Kate Chopin - The Awakening - Episode 1 - Meet The Author, Discover Local Color And Feminism!
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Kate Chopin - The Awakening - Episode 1 - Meet The Author, Discover Local Color And Feminism!
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I\\u2019m Christy Shriver, and we\\u2019re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.\\xa0
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And I\\u2019m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love lit Podcast.\\xa0 This episode we begin a journey to a very unique American location to discuss a very American author. Kate Chopin, was born in St Louis but her heritage is more associated with Louisiana than with Missouri as she is from an originally American people group, the Louisianan Creole\\u2019s.\\xa0 Christy, I know, you lived a part of your life in Louisiana, and your dad\\u2019s family is from Louisiana.\\xa0 As we discuss Kate Chopin and her unusual and ill-received novel The Awakening, I think a great place to start our discussion, especially for those who may not be familiar with American geography, is with the Pelican State itself.\\xa0\\xa0 What makes Louisiana so unusual than the rest of the United States, and why does that matter when we read a book like The Awakening.\\xa0
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Well, there are so many things that people think of when the think of Louisiana- Louisianan distinctive include Mardi Gras, crawfish bowls, jazz music, bayous, The French Quarter of New Orleans and its beignets.\\xa0 The list is cultural distinctives is long.\\xa0\\xa0 But, just for a general reference, Louisiana is part of the American South.\\xa0 Now, it might seem that the states that constitute the South are kind of all the same- and in some respects that\\u2019s true.\\xa0 Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, and the rest of them, \\u2026 after all, they all succeeded from the Union during the Civil War, they all had slaves, they all have had to one degree or another racial tension over the last two hundred years, and, of course, to bring it to modern-day, they all are deeply entrenched in a tradition of American football, barbeque, shot guns, sweet tea, the Bible and a general admiration of good manners that include addressing each other as mr. mrs, yes mam and no sir.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Ha!\\xa0 Yes, that IS the South.\\xa0 I remember moving down here and being frustrated that I could never find anywhere that served tea without sugar- and when they say sweet tea down here- I\\u2019m talking one step away from maple syrup.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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I like it!!!\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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\\xa0People do and feel strongly about it.\\xa0 In fact a lot of people have a lot have strong feelings about this part of the United States.\\xa0 Some love the South; others hate it.\\xa0 It\\u2019s a part of the United States that is historical, by American standards, although laughably young compared to other parts of the world,\\xa0 and controversial- to this very day.\\xa0\\xa0
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Yes, yet having said that,\\xa0 once you move here, it doesn\\u2019t take you long to realize that\\xa0 The South is not one cohesive unit.\\xa0 Every state is very different.\\xa0 Florida was colonized by the Spanish- and has strong ties to places such as Cuba to this day.\\xa0 Virginia was the seat of government and is still central to the heart of American politics.\\xa0 The horse-racing people of Kentucky are very different from their cotton-growing neighbors in Mississippi.\\xa0 There are many many cultural distinctives that are both old and deep.\\xa0 Which brings us to the great state of Louisiana- Louisiana, especially South Louisiana, in some ways has more in common with the Caribbean islands than it does with other parts of the United States.\\xa0 My daddy was born in Spring Hill, Louisiana and raised in Bastrop Louisiana which are in North Louisiana- far from the coast but the people of north Louisiana share many commonalities with their Cajun and Creole brothers.\\xa0 I have early memories of magnolia trees, cypress trees, bayous, shrimp gumbo,\\xa0 and, of my Uncle Lanny taking us in the middle of the night out with his hound dogs to go coon hunting- as in racoon hunting.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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So, for the record, these are things you don\\u2019t see in other parts of the United States.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Indeed, they don\\u2019t have bayous and gumbo anywhere else- and although they do have racoons in other places and likely hunt and eat them, I don\\u2019t know.\\xa0 The whole government of Louisiana is different and its visible.\\xa0 They have parishes instead of counties.