Re-awakening

Toward the beginning of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edna Pontellier reads a risque novel making the rounds of the summer resort, feeling compelled to "read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so--to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps." That's more or less the way I read The Awakening for the first time 30 years ago: I stayed home sick from church on a Sunday morning and sat up in bed reading Chopin's novel from beginning to end without stopping (and hardly breathing!), hoping to read it undetected.

And who could object to my reading such a book? The Awakening was never on the syllabus in any of my undergraduate classes, but in one class I recall reading The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic, a novel published two years earlier than The Awakening and also involving a main character whose passions are unleashed when he listens to a talented woman playing Chopin. If Frederic's novel was not considered dangerous to impressionable young minds, why was Kate Chopin's?

Now I'm getting ready to teach The Awakening and I find that most of my students have already read it, some in high school. Once again, one generation's dangerous literature becomes the next generation's required reading. I've been trying to recapture the sense of transgression I felt on first encountering the novel, but it's hard to imagine the intensity of emotion the novel evoked in its first readers, many of them so horrified by Edna's actions that they utterly overlooked the novel's elegance of language and nuances of character development. An early reviewer condemned the novel as unhealthy because "if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson, the fact is not apparent."

These days Edna seems downright quaint. Tomorrow in class I'll show photos of women's bathing costumes from the 1890s just to set the scene, but the women in those photos look stiff and stodgy and passionless and incapable of relishing the feeling of the warm seawater buoying up the body. I'll remind my students that The Awakening was among the earliest published novels to portray pregnancy and childbirth as natural parts of a woman's life rather than as secret and even indecent mysteries incapable of being discussed in polite company.

But I know I'll be hard pressed to help my students understand what caused all the brouhaha. It's just a simple story about a woman trying to find herself--the synopsis of a hundred hackneyed dramas on the Lifetime network. Over the next couple of days I'll work to peel away the accretions of time and interpretation to help students encounter the text as if it were hot off the presses, to awaken to the risks Chopin took and the wonders she accomplished with this slim little book. And no one will feel compelled to read it in secret.