Kate Chopin's The Awakening

The Awakening, published by Kate Chopin when she was 49 years old, has become a literary classic, and an influential feminist novella. 

Here’s a brief summary. Edna Pontillier is on vacation on Grand Isle with her husband Léonce. In the novella’s eighth paragraph she walks up from a beach with Robert LeBrun, after bathing in the warm Caribbean Sea. On the island she also meets Adèle Ratignolle, mother of three small children, the first person with whom she ever talks about her feelings. Although to start with, Edna cannot swim, she learns to do so and feels liberated. She starts to think of rejecting assigned roles. By the end of the vacation, Edna and Léonce have grown apart, while she and Robert have grown close. To avoid what might happen, Robert moves to Mexico. Back in New Orleans, where she lives, Edna relinquishes her role as housewife, and becomes serious about her painting. Léonce takes a long business trip to New York, his mother looks after the couple’s two young children, and Edna moves into a place she calls the pigeon house. She spends a night with a man who’s a substitute for Robert, whom she thinks is still in Mexico. But he returns and visits her. After some awkward meetings, she kisses him. Although she says that he “must have forgotten that she was Léonce Pontillier’s wife,” she and Robert both declare their love for each other. Then a servant brings a message to say that Adèle Ratignolle is sick, so Edna goes to see her. When Edna returns, she finds a note from Robert. It says: “I love you. Good by—because I love you.” She realizes that he has departed, so she will be solitary. She returns to Grand Isle, removes her clothes, and swims out to sea. 

 

As well as this novella, Kate Chopin is known for her short stories. Her principal literary influence was Guy de Maupassant (whom she first read when she was about 35). “I read his stories,” she said, “I marvelled at them.” He spoke to her directly and intimately. She admired his escape from tradition, his rejection of hypocrisy. Her first short story was published when she was 39.

 

Although there had been myths, fables, and fairy tales, the literary short story dates back perhaps to 1842: Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The short story can be compared with the sonnet: eight lines, four lines, and two lines, with potential turning points between each set, after which we can see what had gone before in a new way. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) for instance, the protagonist first hears that her husband has died in a railway accident. She breaks down in tears, then goes to her room to be alone. There—turning point—she experiences “something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name”—a feeling of freedom. Then, towards the end of the story, she leaves her room and goes downstairs. There’s a turning of a key in the front door lock—final turning point—her husband returns; she dies of a heart attack.

 

In The Awakening, Kate Chopin uses techniques that are typical of poetry. Although she does this all the way through, an instance is in Chapter 10, when Edna finds she can swim, metaphors include: sea—liberation, learning to swim—accomplishment, actions previously not taken—actions that can now be taken, indoors is containment—outside are possibilities, lying in a hammock—comfort, coziness. There are also reiterated scenes of sleeping and waking. In addition, there are juxtapositions and contrasts. In Chapter 10, Edna’s walk down to the beach with Léonce contrasts with her return with Robert. In a more distant comparison, the novella’s first scene with Edna’s return from bathing connects with its last scene in which she swims out to sea. There are also scenes of emotion as inwardly experienced. For instance, as Edna finds herself able to swim “a feeling of exultation overtook her.” Early versions of such feelings tend to be vague. They then become more distinct; so exultation transforms into a feeling of freedom from the role into which Edna has been cast: wife and mother.

 

Kate Chopin. (1894). “The dream of an hour.” In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories(pp. 259-261). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Kate Chopin (1899). The awakening. In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories (pp. 3-128). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Nicolai Gogol (1842). “The overcoat” (C. Garnett, Trans.). In The overcoat and other stories (pp. 3-51). London: Chatto & Windus (current edition 1923).

 

Taking Up Space: Embodying Formations of Visionary Fiction

As I have noted in the past, I study with an organization that provides yoga training in the context of disability, and every year, they hold a month-long "Kiss My Asana" yogathon, which I take as an opportunity to explore embodied experience more deeply, particularly how every body can access the most experience. Following the lead of Matt Sanford, who runs MindBody Solutions, I'm organizing my yogathon practice around creating context where it is possible to try to take up as much space as possible -- a feeling I think can be easiest to access through poses that encourage you to push out like a star. 

Last weekend's amazing Formation video repeatedly featured this star-spaced theme -- combining the physical act of making space with attention to the social relationships that challenge or support this space making, something I'd like to stay a few more things about, given that moving the yogathon to February from its prior location in April has placed it squarely in Black History Month.

This child takes this space in front of a line of riot police, which gives a sense of how this act of reaching out can take different kinds of effort, since the star-reaching, dry-swimming, afro-maintaining dance formation in the pool is obviously not easy.

Beyoncé is obviously very powerful -- and part of what has made Formation rock the internet is not just the power of star poses, but their particular use: pitting that power in both powerful and vulnerable ways against oppression:

Splayed out on a police car as it submerges in a New Orleans flood, after asking "Stop shooting us," or restaging plantation representations, she enacts what Adrienne Maree Brown describes as important visionary fiction, showing possibility and what the space it inhabits looks like:

Phenological Anxiety and Abeyance

Last year at this time, I watched the leaves flame out with peculiar detachment: for the first time, I was leaving my temperate deciduous autumn during the brief interval between leaf fall and snow fall, dissociating the exhilarating experience of gorgeous foliage transformation from the anxious anticipation of winter. This year, I am attempting to channel that dissociation to mitigate the seemingly unavoidable resignation that comes with the end of warm season foliage.

Psychologically, part of what was interesting about trading in my usual excruciatingly cold winter for a cool southern hemisphere summer in Dunedin was that it did not feel quite like summer—it was much more like coasting in a pleasant autumn/spring holding pattern, the kind of seasonal dawn/dusk people in places like Florida and California must experience, complete with a full panoply of broadleaf evergreens whose home range just doesn’t extend quite this far. This in-between season is quite a contrast with the ominous gloaming of both the second half of autumn and the first half of spring in Minnesota, both of which twinkle with the starry brightness of long clear nights and the occasional crystalline sunny days of a winter too cold to snow but also stretch out with snow cover that one knows will last almost half of the year before the leaves flesh out again. Even if it might be t-shirt and swimming weather (like it is today!) while the leaves are crunchy on the beach in Minneapolis, one knows that the lake could freeze within the week, and this leads to a certain pinchedness that contrasts the relaxed abandon elicited by extended warmth in summer.

In a Dunedin kind of summer, any warm morning is almost certain to be followed by a stiff breeze off the cold ocean separating you from Antarctica, sucked in by the lifting warming of interior Otago. The short half-life of warmth prompts somewhat more structured adventure: one is motivated to get out into the promise of warmth but without the illusion of extended heat or the punishment of overheating. This is consistent with spring/fall activities of my prior experience, times when I have found it easiest to plan around the possibility of being outside, getting some sunshine and warmth in whatever time of day best allows it, and then retreating inside to get work done with the rest of the time—a rhythm that feels well balanced and measured, overextended into neither lassitude nor action.

The summer/winter rhythm, in contrast, often feels like one of allowing catch-up relaxation time contrasted with the holing up of cold months recognized to not be much good for fun. Everyday winter sports like biking or snowshoeing or skiing (even as a commute) are process-intensive enough with their bundling and equipment to feel laborious. And the cold is punishing enough to elicit a constant low-level vigilance. Even on days nice enough to lounge around outside if dressed warmly enough, for example, I’ve had police stop to make sure I wasn’t dead when trying to soak up some sun sitting against a tree in the park. Constant reminders of how not to be killed by the weather require a fair amount of the “hygge” coziness that has become a trendy aspiration of cold winter sojourns.

So as I watch orange, red, and yellow leaves stream off the trees today in the uncertain mid-autumn sunny warmth, I am compelled by ways to build up my measure of phenological equanimity in the face of oncoming winter. Phenology is the study of the signs of seasonal progression, and it was an unusual gift last year to be able to watch these signs without bracing for the onrush of seasonal symptoms one expects next (ice! snow! dryness crinkly with static, dark mornings, afternoons, and long nights and slippery roads). This year, I find myself poking at the edges of this anticipation in a more exploratory way, wondering how to build mitigation by other means than escape.