\\xa0 The law is based on French law, not British law which affects everything.\\xa0\\xa0 It is predominantly Catholic not Protestant, hence Mardi Gras, which is what they call Carnival in Brazil but which we don\\u2019t celebrate in other part of the US.\\xa0 But what interests us for this book is the ethnic origins of the people indigenous to the region.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0 The rural part of the state has been dominated by a group we call Cajuns.\\xa0 Cajuns are Roman Catholic French Canadians, or at least their descendents were.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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They were run out of the Captured French Colony called Acadia in North Eastern Canada- it\\u2019s actually be termed \\u201cthe Acadian diaspora\\u201d.\\xa0 Acadia was in the maritime provinces up on the Atlantic side, near the US state of Maine. That part of Canada was very British hence the obvious antagonism.\\xa0\\xa0
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\\xa0Well, The word Acadians kind of morphed into Cajuns over the years.\\xa0 That\\u2019s one people group.\\xa0 But we also have another distinctively Louisianan people group\\xa0 called the Louisiana Creoles.\\xa0 This group of people ethnically are entirely different group than the Cajuns but also speak French.\\xa0 Our author today, Kate Chopin was a creole, and she wrote about Lousianan Creole people.\\xa0 Garry, before we introduce the Mrs. Chopin, local color and her influencial work, The Awakening, let\\u2019s learn just a little about these remarkable people.\\xa0 Who are the Creoles of Louisiana?\\xa0
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Well, let me preface by saying, as Kate Chopin would be the first to admit, history is always messy- people marry, intermarry, languages get confused and muddled, so when we talk about distinctives, we are talking about generalities, and if you want take to talk about Creole people the first word that must come to mind is multi-cultural.\\xa0 There are creole peoples all over the Caribbean.\\xa0 Haiti is the first country that comes to mind, so we need to be careful as we speak in generalities. But\\xa0 the first generality you will notice of the Louisianan Creole people shows up in the first chapter of Chopin\\u2019s book, and that is that they also speak the French language, except for the Louisiana Creoles that can mean two different actual languages.\\xa0 Today, and the latest stat, I saw was from May of 2020,\\xa0 1,281,300 identified French as their native tongue- that would be Colonial French, standard French and the speakers of would include both people groups the Cajuns and the Louisianan Creoles.\\xa0 But what is even more interesting than that is that the language Louisiana Creole is its own distinctive indigenous language, and is not the same as Haitian Creole or Hawaiian Creole or any other form of Creole where you might hear that word.\\xa0 Meaning, Louisianan Creole although having origins in the French language is not French at all but its own distinct language.\\xa0\\xa0 This is confusing because the Cajuns speak a dialect of French that sounds different than the French from France or Quebec, but it\'s still French and French speakers can understand what they are saying even if it sounds different than the way they might pronounce things.\\xa0 That\\u2019s different. Creole is French-based, but has African influences and is literally its own language and French speakers cannot understand it.\\xa0 Today it\\u2019s an endangered language, only about 10,000 people speak it, but it is still alive.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Yeah, that wasn\\u2019t something I understood as a teenager living in Louisiana. I thought Cajun- Creole all meant Lousianan.\\xa0 Since we lived in North Louisiana, I never met anyone personally who spoke Lousiana Creole.\\xa0 All the Creole\\u2019s I came into contact, including Mrs. Devereaux, my French teacher spoke traditional French, which is what they do in Chopin\\u2019s book too, btw.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Of course, Cajuns and Creole people have a lot in common in terms of religion and even in taste in cuisine, but where they differ tremendously is in ethnicity and also in social class.\\xa0 The Cajuns are white and from Canada but often rural and historically lower-middle class.\\xa0 The Creole\\u2019s are not white, but culturally a part of the urban elite, the ruling class.\\xa0 They are the first multi-cultural people group on the American continent and deserve a special status for that reason.\\xa0
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Explain that, because that\\u2019s really interesting.\\xa0 Today, to be multi-cultural is cool, but 100 years ago when ethnic groups did not intermingle, and being a multi-cultural group that was upper class seems like a huge anomaly.\\xa0 Although I will say the word \\u201ccreole\\u201d tips you off to the multi-cultural element.\\xa0 It actually comes from the Portuguese word \\u201ccrioulo\\u201d and the word itself means people who were created.\\xa0
