The Awakening
I read Kate Chopin's, "The Awakening" more than a decade ago, in a small Freshman English class, at a tiny Christian college. My professor was a tall, strong, Black American woman whom I was, frankly, enamored with. I had never seen someone who so perfectly embodied everything I wanted to be- graceful and intelligent, well-read and well-spoken, poised, an advocate for woman (I will refrain from using the word Feminist not because I believe she wasn't one in the context in which I understand the word, but because it can have pejorative connotations which, out of deference, I'd like to not attach to her). She also was a deep theologian, which I both coveted and revered and entwined it in our classroom without doing what I've come to call, "The Christian Lord of the Rings Syndrome"- forcing biblical ideals onto secular productions that had no intent of pointing of Jesus in order to make it more, ahem, "acceptable". She was able to find God in almost anything creative, because God's very nature is creation, but was clear in pointing out what she believed the author's intentions were.
I hadn't known then what a controversial text the short novel was. A novel that so perfectly executes the plight of the domestic sphere- strong women have no choice but to take their own life, lest it be taken away piece by piece by a world that devalues their worth. I hadn't grasped the gravity of what she had done, passing this text out to a group of evangelical co-eds. I also hadn't known that it would shape me, validate me in a way I hadn't known I was waiting for. I hadn't expected the tears pouring down my face in my dorm room-"The past was nothing to her, offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; it was hers, to torture her with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened self demanded," the re-reading in the lobby waiting for my laundry to dry late into the night. I also hadn't anticipated that after all the novels I've read, having left one college for another, having majored in Literature, that this would be one of the few to follow me.
Pieces of it have floated back to me over the years as I've struggled to hold together these pieces of myself that make up my life- daughter, friend, sister, professional, wife, writer, musician, mother, home-manager, cook, gardener, ect. Every time I read the passage where Edna Pontellier finally learns how to swim- "She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before," I cheer. For her. For me. I want to swim where no woman has swum before, too and exclaim with her, "It was nothing! Why did I not discover before that it was nothing! Think of the time I have lost, splashing around like a baby!"
The way music moves her in a way that is other; the way it moves me. "It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready."
But mostly, these days, it is this very conversation that I cling to. In the nights when I'm uncertain of this road I've chosen for myself- the what if's, the mistakes. The terrible, foreboding feeling that I'm a terrible wife and mother, and a terrible professional. That I cannot be all the things. The switch that I feel I constantly flicker on and off between: Ellie's Mama, Jenny, Ellie's Mama, Jenny, back to Ellie's Mama again.... Reading again as Edna comes into herself, finding herself, and tries to explain the depth and the beauty of being a woman truly alive to someone who hasn't grasped it herself.
"I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me."
This delicate balance of remaining grounded as a person, a woman, who also happens to be a wife and a mother, is still precarious at best. Like swimming in the sea. But I know something Edna didn't. I have a God who crafted me lovingly. Who designed me specifically. A God who loves, edifies, and lifts up women in each and every role they find themselves in. I have a God who believes in women- in their voices, in their gifts, in their abilities. I have a God who knew that women were necessary and integral as teachers, preachers, encouragers, leaders and who has equipped us to do just that.
So, when I swim out in the sea, past the breakers, where, "no woman has swum before," I do it knowing who I am in Him. And unlike her, I swim right back to shore. To my life, to my family, to my community, to my job, to my gifts and to my future.