I remind myself that I already organize my daily commute around sun gathering, and that I own a reasonable trunkful of warm winter clothes. The walking and bike commute may soon be more difficult, but I have just discovered a bus route that stops within two blocks of my home and office. I am looking for some better sources of humidity, and spaces to be active and at ease without a lot of extra clothing this winter. If I could build into my schedule regular sessions working in community greenhouses, pleasant spaces, and sunny places to write, can those feel as ordinary, well-balanced, and un-emergency as staying out of the high sun in summer or keeping the garden weeded?

A New Appreciation of What Pies Are For

I paid closer attention to the shape of my produce over the course of this last growing season. Partly because I’ve been working with a number of projects that are starting to figure out what it might be meaningful to measure in gardens, I’ve started thinking about how much food I collect, and what state it’s in. I had never really thought to account for how much of the food I produced was eaten by woodchucks or slugs – because I wasn’t eating it, I was just thinking of it not existing, effectively. But prompted by the wonderful Food Dignity project, I started to think differently about the produce that dried up on the stems because I hadn’t come to pick it (the dried beans and raspberries were delicious, and a handful would have been a pint fresh!), or the strawberries that would have been more edible if I had better air circulation, or the zucchinis I might have had if I could figure out how to distract the woodchuck.

None of this is to say that I feel like I must account for – and possess – all the production possible, but it also made me feel somewhat more successful, and to notice, furthermore, the different stages along the life cycle of a plant where it might be useful, something that had previously been tacit knowledge. For example, I live in a climate where fava beans don’t thrive, but they do well enough – and I can eat the greens if I don’t get enough beans. The purslane and sorrel that grow in my beds no matter what I do are likewise delicious, and reliable even when the rabbits eat whatever was more intentionally planted.

This attention to the stages and close relations of the produce I intended has also spilled over to the produce I find myself sorting as I prepare for winter. Sorting through a ten pound box of blueberries for freezing, for example, I found myself eating ones that might be too mushy to hold up well in my Individual Quick Freeze process – and also sorting out all the ones that seemed questionably ripe; it seemed like those might justify the high amounts of sugar called for in blueberry pie. And all of a sudden I gained a new appreciation of the function of pies!

Pies’ main function may be to deal with questionable fruit! This seems obvious enough in retrospect—although I’m not sure I’ve ever categorized pie as a holding tank for not-freezer-worthy fruit. And this categorization of such a basic staple has made me wonder what other functional food categories I’ve been overlooking at this time of needing to figure out how to squeeze more holding space out of my larder.

Hello, shrubs…

Finding Base, with love for Paul

On the occasion of celebrating Paul (a cousin of mine who was a well-loved wrestling coach in New York and who passed this week), I want to share a small story in three parts about finding base, a kind of metaphysical version of a wrestling parable I realize I learned from him.

The soundtrack for the story is the recent arrangement of Meghan Trainor’s ‘All about the Bass’ by the Postmodern Jukebox: I know it’s about bass and treble, not base and instability, but it makes a nice complement to Paul’s lifelong intense insistence on the enjoyment of the tenor.

The part of the story you should feel in your body is something I’m finally picking up from studying yoga with people learning to inhabit their bodies more fully even through disability: it’s all about the base. Bipedalism isn’t great to us in terms of a base of stability, and as we sway and twist under the various vicissitudes of life, we grip and slacken and may not often be reminded how to settle back into all the points of contact with balance we have – spreading the load out as easily as we can lift it, securing those points of contact with the floor, moving fluidly from there like Paul’s wrestlers.

Paul has been a solid part of all of the lives of my whole generation of our family. Rocked back on his heels, arms folded or in his pocket or gesturing along to his whistle, Paul made us feel where we were standing, and made us appreciate it by the intensity and effort he put into being there.

Growing up as a child of our extended family so palpably (my grandfather’s brother, his father, was dead before his childhood) – stretched between his visits and so visibly sharing his need, his toughly vulnerable quest to navigate a degree of lostness – he gave us so much coaching in the material and spiritual practice of how to relax into things, even when they were sad. And I really appreciate that coaching right now, as I tend to shift up toward my toes in the best of situations.

Critical pastoral: Reorienting in complex contexts

I spent the past several months looking across the Dunedin Harbour at what is marked on the bus maps simply as "fertilizer factory." The Ravensbourne superphosphate plant bills itself as the premier source for pastoral nutrients in New Zealand, and considering the role of fertilizer in pastoral systems has made me understand something new aboutthe way that explanatory stories operate, especially when they are about something like food -- something we encounter often, may care about deeply, but do not necessary have much systemic knowledge about.

