The Awakening
Sometimes it feels like I've already died and now am just reliving my memories. Maybe this is how I could describe arriving at Grand Isle and peeling the coast line with the brown oiled water and the sand with black bits. As I arrived, it was with no expectations, and with many unrelated thoughts on my mind. Of course, the journey from the airport and New Orleans consisted of embellishing the natural greenery and the wheels soaked in swampy water. But; I was not prepared for the history – confederate flags, lack of people, color (except for the violently painted houses), and lack of vibrancy expelled in the Grand Isle that contradicted the pages of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. I wish I could say that “There were acres of yellow camomile reaching out on either hand. Further away still, vegetable gardens abounded, with frequent small plantations of orange or lemon trees intervening.” (pg.21) but there was not. I was simply attempting to put myself outside of the greenery I saw on my way to New Orleans.
However, this still doesn’t stop me from thinking: Edna feeling her certain “anguish” while being in the Grand Isle is not why the Grand Isle island is dull now. After arriving at the Island, I sat on the porch of the AirBnB, the H20 Psycho house, and did my best to enjoy the leisure and space of being on an island whose history is not forgotten. I tried my best to enjoy the lengths I had to breathe in spite of that history. Kate Chopin made it clear what the island was meant for – so certainly, I would try. I think reading The Awakening while being on the island allowed me to appreciate Edna’s state of mind more than if I wasn’t. I perhaps might have hated her character if I had read the book outside of Grand Isle. But the sheer descriptive properties of not only the Island, but the transition from Grand Isle to New Orleans allowed me to step into a 1899 white woman’s shoes, eat up the wind and salt in the air, and imagine myself walking with my own Mrs.Ratignolle into a bath house on the beach and fanning myself off with a patterned pleated fan made of gauze with a “long, narrow ribbon.” (pg.23). I had to put the book down at some point though, and when I did — my mind returned to reality. The saturated beach sand turned into a plain, flaccid color, the wind was just the wind, the blue water, brown and oiled, and the ATV’s holding Trump flags behind the gushing sunset were tangible and in a such a birds-eye-view way that cracks on the wooden floor inside the AirBnB provided me with more visual stimulatory comfort than the natural view. This reality, mixed with the one where all of the white individuals in The Starfish moved out at the first sight of "foreigners" made it difficult to truly absorb the variegation of Grand Isle. That is, if there really was much of any there to begin with.
It’s a little unfortunate that I experienced Esplanade and surrounding streets after the book was read. However, when we all got back in the van and drove off from Grand Isle to New Orleans, many of my unrelated thoughts had dissipated and I could truly appreciate the topography that was Louisiana. It is true that I still feel as if I am reliving my memories of some distant past life, but now that I can see Edna’s house for what it is: built on the backs of slaves and uncompensated labour with a splash, no a deluge, of hate, I appreciate New Orleans 2026 a little bit more than however Kate Chopin described it in 1899.
Life is feeble. And I won’t give up another chance to “experience” the effusiveness of something given the history it provides through literature. So I am extremely grateful and happy to have experienced The Grand Isle the way that I did. I hope that maybe Kate Chopin wrestled in her lifetime with what she left out. Or that, if she was born today, maybe she would see the error in her methods with how she treated Black people and hierarchy of color in the novel.
I anyways empathize with Edna’s character in The Awakening. Maybe it’s just a placebo phantom, or the unrelated thoughts as I mentioned – but I could also feel “an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of [my] consciousness.” (pg.9) in the Grand Isle. I think it’s because I’m a woman. A Black woman at that. But also because I know that Edna was specifically a white woman in 1899 with the troubles that a white woman in 1899 would have. It could have been the blurred but bold line between the licentiousness of the Creole and the prudeness of the Kentucky Puritans and the fact of the existing “structures” existing in the first place that made Edna the way she was. That allowed her to describe the ocean as she did, “seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude,” (pg.20). In many ways it is the same way I feel about the cypress I witnessed along the Mississippi river as we rode in the van. Something I hadn’t experienced before, the mossy structures, the stilted architecture, yet — my relationary experiences made me wonder if I had. I therefore only feel apotheosis from the fact that I’ve experienced this “new” sensation in a different life – or otherwise, I’d peered into the future.
I say this, not to bash Grand Isle at all, but to appreciate that without The Awakening or the historical knowledge that I gained while being there, Grand Isle would’ve just been another spot in America with a most likely majority of racist people and a lot of American flags. It reminded me a lot of my mother’s hometown, Keyser West Virginia. Rural, a hometowny feel where I’m sure the hospitality amongst families is invaluable, and Christian to an extreme extent — but this time, with water and really green trees. As someone who is Black though, sometimes it feels as if, because “quadroon” nurses, and “black slaves” no longer exist (in the same context) in New Orleans, or specifically on the Grand Isle, the culture and substance that would exist today — has just completely dissipated (in the sense that the marginalized individuals are what brought vibrance to the island). And what’s left is just an empty shell of what once was. Palm trees, sand, wood, and tapered roofs.
Again, I highly appreciate the book for what it is, written for the time it was written. And while reading it, as I explained, I was completely engulfed in the emotions and colors that painted both The Grand Isle and New Orleans. I can point out a specific description of Edna’s house in the making — “Ellen brought him one of her dust-caps, and went into contortions of mirth, which she found it impossible to control, when she saw him put it on before the mirror as grotesquely as he could. Edna herself could not refrain from smiling when she fastened it at his request. So it was he who in turn mounted the ladder, unhooking pictures and curtains, and dislodging ornaments as Edna directed.” (pg.130). I can only imagine, now that I’ve seen what the Creole French & Spanish fusion infrastructure looks like, how her house would’ve looked. And I can envision the grunginess of the “work,” sweat, and grime that went to making it finished. That is, at least, how I felt from reading the book.
“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood...She was just having a good cry all to herself.”