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\\xa0And again, I do want to point out that this is kind of a very big simplification of a couple of hundred years of history, but in short, the criolos were people who were born in the new World- but mostly of mixed heritage.\\xa0 Gentlemen farmers, primarily French and Spanish came over to the new world.\\xa0 A lot of them came\\xa0 by way of the Caribbean after the slave revolt in Haiti.\\xa0\\xa0 They had relationships and often even second families with local people here. Many were Black slaves, others were native Americans, lots were mulattos who also came from the Caribbean.\\xa0 Unlike mixed raced people from Mississippi or Alabama, Creoles were not slaves.\\xa0 They were free people.\\xa0 They were educated.\\xa0 They spoke French and many rose to high positions of politics, arts and culture. They were the elite, many were slaveholders.\\xa0 Now, I will say, that most chose to speak Colonial French over Louisiana Creole as they got more educated, also over time as we got closer to the Civil War era being mixed race in and of itself got pretty complicated with the black/white caste-system of the South, which is another story in and of itself.\\xa0\\xa0 And as a result, you had creoles who were identifying as white and others who didn\\u2019t- Chopin\\u2019s family were white creoles.\\xa0 But regardless of all that, but in the 1850s and through the life of Chopin, until today, Creoles are a separate people group that identify themselves as such.\\xa0 They are a proud group of people who worship together, connect socially together, and often build communities around each other. They have societal behaviors and customs that set them apart, and we learn by looking at life through Edna Pontellier\'s eyes, have a culture that can difficult for an outsider to penetrate, if you marry an insider.\\xa0
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And so enters, Mrs. Kate Chopin, born in 1851 to a mother who was Creole and a father who was a Irish, both Catholic. She was not born in Louisisana, but in the great midwestern city of St. Louis.\\xa0 St Louis, at the time had a rather large Creole population by virtue of being a city on the Mississippi river- which runs from New Orleans miles north. Her mom\\u2019s family was old, distinguished and part of what has been termed the \\u201cCreole Aristocracy\\u201d.\\xa0 Kate grew up speaking French as a first language, and as many Creole women was raised to be very independent by three generations of women in the household. She received an exceptional education, was interested in what they called \\u201cthe woman question\\u201d.\\xa0 This will give you an indication of how progressive her family actually was, now brace yourself because this is scandalous\\u2026.on a trip to New Orleans at the ripe age of 18, Kate learned to smoke.\\xa0
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Oh my, did she smoke behind the high school gym or in the bathroom stalls?\\xa0
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Ha!\\xa0 Who even knows, but we do know that at age 19 she married the love of her life, another Creole, Oscar Chopin.\\xa0 Kate and Oscar were very compatible and the years she was married to him have been described as nothing but really happy by all of her biographers that I\\u2019m familiar with.\\xa0 They lived in New Orleans at first and then to Natchitoches parish in the central Louisiana where he owned and operated a general store.\\xa0 They were married for 12 years, and- this small fact wipes me out- they had five sons and two daughters.\\xa0
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Ha!\\xa0 That confirms all the Catholic stereotypes of large families.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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I know right, that\\u2019s just a lot\\u2026and their lives were, by all accounts, going well until\\u2026there\\u2019s always an until\\u2026 Oscar suffered the fate of a lot of people around the world even to this day, who live in hot climates.\\xa0 He caught malaria, and suddenly died.\\xa0 And there Kate was, alone in the middle of the interior of Louisiana,\\xa0 with this store and all these kids.\\xa0 She ran it herself for over a year, but then decided to do what lots of us would do in that situation\\u2026she moved back to the hometown of her childhood, St. Louis so she could be near her mother- I didn\\u2019t mention it before but her father had died in a terrible railroad accident when she was a young child and her brother had died in the Civil War- so basically all of the men that had meant anything to her at all, had all died.\\xa0 One of Kate\\u2019s daughters had this to say about that later on when she was an adult talking about her mom, \\u201cWhen I speak of my mother\\u2019s keen sense of humor and of her habit of looking on the amusing side of everything, I don\\u2019t want to give the impression of her being joyous, for she was on the contrary rather a sad nature\\u2026I think the tragic death of her father early in her life, of her much beloved brothers, the loss of her young husband and her mother, left a stamp of sadness on her which was never lost.\\u201d\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Goodness, that Is a lot of sadness.\\xa0
