Back to Reading

So now that most of my house guests are gone, I’m back to reading. I ran all over town today seeking the next three books (by William Fenimore Cooper). Apparently The Prairie was not such a huge hit, but I did eventually locate it at a used-book store. BTW, if you wonder how far along I am in my reading list, consider that I am reading alphabetically by author. Uh…yeah. I have a ways to go.

Anyway, today I completed The Awakening by Kate Chopin and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and other Short Stories by Stephen Crane. Here are some of my thoughts on those.

Warning: Ending Spoiler

The Awakening, a classic novella by Kate Chopin (pronounced SHOW-pan), hit book stores in 1899. Among the first Southern works, Chopin’s story is set in New Orleans and Louisiana’s southern coast. Her protagonist, Edna Pontellier, faces timeless moral decisions as she struggles to find a voice of her own amidst prevailing social attitudes.

The Awakening is one of the earliest American fictions to explore women's issues without condemnation or patronization. The story is full of sensuality that, though tame compared with contemporary stories, drew heavy criticism at the time of the book’s debut.

Its contribution is in raising the issues that drive Edna ultimately to kill herself. If we ask whether she was right to do so, we waste energy. The greatest value of the story is not in the rightness or wrongness of Edna’s decisions but in helping the reader explore the contemplations that lead to them.

Chopin’s realistic narrative reveals her talent for revealing psychological complexity and providing subtle social commentary.

Released six years earlier, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is a Stephen Crane novella. It’s the first and longest of several Crane works in this compilation. No one gets redeemed or has positive character arcs or offers hope in these stories. Crane seems uninterested in redemption, opting instead for realism.

For example, Maggie’s story takes place in Lower Manhattan’s Bowery neighborhood. She grows up in an abusive home and becomes a prostitute when her mother kicks her out. Yet the mother wonders why her daughter “went to the devil.” In another story, “The Monster,” a doctor’s black servant saves the doctor’s son from a burning house, but in the process this servant loses his face. The story explores an externally upright neighborhood’s hideous responses to the (heroic) human they can hardly bear to look at.

These stories do not leave the reader feeling uplifted. But they do provide interesting explorations of life’s injustices and the warped reasonings that often accompany them.