on rereading & the awakening

Do you reread works/authors you didn’t like? Has it turned out well for you?

Despite that I often whine about never wanting to touch an author’s work again, I often find myself giving that author another try because… well, you never know. What if I don’t read everything by Dickens and discover that one novel of his that might be a gem, might become my favourite novel ever? What if I learn to like Hemingway by reading him so much and becoming accustomed to his style, which is so at odds with mine? What if I discover something I never would have otherwise? And so I am suckered into reading yet another Hemingway, Austen, Dickens, or Trollope novel and hating every minute of it. There have been happy endings to my rereadings, of course.

I’m not revisiting Hemingway (off-limits because he died in 1961), but I am rereading the one classic I read when I was younger that I hated, ranted about, wanted to burn, and raised hell about at school: The Awakening. My female peers loved it, cried over it, and thought I was heartless for hating it. This little book, published in 1899, about a woman who finds herself by means of art and adultery just irritated me beyond belief. I was 17 when I read it, and while I was familiar with pre-modern concepts of femininity and was interested in the portrayal of women in literature, mostly Elizabethan lit, I don’t think I was old or mature enough to appreciate The Awakening. That, and I’ve never been much of a feminist, and when I was younger, I refused to read anything written by a woman because women aren’t writers, G-d be damned, and if they are, they write silly rubbish or are a Bronte sister, and the Bronte sisters are evil and long-winded and terrible, so don’t read them or anyone who has two X chromosomes. In fact, don’t read anything from the nineteenth century except Nietzsche. (This, of course, was the opinion of teenaged Christie, who, if she were to ever write a dissertation, would write one on the sensationalism of the domestic in the writings of Victorian women. Go figure!)

But Chopin’s writing is beautiful and fluid. It really is mesmerising, and it’s just as beautiful in A Vocation and a Voice, if you liked The Awakening and have considered reading another book by Chopin. At 17, I did appreciate the actual craft of the book, but it was Edna, the story, and the regressive symbolism at the end that angered me. And I’m just a few pages into it for the second time. I just read A Vocation and a Voice and liked it, so I’m willing to give Chopin’s originally offensive novel a second chance. I’ve matured a lot over four years—I’ve gone to uni and now have a degree, have had meaningful relationships, have embraced my womanhood, and have read and enjoyed works by female authors.

I hope I like it this time around. I mean, it’s not like there’s some stylistic reason, as in Hemingway or Dickens, that prevented me from liking the poor maligned thing in the first place. Maybe part of me will relate to Edna Pontellier and not want to kill her myself. I’m also quite a bit more conservative now than I was in 2007, so I’m kind of scared to see how I’m going to react to a book about whoredom and boredom. Wish me luck!