119/1001 'The Awakening' by Kate Chopin or 'Emma Bovary moves to New Orleans and Makes a Twat of Herself'

So a few months ago I happened to watch a film called 'The Awakening'. It was OK, kinda, it was about some scientific ghost hunter lady going to some creepy school in Scotland and having her parts equally scared and charmed off her by this teacher guy and his ghostly kids. It was sort of like Mythbusters meets 'The Others' with a bit of rape and lust thrown in for good measure. Now I was fairly keen on 'The Others' but was HORRENDOUSLY disappointed by the book it was based on, 'The Turn of the Screw'*. So when I typed 'The Awakening' into Amazon (to see if the DVD had been released) and a book came up I thought "hooray! Chance for a scary read". The when I saw that I could download it to my kindle FOR FREE and that IT WAS LISTED ON THE 1001 I was like ZOMFG! THIS IS MEANT TO BE LADS!

 
Yeah so it turns out that, upon further research, the ghosty film and the book by Ms. Chopin have nothing in common. My bad. Turns out that 'The Awakening' is an early feminist classic, who knew? Well not me evidently. But hey I thought, I like my feminist stuff, I'm up for this, I've never heard of the damn thing but it was evidently important once and after all it is still on the 1001 list.

So this version sees a young society wife and mother fall in love with a young dandy while on holiday. It all starts out as a bit of flirty fun, but then it gets a bit out of hand and the young lad buggers off to Mexico because he knows the whole thing is doomed. Meanwhile the young society wife (known here after as Edna) moves back to New Orleans and proceeds to get more and more fed up with all her society duties, so she decides to jack it all in. She stops doing her little visits and returning letters and holding dinner parties and all those super important things what ladies with rich fellas oughta do. Her husband is all 'WTF' but is convinced by the local doctor that she is just being a silly girl and that it is fine for him to bugger off to New York for a while and send his kids to his mothers because Edna won't do anything silly.

 So surprise surprise, while hubby is away Edna starts fooling around with a local womanizer and generally misbehaving, at least in the eyes of polite society. She shuts up the big fancy family pad and moves into a little house down the road, where lover boy can come round without the neighbors minding. The the guy she fancied on holiday comes back from Mexico, like kisses her once and then promptly runs off again. In response to this Edna travels back to where she met him on holiday and drowns herself.

Honestly I cannot figure this out, I'm just so confused. The silly bint kills herself? Alright her lover boy has buggered off again but really he's done it once before so I'm sure she'll come back. Also she's just managed to get what she wants, she's left her husband, she's carrying on with some Casanova, she has her own house with no kids to bother her, so why does she kill herself? And why did people get so upset about this book giving women 'ideas', it didn't exactly end well for her did it? 'Here you go ladies, leave your husbands, leave your kids and end up drowning yourselves in despair', surely it's more of a cautionary tale!

Up until the suicide bit ruined it all though, I was quite enjoying this book. Chopin communicates this kinda vague despair of women who haven't really been terribly ill treated, but still are a bit fed up with their lot in life quite well. Edna knows she should be happy really, she is well off, attractive, has plenty of servants to help her run her house and her husband is very kind and treats her well, but it doesn't make her happy. I think there is a clear tendency for people (men and women alike) to think that if you don't actually abuse women, and they have more or less the same rights as men, then that's just fine and we should put up with it. It's only when we completely fuck over women (like old Tess of the d'Urbervilles) that we need to get upset. I guess that puts Chopin well ahead of her time really, this general feeling of being dissatisfied with the role society wants you to play rings very true today, when in the west we are, on paper, so close to equality between the sexes, but in much more subtle ways we are so far from it.

Edna is a lot like Madame Bovary, the main difference being she isn't such a bitch. I guess what made this book different from others at the time (in the humble opinion of someone who originally thought it was about Scottish ghosts) is the fact that we are supposed to sympathise with her. Yeah I don't like that she feels the need to cheat on her husband with a lame playboy (why do the women in these kind of books always feel the need to be adulterous?) or that she kills herself (still super pissed off about that) but I do like her, and I do feel sorry for her. I don't feel sorry for Emma Bovary, the book was awesome, but she was an utter cunt.

* I know I know preferring the film to the book is a bibliophile no no, but this is one of the very rare cases where this is justified. 'The Turn of the Screw' is very, very, very boring for a book that is supposed to be about ghosts and creepy kiddies. It's all so vague and poorly described, I'm sure a shadow at a window was enough to make the Victorians soil their pantaloons, but it takes a bit more these days.