The second you leave LAX, tall cemented buildings, grand crowded highways, and blinding car lights clutter your eyes. The surroundings of MSY are quite different.
With four minutes till landing, I awakened from my three hour slumber, and my eyes were met with miles and miles of greenery, lakes, and rivers out the plane window. Are you sure we’re only four minutes away? It was 12:31pm when I landed and around 3 when we left as a group from MSY to Grande Isle.
Seated on the edge of the van seats, contemplating when to eat my only nutella snack pack, I was struck with an image that differed from what I had imagined. As we embarked on the I-310 highway, I expected to leave behind images of New Orlean’s French styled homes and buildings that we’d revisit in the coming week. Rather what surrounded large half empty highways were not buildings but vast lands of cypress trees, draped in Spanish moss, and enriched by the moisture of low-lying slowly moving water. Our view of swamps converged to that of a singular bayou to our right, on the LA-308. A long stream of water separating the already isolated houses, surrounded by the sweetness of sugar canes or the destructive footprints of Hurricane Ida. Our last road was the LA-1. What lay beneath it was not land, but a large body of water, where patches of saturated weeds and grasses rested. The peace of the marshlands guided our ears to the noise of the ocean outside our porch on Grand Isle.
“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening
The voice of the Grande Isle sea is not the same as the California coast. It doesn’t remind me of the busy streets I will soon hurry over, the assignments I have yet to complete, or the worries I’ll confront with still no answer, when I arrive back at home in Los Angeles, within an hour drive. It’s everywhere. It’s inescapable, engulfing all edges of Grande Isle, luring me in as it did to Edna. Riveting winds propel the waves forward while winding back my thoughts. My phone is nowhere in sight. I sit on the porch accompanied only by The Awakening and the seductive sea.
This peaceful sensation was not foreign, but neither had it ever elongated its stay to that of now. Occasionally, my mind would be able to free itself from the constraints of reality's grasp. Catching a breath, before being suffocated by the weight of endless thoughts. But here my breaths were slower, longer, free. And occasionally interrupted by the crunch of a Jo-Bob’s fry.
In the beginning of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna chooses to swim alone, further out than any woman has swum before, enthralled by the sea’s space and solitude. As she swims outwards, the sea serves as a source of liberation from the constraints of the society behind her. In the ocean, she is not expected to conform to the role of a mother, a wife, nor that of the woman in the late nineteenth century. Nature doesn’t abide by such conformities. She is purely a body in water and as a result, her presence isn’t found in the expectations of society but within herself.
“At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life–that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Writing from the twenty-first century, the expectations of Edna’s outward existence in the late nineteenth century vary from mine. Unlike Edna, I’m not weighed down heavily by the expectation of being a mother, a wife, and to entirely bury my needs, desires, and thoughts for the sake of a patriarchal society. This is not to say these expectations don’t still exist and underplay the much needed progress for gender equality we still face today, however, I am writing this blog on a trip that I choose to go on, as a single undergraduate student, studying what she loves, seeking to explore the world for herself. As a woman in the twenty-first century, I have many more freedoms fought by pioneering women before me. Nevertheless, this “outward existence” does not vanish with the wave of a new generation. As a woman, coming from a working class and immigrant family, these expectations remain and expand from those of Edna’s as a white and wealthy woman of her time. In the pursuit of my education, my career, and in my personal life, I feel the pressure to succeed. To continuously hustle, to worry about the next thing I need to accomplish, the next step I need to take to move up the social scale, achieve financial security, and ensure the love, the sacrifices, and the efforts of my parents are worth it. My “outward existence” is both a privilege garnered by the efforts of those before me and an expectation that overwhelms my inner self.
On Grande Isle, the movement of each wave brought upon a serenity that washed away my outward existence and revealed an inward life that didn’t question my steps for the future or my regrets of the past, but what I craved for a snack, how I enjoyed the book on my lap, and how I admired the view before me. As it did for Edna, the seductive sea brought upon a presence within myself.
“The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.”
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Throughout The Awakening, the presence Edna finds within herself battles with her outward existence, a battle that ultimately overcomes her. At the end, the sea is both a place of liberation for Edna and the place of death. Kate Chopin conveys the conflict between the present and presence. It’s like the swamps and the marshlands of Louisiana, ever growing and moving with the slow dance of water whose saturation prompts both life and destruction, beauty and pain.
After the 11th of June, I will board a plane and land in LAX back at home, where I’ll be welcomed by the sight of tall cemented buildings, grand crowded highways, and blinding car lights. The inevitable expectations of reality will surely overwhelm me again and the voice of the seductive sea will cease to be heard, but whose to say my inner presence cannot remain?
Well that’s a question for later.