Now here's mine. Sort of.
I don't have a favorite book. I have at least 50 favorite books and many of them have been challenged: Great Gatsby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Grapes of Wrath, Franny & Zooey, To Kill a Mockingbird. . . . I could go on.
The Awakening is not my favorite book, and it's not my favorite banned book. But it is the one I wanted to write about today.
Jacket copy from Amazon:
First published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. This sensuous book tells of a woman's abandonment of her family, her seduction, and her awakening to desires and passions that threatened to consume her. Originally entitled "A Solitary Soul," this portrait of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier is a landmark in American fiction, rooted firmly in the romantic tradition of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Here, a woman in search of self-discovery turns away from convention and society, and toward the primal, irresistibly attracted to nature and the senses. The Awakening, Kate Chopin's last novel, has been praised by Edmund Wilson as "beautifully written." And Willa Cather described its style as "exquisite," "sensitive," and "iridescent."
I first read this at some point in middle or high school, when my sister passed it along to me. Although at that age I couldn't identify with Edna Pontellier's experience as a wife and mother [uh, I guess I still can't, even if I'm more or less Edna's age now] I found her story deeply affecting. Reading so much classic literature by men--literature which I loved then and now and has had a huge impact on me as a reader and writer--this book blew my adolescent mind by focusing on women in an authentic, honest, feminist way. The Awakening is definitely not a love story. I loved the themes of solitude, independence, and women's emotional and sexual needs. I also loved the evocative descriptions of Louisiana life. During a family trip to New Orleans around that time, I remember thinking of Edna whenever I swam in the Gulf or saw Spanish moss or felt the humid breeze (i.e. constantly).
I'm not surprised that this book was so reviled by critics at the time of its publication that it was removed from library shelves and Kate Chopin was barred from arts leagues and her writing career was abruptly kaput (although that's sad). Those reactions make it more important, right? That a woman writing about female experience and questioning the role of women in society and the home was so unthinkable, so offensive, that people demanded the book be taken away. So The Awakening is important not just for the writing, or the themes, but in the context of its publication, too. And it still tells a captivating story.
Random side note: I got into a huge argument in college with a guy in my dorm about this book: he loathed it, I defended it. He ended up writing me a multi-page limerick about how bad The Awakening was. Said limerick ended with him asking me out, still in the same strict rhyme scheme. Um. No.
