I recently stumbled across a list of the top books of the century or whatever, which listed this book as #2. I was surprised, because I had never heard of it. I stumbled across it in an antique store for $1 so I bought it, and finished it today.
Like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, you can see what it did for it's time, but otherwise, not particularly impressed. It was published in 1899 and a huge feminist scandal, mainly because the protagonist, a 28-year-old wife and mother of 2 throws off society's definition of a woman and wants to be independent, but I just didn't like the book much, even though it was set in New Orleans, one of my spirit cities! (The other is Boston). It felt a little boring, slow, completely contrived, and I never really felt what was trying to be conveyed (emotion, urgency) really came across. But it was short and interesting I guess.
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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.
At that time [Madame Ratignolle] had three babies, and was beginning to think of a fourth one. She was always talking about her "condition." Her "condition" was in no way apparent, and no one would have known a thing about it but for her persistence in making it the subject of conversation.
A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, - the light which, showing the way, forbids it. At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears. 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. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight... but the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many soul perish in its tumult!
Monsieur Farival thought that Victor should have been taken out in mid-ocean in his earliest youth and drowned. Victor thought there would be more logic in thus disposing of old people with an established claim for making themselves universally obnoxious.
[Her sentiments] belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.
Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle, - a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium.
Conditions would some way adjust themselves, she felt; but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.
"One of these days," she said, "I'm going to pull myself together for awhile and think- try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am."
I may as well admit that this is my birthday, and that I am twenty-nine.
He hoped she had not acted upon her rash impulse; and he begged to her consider first, foremost, and above all else, what people would say.
There was a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to "feed upon opinion" when her own soul had invited her.
She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness, - not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.
"...I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both."
"...There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others- but no matter- still, I shouldn't want to trample upon the little lives."
The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.
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