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Well, it is and it took a toll.\\xa0 When she got back to St. Louis, Dr. Kolbenheyer, their obgyn and a family friend talked her into studying some French writers for the sake of\\xa0 mental health, specifically Maupassant and Zola and take up writing.\\xa0 She took that advice ..\\u2026so at age 38 a widow with six living children, Chopin began her writing career.\\xa0 A career, sadly that was only going to last five years.\\xa0 It started great, and she was super popular, but then\\u2026.she wrote a scandalous book and was cancelled, and I mean totally cancelled.\\xa0 Five years after the publication of\\xa0 this candalous book that today we call The Awakening, she had a stroke and died.\\xa0 At the time of her death, Kate Chopin as a writer, was virtually unknown and uncelebrated.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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What do you mean by cancelled? That sounds like a crazy story for a mommy writer.\\xa0
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True, and it is.\\xa0 When she started\\xa0 writing, she was super popular.\\xa0 This kind of reminds me a little of Shirley Jackson, honestly.\\xa0 She wrote short things for magazines for money.\\xa0 What made her work popular, at least in part, was because writing about a subculture of America that people found interesting.\\xa0 Although she was living in St. Louis, her stories were set in Louisiana amongst the Creole people- and people loved it.\\xa0 This movement in American literature where authors focus on a specific region or people group\\xa0 has been called \\u201cLocal Color\\u201d, and her ability to showcase the local color of the Creole people led her to success.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Subcultures are so fascinating to me and I\\u2019m always amazed at how many different subcultures there are- and I\\u2019m not talking about just ethnically. There are endless subcultures on this earth, and most of the time we don\\u2019t even know what we\\u2019re looking at.\\xa0
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Oh, for sure.\\xa0 I think of guitar players as their own subculture- they speak their own language, have their own passions, I wouldn\\u2019t be surprised if they have their own foods.\\xa0
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\\xa0HA!\\xa0 Do I sense a bit of mockery?\\xa0 But you are right, we do have a little bit of a subculture, but if you think guitarists are a subculture, what do you think of my cousin Sherry who is neck deep into Harley Davidson culture and goes to Sturgis, South Dakota every year.\\xa0\\xa0
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True, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who participate in that subculture all over the world\\xa0\\xa0 And of course, we\\u2019re talking about hobbies which are not the same as actual ethnic subcultures in any location, understanding and just seeing behind the fence of someone else\\u2019 experience is the fun.\\xa0 The idea of living life vicariously through the stories, so to speak, of people who are so radically differently is one of the things I most love about reading.\\xa0 In the real sense of the term \\u201clocal color\\u201d though, this was an actual movement after the Civil War.\\xa0 Authors were using settings from different parts of the country and it made the writing feel romantic for people unfamiliar with the setting while actually being fundamentally realistic- I know that\\u2019s a paradox, but if you think about it it makes sense.\\xa0 They were works that could only be written from inside the culture by someone who was a part of it- that\\u2019s what made them realistic.\\xa0\\xa0 Chopin was considered a local color author because she was Creole writing about the world of Louisiana Creoles.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Well, apparently it was well received.\\xa0 She got stories printed first in regional publications but then in national publications.\\xa0 \\u201cThe Story of an Hour\\u201d which was the only story I had ever read of hers, and I didn\\u2019t know this, was published in Vogue in 1894.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Very impressive, Houghton Mifflin, the publisher that to this day publishes quite a bit of high school literature textbooks actually published a collection of her stories, titled it Bayou Folk.\\xa0 So, just in the title, you can tell they are playing up her Louisiana connection.\\xa0 And that book was a success.\\xa0 Chopin, who kept notes on how well all of her works were doing, wrote that she had seen 100 press notices about the book.\\xa0 It was written up in both The Atlantic and the New York Times.\\xa0 People loved how she used local dialects. They found the stories and I quote \\u201ccharning and pleasant.\\u201d\\xa0 She was even asked to write an essay on writing for the literary journal Critic- which I found really insightful.\\xa0\\xa0
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Well, of course, all of these things sound like a woman bound for monetary and critical success- stardom of her day.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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\\xa0And so her trajectory kept ascending.\\xa0 She was published in the Saturday Evening Post.\\xa0 Of course that was a big deal.\\xa0 Everything was moving in the right direction\\u2026.until.. The Awakening.\\xa0 The Awakening was too much and she crashed immediately and hard.\\xa0\\xa0
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You know, when I read these reviews from 1899, it\\u2019s so interesting how strongly they reacted.\\xa0 Let me read a few, her local paper, The St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat wrote this, \\u201cIt is not a healthy book\\u2026.if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson the fact is not apparent.\\u201d The Chicago Times Herald wrote, \\u201cIt was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the over-worked field of sex-fiction.\\xa0 This is not a pleasant story.\\u201d\\xa0 Here\\u2019s another one, \\u201cits disagreeable glimpses of sensuality are repellent.\\u201d\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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She was not prepared for this.\\xa0 She did not expect it.\\xa0 She was expecting people to see it as the American version of some of the things she had been reading in French that had been published in France.\\xa0 Her treatment of sexuality is what really got her, and maybe if her protagonist had been male she could have gotten away with it.\\xa0 Actually, I\\u2019m pretty sure, she would have gotten away with it, there are other authors who did.\\xa0 But discussing how women felt about sexuality- and let me say- in case you haven\\u2019t read the book- this is not a harlequin romance.\\xa0 She doesn\\u2019t talk about hot steamy passion in descriptive tones.\\xa0 She is very polished and shows deference to the WAY things were expressed in her day.\\xa0 The problem was not in how she was treating sexual content- the problem was that she WAS discussing how women felt about sexuality and this just was too realistic.\\xa0 People weren\\u2019t and maybe we still aren\\u2019t, ready to be vulnerable about how we feel about intimacy.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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You know, I tell students all the time that in American politics, sexual issues have always been used as a wedge issue to define people\\u2019s position as good or bad people.\\xa0 That has not changed in the American political scene in 200 years and is something our European and Asian friends have mocked us about for just as long.\\xa0 We are a people committed to moralizing, even to this day.\\xa0 For a long time, it was cloaked in religion, but now, hyperbolic moralizing, although not done in the name of a faith is still a favorite American pastime.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Well, honestly, I guess that\\u2019s also been true for the arts as well.\\xa0 But honestly, greatr art is never moralizing.\\xa0 And Chopin knew that.\\xa0 Furthermore, if anyone had read that essay Chopin printed about her writing that I referenced, they would have seen that Chopin, by design, does NOT moralize in hers.\\xa0 She does not condemn or judge.\\xa0 She has no interest in telling us how we should or shouldn\\u2019t behave.\\xa0 She sees the role of the artist, and clearly stated as much,\\xa0 and the role of fiction as in demonstrating how we genuinely ARE as human beings.\\xa0 It is a role of showcasing the human experience.\\xa0 It is meant to help us understand ourselves.\\xa0 What she does in her writing by using a culture that is unfamiliar to us, is allow us a safer space from which we can pull back the veil that IS our experience, so we can see ourselves.\\xa0 Let me quote her from that essay and here she\\u2019s talking about the Creole people of Louisiana,\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
\\u201cAmong these people are to be found an earnestness in the acquirement and dissemination of book-learning, a clinging to the past and conventional standards, an almost Creolean sensitiveness to criticism and a singular ignorance of, or disregard for, the value of the highest art forms. There is a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana, nor does it lie at the antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it.\\u201d\\xa0
