Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” for all its despondency,
conjures the prettiest images of summer:
There was a garden out in the suburbs; a small, leafy
corner, with a few green tables under the orange trees. An old cat slept all
day on the stone step in the sun, and an old mulatresse slept her idle hours
away in her chair at the open window, till some one happened to knock on one of
the green tables. She had milk and cream cheese to sell, and bread and butter.
There was no one who could make such excellent coffee or fry a chicken so
golden brown as she. (138-139)
As can any true poet, Ms. Chopin has with her beautiful
prose transformed my own summer and its torturous heat and painfully idle hours
into a veritable enchantress. The sun, I find, has not only become
tolerable—everything it touches suddenly glistens. And my curtains, they are no
longer the obligatory middleman between the sun and me. The sight of their
whiteness violently billowing in the wind has become endlessly alluring. My
summer is suddenly bestowed with charm. And so when I wipe the sweat off my brow, I
wipe delicately like the sensual Creole lady in the story.
For all its despondency, too, the novel moves me to embrace
the solitude that I have so feared and labored to evade. I am moved to savor my
own space and bask in my thoughts, lugubrious or merry. I am roused to take
long solitary walks to places unknown. I am made grateful for my painting and
for my dinners with myself. Somehow, Edna Pontellier’s fate does not discourage
but liberates.
What an opportune time for an awakening.
