The Cost of Waking Up

Mum and I went to St. George this week. This is in Snow Canyon.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening (spoiler alert) is the second book I've read in three weeks which ends with a surprise suicide. In both cases the protagonist strides into water and drowns. The other book was The Buried Giant. In both cases, the end is, in its way, wonderful and inevitable. But the end of The Awakening seemed sadder.

Edna, who has awakened to her own existence as a person and being worthy of independence and dignity, and worthy of freedom beyond her husbands dictates, realizes simultaneously that her life cannot be what she wants it to be. Lovers do not interest her; children stifle and oppress her. The life she has awoken to does not have a version that she wants to pursue.

Would she feel more positively if she were a man? Doubtful. Her husband leads as proscribed an existence as she does, though in a very different sense: he has at least the appearance of control over his business and his money. But in fact he controls nothing about his livelihood, is beholden to other men, and has to scramble to minimize the damage done by his uncontrollable wife.

Early in the novel Edna's awakening is exciting. She feels excitement, sensuality, desire, and freedom. She feels impetuous and rebellious, and acts out on these feelings against her husband's commands.

An exciting moment in the book occurs when Edna comes home from an evening at the beach and stays on the porch, in the hammock. Her husband comes home, says it's folly that she be up so late on the porch, and tells her to come into the house. She very calmly refuses:

With a writhing motion she settled herself more securely in the hammock. She pereived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.

"Leonce, go to bed," she said. "I mean to stay out here. I don't wish to go in, and I don't intend to. Don't speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you."

One of the remarkable things about Mr. Pontellier in this book is his tendency to bend like   reed when his wife refuses to bend like one. He does not resist her; he is like a king who, faced with a obstinate servant, has no idea what to do about it and so does nothing. A few paragraphs later we get Edna's process of awakening:

"Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul. The physical need for sleep began to overtake her; the exuberance which had sustained and exalted her spirit left her helpless and yielding to the conditions which crowded her in."

What a phrase: "the realities pressing into her soul"! It is difficult to say whether this is a happy or a sad state, in which realities press in on one. Realities can be freeing, as in "I don't have to do everything my husband tells me to do." This next paragraph tells of less pleasant realities pressing in on her, right before she succumbs to the water.

"Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night, and had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the souls' slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them. She was not thinking of these things when she walked down the beach.

...

The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace."

It is not so difficult to characterize the awakening James Baldwin describes in The Fire Next Time. These realities are heartbreaking, and so typically obscured by the false narrative of white supremacy that hearing them is like getting slapped in the face. In the earliest part of the book Baldwin describes his childhood experiences which led him to the church, and his experiences in church which led him out of it.


The deftness and control with which he describes the violence committed against black citizens of this country is .... I don't know how to describe it. Infuriating. Infuriating that this kind of truth blares like a fog horn through the lives of black Americans, while for white Americans it is hardly a whisper, if anything. Here is how Baldwin describes his and other black boys' awakening:


"... I myself had also become a source of fire and temptation. I had been far too well raised, alas, to suppose that any of the extremely explicit overtures made to me that summer, sometimes by boys and girls but also, more alarmingly, by older men and women, had anything to do with my attractiveness. On the contrary, since the Harlem idea of seduction is, to put it mildly, blunt, whatever these people saw in me merely confirmed my sense of my depravity.

It is certainly sad that the awakening of one's senses should lead to such a merciless judgment of oneself - to say nothing of the time and anguish one spends in the effort to arrive at any other - but it is also inevitable that a literal attempt to mortify the flesh should be made among black people like those with whom I grew up. Negroes in this country - and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other - are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world."

No matter how depressing the existential epiphanies of Edna Pontellier were, there was no message in them that she was despicable. Finding life not worth living is better than wanting to live and being told you are not worthy of an equal life.

The church plays a dishearteningly large role in Baldin's painful "awakening" to his depravity. We are so out of touch with our sensual selves, so distant from our own reactions and their legitimacy, that we condemn our thoughts and impulses because they are so foreign. The church needs to get a little more close and personal with the normal thoughts and feelings of humans! We need a church service which is a cross between traditional service and the WNYC podcast "Death, Sex, and Money: Three things we think about a lot and need to talk about more."

I had my own awakening this afternoon to the pleasures of bike maintenance at the Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective:








Last night, I awakened to the glory of Dvorak's slavic dances, performed by the Utah Symphony: