{"id":137309,"date":"2019-06-17T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T13:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=137309"},"modified":"2019-06-17T09:54:29","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T13:54:29","slug":"what-it-is-to-wake-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/06\/17\/what-it-is-to-wake-up\/","title":{"rendered":"What It Is to Wake Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

John William Waterhouse, Miranda<\/em>, 1875, oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was hard to fully appreciate The Awakening<\/em> when I first read it, given to me by my sophomore-year English teacher to appease my rage against all the Hemingway we were assigned. It was one among a small stack of books from her home library\u2014including titles by Henry James, Gloria Naylor, and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2014that would begin to make up the backbone of my own personal canon. But I read The Awakening<\/em>, by Kate Chopin, first. Its back flap copy promised a feminist classic, and it sounded pretty sexy besides.<\/p>\n

It was 2001. I was fifteen years old and neither mother nor wife (nor straight, though I didn\u2019t realize it at the time). I understood The Awakening<\/em>\u2019s appeal in the abstract; I appreciated that, despite the seeming quaintness of its epiphany, its content was radical, even shocking for its era. But Edna\u2019s suicide seemed, to my teenage self, as melodramatic as Romeo and Juliet\u2019s. So what if Robert left her? Was that any reason to die?<\/p>\n

Rereading The Awakening<\/em> as an adult, I find that it\u2019s nearly impossible to re-create that quick-to-judge adolescent frame of mind. Having marinated in the world of men for nearly two decades, I have a far better understanding of the depth and breadth of Edna\u2019s suffering. When I read the book now, every male character\u2014the resentful, petty husband; the philandering cad; the condescending doctor; the fickle man-child\u2014induces a bowel-curdling rage. It occurs to the present-day me that a more just ending would have involved Edna drowning any of those men in the Gulf\u2014maybe all of them\u2014and then going to take a well-deserved swim. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Here is the story of a woman who begins to discover herself as a human being, as a sexual creature. Who realizes that while she would \u201cgive [her] life for [her] children,\u201d she \u201cwouldn\u2019t give [herself],\u201d a sentiment that people still find baffling, astonishing. A woman who stops referring to her drawing as dabbling and begins to think of herself as an artist. Who claims a little house all her own. Who directs the schedule of her days.<\/p>\n

Think of the nap Edna takes at Madame Antoine\u2019s: Is there any scene in literature more ecstatically real? How she takes pleasure in being in bed by herself, in feeling her own body. Her sleep, her metaphorical death, her rebirth. How she wakes up hours later, rested, comforted, listening to the distant murmur of voices. How she powders her face, eats ravenously, and emerges: a new woman into a new world.<\/p>\n

But you can feel free without really being free. Most of us do. Like many stories of women\u2019s lives, The Awakening <\/em>is wreathed in anguish, shot through with sorrow and heartbreaking details: Edna watching a friend in childbirth. \u201cWith an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture.\u201d The ways of Nature<\/em>. How, throughout, the children act out the inevitable fates of their respective sexes in miniature. \u201cA small band of [children] were lying on their stomachs on the floor looking at the colored sheets of the comic papers which Mr. Pontellier had brought down. The little Pontellier boys were permitting them to do so, and making their authority felt.\u201d Making their authority felt<\/em>. How she mourns when she learns to swim. \u201cThink of the time I have lost splashing about like a baby!\u201d Think of the time I have lost<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I felt freer at fifteen than I do at thirty-two. Now I know better.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It is not hard to imagine that even if Edna had left her husband, taken up with Robert, and abandoned her children, she would have found new miseries. She gets an inkling of this just before Robert leaves her. She has to remind him, \u201cI am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier\u2019s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, \u2018Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,\u2019 I should laugh at you both.\u201d<\/p>\n

Edna has discovered herself, but the world has not yet discovered her. She seems to know, even then, that there are always fresh sorrows in the wings for women, just waiting for their cue.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Many years after I first read The Awakening<\/em>, I discovered that it was not Chopin\u2019s only piece of fiction in which she\u00a0explored themes of feminist epiphanies, of women waking up, gasping, beneath the burden of men\u2019s mediocrity, their entitlement. In \u201cThe Story of an Hour\u201d\u2014originally published in Vogue<\/em> as \u201cThe Dream of an Hour\u201d five years before The Awakening<\/em> scandalized the world\u2014a woman is told by a family friend that her husband is listed among the dead in a train accident. When she goes to her room alone, she moves through her grief and into a kind of ecstatic, transcendent revelation. She realizes that she is now, \u201cbody and soul,\u201d free.<\/p>\n

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature \u2026<\/p>\n

Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then, just as she has catalogued the breadth and potential of her freedom, the intoxicating giddiness of it, her husband\u2014not dead, not realizing he was thought to be dead\u2014arrives home. The family friend tries to block him from her view, to avoid shock, but to no avail. \u201cWhen the doctors came,\u201d the story ends, \u201cthey said she had died of heart disease\u2014of joy that kills.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dream of that<\/em> hour was freedom\u2014it was the waking that killed her. Once you have tasted freedom, Chopin seems to be showing us, its confiscation\u2014or knowing that its confiscation is inevitable\u2014is impossible to bear. You cannot survive it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

So: Edna\u2019s suicide. My take on it as a teenager was that she was heartbroken that Robert had left, but now there are so many other, less simple ways for me to read it: That death is the only way to have things on her own terms. That she does not want to be forced to bring any more children into this world. That she does not believe she\u2019ll be able to fight for herself in the future the way she is able to now. That she realizes her freedom is a kind of illusion, and always will be. Each option is grimmer than the last, and each is entirely plausible.<\/p>\n

It is, with a modern eye, perhaps difficult to feel much sympathy for the ennui of an upper-class woman with every advantage in the world aside from her sex. But the cruelty of what is denied her is no small thing; a reminder, perhaps, of the ways in which the dimensions of women\u2019s existences are flattened no matter their privilege.<\/p>\n

Almost a hundred years after the 1899 publication of The Awakening<\/em>, Dorothy Allison wrote in her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure<\/em>: \u201cWomen lose their lives not knowing they can do something different.\u201d The only tragedy worse than Edna\u2019s would have been a novel in which she lived and died never realizing she had another choice. For all her pain, she knew, albeit briefly, what it was to have her own days. She knew what it was to wake up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s debut short story collection, <\/em>Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN<\/small>\/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and was the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle\u2019s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the <\/em>New York Times listed <\/em>Her Body and Other Parties as one of \u201c15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.\u201d Machado holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop and is the writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.<\/em><\/p>\n

From the book <\/em>The Awakening<\/a>,<\/em> by Kate Chopin, to be published on June 18, 2019, by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Introduction copyright \u00a9 2019 by Carmen Maria Machado.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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