The short version of how I've needed to revise my story of pasturing sheep has to do with understanding of how pastures work. Although I have known, at various points, that people fertilize grasses and other fodder to make them grow better (and hence that pasturage represents a potential threat to water -- frankly, even without fertilizer, potentially, given the nutrients in animal waste), I found that I still romanticized grassland systems as, at best, letting animals forage in ecosystems adapted to their grazing.

This is not exactly the wrong story, but it makes me think about the trajectory of my understanding of corn agriculture: for the first third of my life, as far as I can remember it, I thought of corn as an attractive indicator of successfully retained agriculture (even when I realized it was "cow corn," as we called it in my childhood, rather than fresh corn for human food). As I studied agroecosystems in more detail and came to recognize the food landscapes I encountered in the context of their complex relationships, cornfields became a daunting manifestation of monocultural extractive landscapes, designed for the most efficient transformation of metabolic processes into industrial returns on investment. It has taken over a decade of further exploring corn—growing beautiful varieties in my garden, curating and exchanging gift corn with interesting stories and geographical histories—to learn to appreciate some of the further complexity beneath the surface of what appears to be a repellently stripped down productivist ecology.

The fertilizer factory has helped provide a similar entry point into stories of pastures, making me wonder how others see their complexity. If farmers are compelled to maximize the returns on their pastures such that they become "locked in," as those who study the production of scientific knowledge call it, to the whole system surrounding the relationship between particular kinds of livestock and particular kinds of pasturage (white clover and sheep, for example, despite the better contexts for nitrogen-fixing microbiota that red clover might provide), how can we invite someone just appreciating the pastoral landscape into the whole fascinating world of the political economy of agroecosystems, to debt, the models of nutrients and water flows and soil edaphon, and the many stories that govern how we orient ourselves amidst these complexities?

Orientation to very hard things

If you tell people something is going to be really hard, who responds to that invitation?

Can you figure out how to stage the signals letting people know that there will be difficulty -- so they are neither ambushed nor deterred, but invited with the assurance that they will have just as much support as they need to face the challenge?

I have been following this line of thought to figure out how to more successfully scaffold uncomfortable conversation about society and environment issues.

Traveling back to the U.S. reminds me how hard people are on each other, even (maybe especially) when they're trying to build up to doing hard things. So having watched a wave of appreciation for mothers swell the bandwidth of social media yesterday, I'd like to add my appreciation for the orientation provided by people who have done things they think others should try.

I can see how you went. I can witness and imagine some ways these things can be done, especially if I don't also have to worry about sticking exactly to your path(s). And especially then, figuring out the paths to take, I am even more grateful for the sign posts people might leave at difficult passages and choice points.

Re-labeling a fierce wind: Listening more to internal dialogue

I commuted this morning for the first time to my new office against a head wind that was strong enough to beg for an additional adjective. The wind was whipping off the hills to the north and pouring into the valley with such strength that it stopped my bike on downhill slopes, and it took herculean pedaling to get to work in just under twice the amount of time I had estimated it would take. My route takes me around the bay end of Otago harbor, and especially as I got down to the south side of the water, the wind was not only trying to push me off my bicycle, it was also throwing fistfuls of water my way, and snapping branches down into my path. Passing through the lee of my favorite pohutukawa trees almost knocked me off my bike in the other direction, the contrast was so sharp when sheltered.

In this kind of retrospect, it is easier to deconstruct the various parts of my experience of the wind, and analyze their relationship to my emotional state in relation to it. At the time, however, my main reaction was terse. I kept finding myself exclaiming (to myself) about what a fierce wind this was, or how wicked.

This was clearly a practiced response—the kind of thing one might say to a companion facing into a stiff wind, perhaps to keep spirits up, or to check in to see whether a course correction might be in order, or if the goal is worth the punishment of the wind. It certainly summons a certain attention to the wind: is this the kind of wind that is bringing a change in the weather I need to pay attention to?

My immediate response was surprisingly normative: I found myself chastising my inner wind labeller. True, the wind is from the north northwest, and my northern hemisphere self braces against the Alberta Clipper-eque cold that often signals at the time of year. But here in Dunedin in summer, what if this is a warm equatorial burst? Pedal harder. And I would no sooner concentrate on pedaling again when I would hear the first voice start up again about what a fierce wind that was.

