Warning: This post contains spoilers for a crap-ton of literature and film, but you should read it anyhow.
I did two things this past weekend:
Finish reading the Awakening and help to host a baby shower for my BFF Ashley.
The first time I read the book, it was on a plane ride to California with Ashley and my mother the summer following our senior year. We were 18, the summer before going to college.
And here I am reading it 10 years later, as Ashley is about to have her first baby and I am looking toward finally, after 6 years of being nomadic, settling down into a job and into a place.
Unintentional, but poignant.
I didn't remember much from the first time I read it - The opening scenes on the beach. A woman wondering around a cul-de-sac near a large white house. And the ending - where she walks into the ocean and drowns herself.
My semester has been the most hectic and difficult one teaching in my life. Definitely on par with that troublesome first year. My art-making has been neglected. So in an attempt to get back on the horse, I thought a good dose of classic feminist literature would do the trick. And it has.
I didn't realize, but I am the exact same age as Edna in the book. She was 28 and in the latter part turns 29, one month before her final swim. I will be 29 this October.
I tried my best to identify with her, though she was married at 22 to a man she didn't much care for, had two children, and when we first discover her - has lived a monotonous existence of sameness.
It's not until she decides to take a swim - something she has previously been afraid of, that she realizes her mortality and then she begins her awakening. An awareness to her aliveness, and also that her path has been one pre-planned for her for society. Until now, she's followed all the rules and the plan set for her by the life gods. Get married. Have Babies. Raise your babies. Then end.
(May I interject at this point, the story line is similar to another favorite
The Death of Ivan Illych by Tolstoy - about a man who "comes alive" once he becomes terminally ill - and discovers all the meaningless social motions we go through. You should read it.)
Edna faces the same troubles as Julianne Moore's Character Laura Brown in
The Hours - Unhappy housewife trapped in a life of convention.
Edna chooses death in the end - showing that, in no way will she ever escape the obligation of motherhood, so through drowning herself she has taken the final obligation - death - into her own hands. Laura Brown does the same - contemplating suicide, though Mrs. Brown in pregnant and can't kill her child. She waits until it is born and abandons her family to begin a new solo life.
This baby shower has been in the planning stages for over a month. Seeing as I do not live in Russellville to help with much of the prep work, I was assigned to make the Baby Banner because I'm the artsy type. I did my best to make something cutesie - decked out will all the pink sparkles and bows and ribbon that could fit within 5 feet.
Mom and I arrived early, helped hang the banner and arrange the foods on the table. At one point our host, regarding the fantastic spread, looked up at me with a smile and said, "Doesn't this make you want to have babies?!?!" I misinterpreted her rhetorical statement for a real question and said adamantly "No...No it does not!" and laughed. I could tell by the look on her face that I had just somehow insulted the existence of her children and grandchildren.
That wasn't the last conversation I had about babies that afternoon (if you can believe it). There were plenty of expecting and new mothers at the event. When talking to two other ladies about their baby plans one said to me "Oh, I know you'll be a mother someday, I just know it. You'll be a good mother."
I learned from my previous honesty to be more tactful with that statement. Do I tell these women that I don't really desire to birth anything? Or that my last Dr.'s appointment confirmed my suspicions that I am not even able to conceive children?
No. Confessing the former, they'd be sad for me or angry or confused - as I'm throwing off my womanly gift, and with the former I'd get sympathy and the already old conversation of new technologies and bionic uteruses.
I must say, when I did finally learn of "my condition" I was sad, because - if I ever did change my mind about birthing, it was too bad. With that said, I am perfectly contented in not being a mother ever in the conventional sense, and if later I get the impulse, I'll adopt something.
I have always been drawn to stories like the Awakening, and
The Hours. I remember the first time I saw the movie, at my friends Beth's House. I'd be struggling with a large decision for a while and Mrs. Laura Brown's story answered my question. When I shared the film, to me life-changing, with my friends, all they could say was "Wow! That's sad".
To me Laura Brown's story said - What makes you happy in life might not make other people happy. What you want in your life - your goals, your path, might not be for everyone else. You need to do what makes you happy.
This was freeing to me - a mini-awakening.
In the film, Mrs. Brown has a life envied by all her friends. The American Dream.
But despite that, it's not what she wants. This gave me permission to want something other than what I was supposed to.
Most of my art discusses women and rules that surround Femininity.
What we should do as women to be good - and what are the rewards for following the rules. Or the punishments for going off track.
Growing up in the south, there is plenty of pressure from the church and the society at large to get married and birth babies. I worked with two girls who were both my age at the time - 22, and both were married. I was not: "Oh Girl, If you're not married by 24 around here, you're an old maid."
That's really tragic.
Why am I so drawn to these morbid stories?
I love the freedom the women (and
Ivan) find. I love their awakenings.
They finally come alive.
I can't say that I, like Eda or Laura, had a specific moment where there was an awakening.
I feel I have struggled myself - as anyone growing up - with what to do, which way to go.
What is the "right" thing - to my family, to religion, to society...blah blah
I want, above all things, to be free.
Not free from responsibility, but free to make my own way, conventional or not.
The thing that hurts me the most, is when I see people being bound by rules. Meaningless social rules.
I find the decisions I make for myself hinge on this - do not compromise who you are.
I'll leave you with Ada's last words - from
The Piano.
One of the most beautiful scenes ever in a film.
It's another tale with Drowning, I know you're excited.
The mute piano player Ada has finally become free from her abusive husband, and is sailing with her new lover and her daughter and the piano to a new home.
The piano up until this point has acted as her voice. Looking at the piano, Ada signs to her daughter to have it thrown overboard, that the Piano is spoiled.
(Her husband earlier took an ax to the piano and then later took an ax to Ada's hand, cutting off both methods of communication.)
Her new lover, caring for her, throws it overboard. In one swift but thoughtful motion, Ada intertwines her foot with the pianos rope and both get dragged to the bottom of the water -she feels she too has been spoiled.
After a long descent, Ada has an awakening and swims to the top.
With the piano, and the old schema of life gone, Ada in the epilogue begins learning to speak.
The last scene, you see Ada floating above her piano in the bottom of the water while you hear her voice:
"My will has chosen life. Still, it has had me spooked and many others besides...
At night I think of my piano in its ocean grave, and sometimes myself floating above it.
Down there everything is so still and silent, that it lulls me to sleep.
It is a weird lullaby, and so it is, it is mine.
There is a silence, where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be, in the cold grave in the deep deep sea."
(Quote partly from Thomas Hood's poem
Silence)
