the setting of my home or of New York City connected vaguely to the books that I was reading, with The Awakening I was placed directly on the sands of Edna’s desires and in the waters of her demise. It is the water itself which spoke to me so tenderly about these both maiden and matronly matters. Chopin continues the prior quote, “...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. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (Chapter 6). Though voiced through Edna, these words sound as if they were not written but simply transferred from Kate Chopin’s soul and materialized in the ink of these pages. Reading these words, I know that Kate ensconced herself in that softness and, perhaps, waited to succumb to its grandiosity. Sitting on the porch and reading these words, I see Kate, I see Edna, I see womankind enveloped in these waves. I see myself put the book down, I see my body traverse the hot sand and plunge into the cool water, I see this from above and I see us all together. I am in the water with new friends, my tangible female companions to accompany the literary and historical ones of Edna and Kate. We are all in this infinity together.
Of course, the ocean has long been the topography of the woman. Salted water is pulled to the shore by the moon, cyclically, as fertile blood is eked from the woman by that same celestial body. That day, the Gulf Sea was Mother’s Womb. It took us all in, again girls under Her playful benevolence, again women under Her massive severity, new souls added to Her endless supply. For a moment, I felt Edna entreat me to join her in pinkness and hums. The vast openness is inviting as a final resting place; Oh to die happy! With joyous heart and sunkissed skin! Her death was a victory, Edna’s literary stand against Kate’s literal perils. But my victory will not be so. My victory’s existence is not yet known except that it begins with the delicious delirium of sunshine and ink, with elegant prose and a previous ennui that, with each moment passing under bright sunshine and amongst still brighter individuals, lifts into a precious enjoyment of body and mind.
But I thought too of the bodies the bodies the bodies – the workers on the oil rigs burned and drowned both at the same time, screaming out and gurgling in, full of fear and desperation. Scorched and bloated I imagine some settled down to the sand, picked apart by crabs, and other more buoyant cadavers devoured by toothy fish. This is their sea too. This is the reality of the ocean itself, of water with its multitudes of rivers flowing in and out and estuaries and swamps all creating this network of suffering and of glee. First a peaceful suicide, then a screeching massacre, and lastly, us. Soaking it in, spitting it out.
Contemplating these Bodies, I saw a fin in the water. Almost masochistically, I saw my death right in front of me. I thought about joining Edna in my moments of floating reflection, but I am a coward because I still wanted to live. Cowardice, when well-intentioned, is permissible. In those moments I saw those Grand Isle graves, those bodies marked by French names and crosses askew from years of torrents. I didn’t want to join them yet because I had also seen the school boys playing basketball by the cemetery, had seen their lackadaisical mirth drawn from simple play. A younger boy shrieked and clapped when the older boy tossed his ball right through the net. I wondered if their mothers loved them even if Edna did not love her children. And then I did not care; it was this one individual moment of play that set their hearts ablaze. Edna did not spite her children in her death. She set them free with her bravery, her suicide. Seeing these boys, seeing this cemetery, seeing that fin in the water, I set myself free with my cowardice; my will to live.
This video originally had much brighter hues, but when uploaded onto this website the image was dulled. I could not fix this, but perhaps this is how Kate Chopin would’ve wanted it… Her spirit lives on…