Well, regardless of how she wanted to come across, apparently, she struck a nerve people didn\\u2019t want struck.\\xa0 The Awakening unsettled America.\\xa0 The book was published in April of 1899, by August critics were destroying it, and again I\\u2019ll use the reviewers words,\\xa0 it had been deemed \\u201cmorbid and unwholesome\\u201d and was reproached on a national stage.\\xa0 She was scorned publicly.\\xa0 When she submitted a new short story to the Atlantic \\u201cTi Demon\\u201d in November after the publication of The Awakening it was returned and rejected.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0 Her own publisher, the one who had published the controversial book decided to \\u201cshorten is list of authors\\u201d- and they dropped her.\\xa0 Of course to be fair, they claimed that decision had nothing to do with the problems with the reception of The Awakening.\\xa0
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I\\u2019m sure that it didn\\u2019t.\\xa0 Chopin was obviously crushed.\\xa0 She would only write seven more stories over the next five years.\\xa0 In 1904 when she died of a stroke, she was basically a forgotten writer.\\xa0 And likely would have remained forgotten until, ironically the French discovered the novel in 1952.\\xa0 A writer by the name of Cyrille Arnavon translated it into French under the title Edna with a 22 page introduction essay called it a neglected masterpiece.\\xa0 What he liked about it had nothing to do with \\u201clocal color\\u201d or creole people or anything Americana.\\xa0 He saw in it what we see in it today- psychological analysis.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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So fascinating, this is the 1950s; this is exactly the time period psychology is shifting from Freudian interpretations of Chopin\'s\\u2019 day into behaviorism and eventually to humanistic psychology.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Why does this matter?\\xa0
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With Freud everything is secret and we\\u2019re ruled by unseen forces we don\\u2019t understand without psychoanalysis.\\xa0 Chopin\\u2019s book came out when this was how we were looking at the world.\\xa0 After him came Skinner\\u2019s behaviorism which said everything can be reduced to rewards and punishments.\\xa0\\xa0 Humanistic psychology is this third way of looking at things.\\xa0 It\\u2019s extremely empathetic.\\xa0 Names like Karl Rogers were looking at life with the idea that it\\u2019s just plain difficult to be a human, and we need to understand this complexity.\\xa0 They would like books that are not all black/white thinking or moralistic.\\xa0 This is what\\u2019s crazy to me about Chopin.\\xa0 She wrote in the days of Freud, but she was so far ahead of her time psychologically; nobody would get her for another 60 years- literally two entire movements later in the field of psychology.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Well, when they did get her, they really got her.\\xa0 In 1969 a Norwegian\\u202fcritic\\u202fPer Seyersted\\u202fbrought her out into the open in a big way.\\xa0 This is what he said, \\u201c Chopin, and I quote \\u201cbroke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman\\u2019s submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce, and of woman\\u2019s urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom.\\u201d\\xa0
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Finally people were understanding what she was trying to do.\\xa0 That\\u2019s exactly what she wanted to show- the complexity of being human.\\xa0 Here\\u2019s another Chopin quote whole talking about the role of a writer, \\u201cThou shalt not preach; \\u201cthou shalt not instruct thy neighbor\\u201d.\\xa0 Or as her great- grandmother Carleville, who was extremely influencial in her life, used to tell her, Kate\\u2019s grandmother who raised her was known for saying this \\u201cOne may know a great deal about people without judging them.\\xa0 God does that.\\u201d\\xa0
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Well, she was immediately resurrected.\\xa0 Today she is considered one of America\\u2019s premiere writers.\\xa0
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Well, it also didn\\u2019t hurt her reputation that she was being discovered in Europe at the exact same time, the women\\u2019s movement was taking off in the United States and finding an unsung feminist writer was very popular.\\xa0\\xa0
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Yeah, I thought she WAS a feminist writer, but you don\\u2019t see her as that.\\xa0
