Day 55: Read a Classic American Novel

 I was determined to read a novel considered an American classic. I chose Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.  I am familiar with Chopin’s themes and style; however,   I have never read what is considered her most important work.  “In The Awakening, Kate Chopin introduces Edna Pontellier, the wife of a New Orleans businessman and mother of two. Despite her conventional roles as spouse and mother, Edna struggles with romantic feelings and sexual desires that ultimately lead her to her own independence. The novel was quite controversial when published in 1899 and Chopin was ostracized immediately after its publication.”

 I came across this essay defining the “classic.”

What is a Classic?

by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
(1804-1869)

A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.

Such a classic may for a moment have been revolutionary; it may at least have seemed so, but it is not; it only lashed and subverted whatever prevented the restoration of the balance of order and beauty.

Kate Chopin did not receive literary acclaim until almost a half a century after her publications, In the 19^th century Victorian society her   themes of marriage being an oppressive and unjust institution were more than revolutionary. She was for the most part banned and went unnoticed as a literary figure. I like the courage she exhibits in exploring a very sensitive subject at that time. A hundred years later, these ideas are almost foreign to me, but still serve to “enrich the human mind.”

A beautiful line from "The Awakening"
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

One more:
sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking throguh the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking, and unguided.
This is my new motto for summer.. and life in general.