The impact of writing
When has a piece of writing, something you wrote or read, made a significant impact on your life? What qualities or context made that piece of writing so significant?
I grew up a reader, a lover of words, lyrics and poems. Both of my parents are voracious readers. My father was always reading. Magazines, newspapers, books and notes on scraps of paper littered most available surfaces in our house. I can’t recall the number of bookshelves purchased throughout my life but I do remember the joy when we moved into a house with built-in bookshelves. Both parents read for themselves and read to my brother and I. Beyond that, they encouraged our reading, made time for it as we learned, bought us books of our own. Visits to the library were often a daily event. To me, libraries were magic. All those books, the stories waiting to be discovered. My brother and I used to ride our bikes downtown, buy candy at the corner store and then head to the library where I could spend the afternoon.
I’m probably happiest when I’m reading. In that way, I suppose writing, all writing has had an impact on my life. I feel lucky and grateful that my parents passed on their love of the written word, that they prioritized reading in ways I would later learn, that not every household did. I believe reading provided a pathway for my love of learning new things, imagining places I’d never been, learning about people who were unlike me, identifying with heroes and heroines who overcame, and struggled, and had experiences that made me feel less alone, particularly when my mother was in the worst of her depression.
By the time I was in college, I longed to understand the deeper meaning of texts. While I’d been a reader my entire life I wasn’t studying what I read in the same way a college class would ask me to. I was also reading particularly for class, books, essays, poems, theories that I would not have otherwise read; some texts I’d never even heard of. And I certainly would miss the benefit of reading with a classroom full of students and a professor whose expertise was often instrumental in my understanding.
I was impacted by much of the writing I encountered but most significantly by Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
There was something achingly familiar in Chopin’s novel and in the character of Edna Pontelier, the protagonist. The nuances of Chopin’s language allows her to frame female experiences that had not been acknowledged at the time she is writing. There’s a real loneliness that later I would see in Mrs. Dalloway and in the brilliant Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and its film adaptation. I was too angry at the time I first read The Awakening, but perhaps it wasn’t unlike my mother’s loneliness, the loneliness perhaps all mothers, caretakers and nurturers face. Edna is dealing with the suffocation of her personhood, framed instead by expectations; the expectations of her husband, society, of place and what happens when there are discrepancies between any of the above. She is “seen” only through the lens of others though as readers, we understand that as a falsehood as does Edna in Chapter Six.
“In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (33).
This novel created a paradigm shift for me in the way I thought about what it meant to be a writer, a woman, a mother, a Southerner.
I was suddenly, acutely aware of all the advantages I had in the 20th century that Edna did not. At the same time, as a Southern girl who’d been steeped in the suggestion that what people thought of you mattered, I instantly identified with Edna, with the feelings of being caged by expectations. I first read this in my early 20s and still very much felt the weight of expectations upon me. And yet, Edna represented many of the things I strove to be in that she was a rebel, a maverick. She did and said what she wanted though she ultimately paid for refusal to fit into society.
As I mentioned, it’s Chopin’s language that strike me when I return to this text, as well as her use of place. The sea itself stands as a metaphor. Grand Isle is surrounded by water; there is no where to go. It is both isolating and freeing for Edna. Because I grew up on the water, I understand both its beauty and danger, the power of the tide, the life hidden in its depths.
Edna is empowered through the act of physical control of her own body and spirit while swimming successfully for the first time. Her previous encounters with the ocean are overshadowed as Edna is compared to a child that “realizes its powers and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence” (32). Here Edna experiences the first major shift in her awakening as she learns to “control the workings of her body and her soul” (32). The physical power used to move herself through the water and her final comprehension of the subject of swimming allow her to grasp onto control in her own life, an act which had not been present leading up to her awakening.
There’s something incredibly elusive about how best to articulate the influence of this novel on my life; yet it’s always there, never far from my mind. I often say this novel changed my life but explaining why sometimes stops me short. But, I think it gave me freedom to resist the expectations I was straining against, to be the maker of my own future. Before I read the book, I was a certain way and after I read it, I was completely different in significant but really intangible ways. Like Edna, “my present self was different than the other self”.
She let her mind wander back over her stay at Grand Isle; and she tried to discover wherein this summer had been different from any and every other summer of her life. She could only realize that she herself-her present self-was in some way different than the other self (102).