In the weeks that have followed since I wrote the first lines above on my first commute, this conversation with myself has stuck with me, and has made me notice some things about internal dialogue. First was its pre-formedness. I was not so much searching for descriptions for what I was experiencing as I was discovering what I was experiencing by the way my internal voice was narrating it to me. This was accentuated by the dramatic nature of the effortful windy bike ride, and my consequently narrowed mental bandwidth. When I wondered, somewhat involuntarily, “why is this so hard?” a preformed answer was already there with an explanation about the ferocity of the wind.

This was, secondly, not just a descriptive note, but a preformed normative analysis that constructed the wind as a character! By assigning qualities like fierce and wicked to the wind, my internal weather monitor was personifying what I was “up against,” and providing me a set of similarly preformed schemata for responding: fight, struggle, perhaps retreat. It was only through the second part of the internal dialogue that I could access a perhaps more interesting schema like explore—or even reconsider those hasty judgments that come from experience in a very different place.

Although fairly mundane, these observations about the qualities of internal dialogue made me start to pay considerably new attention to how much I was relying on presets to interpret and orient in new situations. And especially since I was already bringing the frame of reorienting myphenological expectations in a hemispherically reversed seasonal transition, I had yet a new tool for noticing when and how that second part of the conversation could be encouraged, figuring out what patterns I am observing, and how those work.

Adjusting Phenological Expectations

The leaves on the trees along the Mississippi River where it runs through my neighborhood are just starting to turn. This has prompted a dissonance of expectation that is unprecedented in my experience: I will be spending the northern hemisphere winter in the southern hemisphere this year, so I have the chance to experience the seasonal transition into autumn without the bracing involved in facing cold weather. This has started me down a fascinating path of adjusting all of the expectations that collect around the phenological transitions we notice with the changing of seasons in a particular place, like when the leaves bud and leaf and color and fall.

I have discovered that I appreciate existential preparation for things like seasonal change. Unlike my mother, for example, who (as a schoolteacher by profession) covered her eyes whenever she saw a schoolbus before Labor Day and tried to hold off on acknowledging the coming change of season, I find seasonal changes less jarring if I play with them at least a little bit before they happen. Even welcome changes, like the emergence of leaves, suddenly taking up so much of the experiential space of the sky in the spring, can come with challenging feelings, for example of those leaves pressing in on me in an unaccustomed manner. This transition can be much more interesting and less dissonant if I have anticipated them adequately. This year, for example, with spring so late, I willed the leaves to come out, staring them into sprouting in the side yard with so much effort that when they appeared, it was more as if they were filling a void than taking up space I had been enjoying. I also travelled to places a bit further ahead of us where leaves were concerned, refamiliarizing myself with the feeling of leaves and the changed spatial relationship with trees.

The inverse moment, when the leaves come off again, has a more glorious compensation, but for a much more woeful change: a reduction in aerial spaciousness is a trivial price to pay for the transition out of the six months of freeze; the colorful riot has to be awfully amazing to store up equanimity for return to the cold half of the year. But this year, I am gleeful about the ability to experience some distance between the dying of the summer and the anticipation of cold. But what will this be like? I anticipate that I will learn not only about the many ways I may unconsciously brace for the worst* (and hopefully unlearn some), but also about the way that foreshadowing works in the experience of narrative. This hemispheric transition will also give me a chance to re-explore the relationship between the warm and cold seasons, something that has been creeping up in my priority list, as my recent hip reconstruction has suddenly relocated me, socially, into the set of people who feel seasons in their bones, and as my scholarly work brings me more often into the problem spaces created by less predictable climate regimes.

I have often wanted to stockpile some of the warm experiences of the green land of summer—the space one can move through in bare skin and relaxed limbs—to sustain me in the snowed-in dark months, and I have a picnic project opening tomorrow that is designed, in part, to do just that: to collect and catalogue moments of un-seasonally-encumbered exploration for unpacking in the inside months. Perhaps narrating my way through these picnics will also help me approach this season of preparation in ways that let the seasons talk to each other more in my experience, and that let the reading of phenology always have compensating comforts.