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I really don\\u2019t, and that\\u2019s not to say there isn\\u2019t any feminism in the book, because obviously, it\\u2019s about life as a woman at the turn of the century.\\xa0 Virginia Wolfe famouslty argued in her essay A Room of One\\u2019s Own that no one knew what women were thinking and feeling in the 17th century because they weren\\u2019t writing.\\xa0 Well, you can\\u2019t say that about Chopin.\\xa0 She was absolutely writing about what women were thinking and feeling, it just took 60 years for the world to allow her to share it.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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If we want to talk the particulars about The Awakening, which of course we do, we have a female protagonist.\\xa0 I\\u2019m not going to call her a hero because I don\\u2019t find anything heroic about her.\\xa0 But it\\u2019s very very honest characterization of what women feel, and honestly, perhaps it\\u2019s what a lot of people feel- both men and women when they live, as we all do, within cultures of high expectations.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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Isn\\u2019t writing about standing up to cultural norms and societal expectations kind of clich\\xe9?\\xa0 I\\u2019m surprised you find it interesting in this situation.\\xa0
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\\xa0Well, it for sure can be.\\xa0 It\\u2019s what a lot of teenage angst poetry is about.\\xa0 But Chopin\\u2019s book is a lot more complex than just a denouncement on social expectations of women\\u2019s roles.\\xa0 In some ways, that\\u2019s just the setting.\\xa0 This particular woman, Edna, is for sure, unhappyily objectified by a husband.\\xa0 That part is obvious.\\xa0 But, Chopin isn\\u2019t necessarily moralizing against this or anything else.\\xa0 In the opening encounter between husband and wife, we see the wife being objectified, but we also see that they have worked out some deal.\\xa0 She has a very privileged life.\\xa0 It\\u2019s not a life between two people who have emotional intimacy, for sure.\\xa0 These two clearly don\\u2019t.\\xa0 Edna asks if her husband plans on showing up for dinner.\\xa0 He basically sayd, I don\\u2019t know- I may; I may not.\\xa0 It doesn\\u2019t appear Edna could care less one way or another and Chopin isn\\u2019t condemning them; she is observing.\\xa0 This are the deals people are working out in the world.\\xa0 She makes other observations in regard to Edna and her relationship with her children.\\xa0 She loves her children; sort of; but it\\u2019s certainly not the motherly and passionate devotion most mothers feel towards their kids.\\xa0 It\\u2019s definitely not the self-denying ideal, we see expressed through a different character in the book.\\xa0 Again, Chopin is not endorsing nor condemning.\\xa0 She\\u2019s observing.\\xa0 There\\u2019s no doubt, Chopin herself was progressive.\\xa0 She was raised in a house of dominant women.\\xa0 She herself was a head of household.\\xa0 She was educated.\\xa0 She made money, but she had healthy relationships with the men in her life.\\xa0 She is not a man-hater, that I can tell.\\xa0 She never remarried but there is reason to believe she had at least one\\xa0 other significant male relationship after her husband\\u2019s death.\\xa0 So, portraying her as a woman who influenced feminism in any kind of deliberate way, I don\\u2019t think is something that she intended, nor was it something that happened.\\xa0 She was cancelled.\\xa0
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I understand that, it\\u2019s just interesting that today, we think of her first and foremost as a feminist writer in large part because she had sexual content in her books.\\xa0 Although, as I think about the progressive women in the 1890s, what we know about them from history is that most were not really be fans of indiscriminate sex.\\xa0\\xa0
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Oh my, we\\u2019re getting edgy here, but I have to ask.\\xa0 Why do you say that?\\xa0
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You have to understand this is before birth control.\\xa0 Sexual relationships for women meant running the very real risk of generating children which was often a life-risking ordeal.\\xa0 Kate herself had gone through that seven times in twelve years.\\xa0 Women were spending half of their lives pregnant.\\xa0 Many progressive women in this time period were not fighting for the freedom to have sex, they were fighting for the right to NOT have it.\\xa0 They wanted the right to say no.\\xa0 The goal of Self ownership was central to nineteenth century feminism.\\xa0 Woman\'s rights were about possessing a fully realized human identity.\\xa0 We think of this today in terms of sexual freedom but that\\u2019s the arrogance of the presence kicking in.\\xa0 Obviously human sexuality is a core part of the human experience and that\\u2019s likely why it\\u2019s central to Chopin\\u2019s story, but there are other aspects of person hood.\\xa0 Women, especially educated ones, were interested in navigating a sense of place in the community and the universe at large- and that involves all kinds of things- hard things like love, connections, maternity.\\xa0
