On the two interconnected and ambiguous scenes that offer a mirror for each
reader’s identity and ideals.
I’ve taught a lot of texts in my time (he said sounding old), including some
that inspired very strong opposed responses: sympathy for or condemnation of Richard
Wright’s Bigger Thomas; laughter with or horror at Philip
Roth’s Alexander Portnoy; intellectual excitement at or angry frustration
with Gloria
Anzaldúa’s style. But I’m not sure that any class discussions have been as
divisive as those over Kate
Chopin’s The Awakening (1899),
and specifically over how we read her protagonist Edna Pontellier. Each of the
three times I’ve taught the novel, the class has been evenly divided into
profoundly opposed camps: roughly half of the students sympathizing with Edna
and applauding her tentative moves toward awareness and independence; the other
half disliking her and criticizing her arc as self-indulgent and foolish.
The culmination of those arguments is also the famous culmination of the
novel (SPOILER ALERT!): Edna’s
final, suicidal swim into the Gulf of the Mexico. That swim is certainly
tragic however we read it; but again, I’ve had plenty of students read it
sympathetically and with understanding, and plenty of others do so critically
and angrily. But just as complex and ambiguous, and foundational to how we read
that final swim, is Edna’s first
true journey into the Gulf, in Chapter 10; having “attempted all summer to
learn to swim,” she suddenly gets it and decides “to swim far out, where no
woman had swum before.” The next two sentences are a master class in narrative
ambiguity: “She had not gone any great distance; that is, what would have been
a great distance for an experienced swimmer. But to her unaccustomed vision the
stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a barrier which her unaided
strength would never be able to overcome.” When she does make it back to shore,
Edna says to her husband, “I thought I should have perished out there alone,”
to which he replies, “You were not so very far, my dear; I was watching you.”
Is Mr. Pontellier expressing his watchful concern, or downplaying her
achievement? Was it an achievement (given her prior lack of experience), or is
she silly to think so (due to her prior lack of experience)? Has she
experienced a titular awakening, one that carries her past gendered expectations
or history? Or is she seeing a fantasy version of the world, one not borne out
by its realities? The answers depend in part on whether we emphasize or
downplay Edna’s own perspective; and in part on whether we read the narrator in
a phrase like “her unaccustomed vision” as sympathetic to Edna’s growth or
pointing out her naivete. But because of those ambiguities, those answers also
depend on our own perspectives and experiences, how we see the world and how we
analyze themes such as gender and identity, marriage and independence, history
and social change. They’re all caught up in Edna’s swims, but what’s under the
surface of those Gulf waves depends a lot on we navigate the waters ourselves.
Next American swim tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on this book or these questions? Other
summer links you’d highlight?
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