Remember all those books we had to read in high school and college? From Beowulf to Austen, you may or may not have been a fan. You may have been like me and felt tortured during The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s, but fell in love with Jane Eyre. Well, I am here to tell you to pull them all back out and read them again! *Gasp* But why? I don’t want to go through that again! Just wait, and think about this: did you ever consider why they were such torture? Well, those of you that are young, you will get to read them and I recommend remembering this moment, and coming back to all the books you just don’t connect to one day.
For those of us that are adults, with careers, husbands, wives, families, and more, take them back out and read them from this new perspective. This new perspective of life experiences. Yes it differs for some of you, but the majority of us have been through the break-up that was heart-wrenching, the relationship that felt like we “escaped,” the death of a loved one that gave us that hole. We have been through the pain they were writing from, the life experiences, and the raw emotion that went with it. Could you imagine it being scandalous to write about raw emotions and real experiences? Some authors were ostracized because they were seen as scandalous for putting down in paper what so many felt but weren’t allowed to express.
Let’s start with Kate Chopin and her novel The Awakening, published in 1899 and resulting in her expulsion from literary circles. Why? Is it a harlequin romance novel? 50 shades-esque? No, not even close. This book is just a novel that expresses the emotional turmoil of becoming a wife and mother, of finding an identity, of feeling trapped, and ultimately being so overwhelmed with that emotion it overcomes you.
Considered the American Madam Bovary, it was labeled as “too strong a drink for moral babes,” that it should be “labeled poison.” The Nation granted its “fine workmanship and pellucid style…we cannot see that literature or the criticism of life is helped by the detailed history of the manifold and contemporary love affairs of a wife and mother.” (Yes, those of you reading that getting slightly miffed, I am with you, and so was Kate Chopin.) Set in Louisiana, weaving in a bit of Creole spice, her prose will leave you hanging on every letter of every word.
Find Kate Chopin and more on RBdigital.
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