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Exactly, and that\\u2019s why Edna is so complicated.\\xa0 Being a human is difficult.\\xa0\\xa0 Navigating\\xa0 \\u201cthe woman\\u2019s sphere\\u201d, to use the expression of\\xa0 the notable Chopin scholar Sandra Gilbert is complicated.\\xa0 And so, we all find ourselves, one way or another in cages- some of our own making, some of the makings of our community, our religion, our culture, our own personalities- whatever it is.\\xa0 And that is the opening of our story.\\xa0 The Awakening starts with a woman in a cage.\\xa0 This is not to say that men do not experience cages or awakenigs- they absolutely do, but Chopin is a woman and will speak from inside the world of women.\\xa0 She will drop a woman named Edna, a middle child Presbyterian English speaking girl from Kentucky, into a French speaking Catholic world of elite Creole women.\\xa0 Edna is flawed, but not awful.\\xa0 She\\u2019s flawed in the sense that we are all flawed.\\xa0 This woman acts out- in the way that many of us have acted out- often as children, but for some of us, we don\\u2019t experience this desire for agency until later in life.\\xa0 For Edna it comes at the age of 26 and when it does- she will scandalize her world the way acting out always does.\\xa0 She finds herself in a cage and decides she wants out...but then what\\u2026where do you go from there.\\xa0 Let\\u2019s read how Chopin sets this up in the first paragraph of her story.\\xa0
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A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:\\xa0
\\u201cAllez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!\\u202fThat\\u2019s all right!\\u201d\\xa0
He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.\\xa0
Mr. Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, arose with an expression and an exclamation of disgust.\\xa0
He walked down the gallery and across the narrow \\u201cbridges\\u201d which connected the Lebrun cottages one with the other. He had been seated before the door of the main house. The parrot and the mocking-bird were the property of Madame Lebrun, and they had the right to make all the noise they wished. Mr. Pontellier had the privilege of quitting their society when they ceased to be entertaining.\\xa0
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Christy, does she give the entire story away in the beginning?\\xa0
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She\\u2019s doing something.\\xa0 She opens with a bird- a parrot. We will talk more about this later, but birds are a big deal in this book.\\xa0 But why a parrot- what do parrots do- well they imitate.\\xa0 They talk.\\xa0 This parrot is in a cage repeating something an English reader may not understand.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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What does that phrase mean?\\xa0
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It means Go away! Go away!\\xa0 For God\\u2019s sake!\\xa0 The bird is telling everyone to go away, and Mr. Pontellier pretty much ignores the bird and does actually go away.\\xa0 The bird speaks a little Spanish but also a language no one else understands.\\xa0 There\\u2019s a lot of intentionality here.\\xa0 This book begins with a bird in a cage and the book ends with a bird, but I won\\u2019t tell you how we find that bird yet.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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\\xa0These 19th century writers were always using symbols on purpose.\\xa0\\xa0
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They really do.\\xa0 And if this one is our protagonist- what we can see is that she\\u2019s beautiful, she\\u2019s in a cage, and although she can talk, she cannot articulate something that can be heard properly or understood.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0
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And so that is our starting point.\\xa0
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I think it is.\\xa0 Next episode, we will join Edna and explore this beautiful place, Grand Isle- the site, and if the title of the book hasn\\u2019t given it away yet, I will, of her Awakening.\\xa0 We will watch Edna awaken- but then, we know from our visit with Camus\\u2026that is only step one.\\xa0 Now what.\\xa0
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Indeed\\u2026now what.\\xa0 Well, thank you for spending time with us today.\\xa0 We hope you have enjoyed meeting Kate Chopin and jumping into the first paragraph of her lost but rediscovered American masterpiece, The Awakening.\\xa0 And if you did, please support us by sharing this episode with a firend, either by text, by twitter, Instagram or email.\\xa0 That\\u2019s how we grow.\\xa0 Also, if you have a favorite book, you\\u2019d like us to discuss, you are always invited to connect with us, again via all the ways Modern world people do.\\xa0
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Peace out!\\xa0
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