Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” was more interesting to me this time around than it was in high school.  In high school, you haven’t had opportunity to make many serious concessions to your dignity.  I mean, the most momentous problem with compromise in high school occurred during freshman year when your guidance counselor insisted that you were suicidal because you wore your Suicidal Tendencies tee shirt to school once a week.  ”It’s a band,” you said.  ”It’s a uniform!” she said.  ”Don’t worry about me,” you said, considering not wearing the tee shirt again to avoid this kind of grown-up hysteria. The “considering” felt like a huge violation of your values, so you kept wearing the tee shirt.  After all, they were a pretty awesome band.

After high school I had planned to forego college and begin my writing career immediately.  The last high school article I wrote for the student page of our local paper was titled “College: Who Needs It”. However, it only took 5 rejection notices from publishers and magazines to make me panic and apply for spring semester classes. Going to college was my first Big Compromise, even though leaving my parents’ home turned out to be a necessary step to establishing my independence, not to mention that my degrees have helped me to get like…jobs and stuff.  So that worked out okay in the long run.

During my last year of college, I stumbled into a relationship with a person who tried to turn me into someone he liked, rather than really liking me much to begin with.  When I began to rebel against his image of me, it fell apart for very good reason, and to my betterment. Wasting a couple of years with a person who wanted to mold me into his image was my second Big Compromise. Fortunately, I got that kind of folly out of my experience early enough: my ~amor de ma vie~ is someone who helps me identify and pursue my own idea of myself, and I hope that my efforts at doing the same for him are efficacious.

The Great Compromise, the one I identify with Edna Pontelier’s stifling marriage, was my job.  I worked a job sitting in a 5×5 cube all day doing busywork…for six years.  I thought the job was okay when I got a raise or a promotion, but raises only satisfy a person’s psychic needs for a month or so, and you can coast on the thrill of promotion for only a few months beyond that.  Then you start retreating to the sick room for midday naps and no one asks where you were.  Then you spend 6 hours a day emailing or writing a short story or browsing for new jobs and otherwise avoiding work however possible.  After all, your real work can be finished in about 3 hours a day.  That leaves 5 that you either have to fill with shenanigans or made-up work.  Then your co-worker gets a promotion and her position remains unfilled for two years, which means you have to pick up all the work she can’t do anymore, which means you’re working hardcore 5-8 hours a day, and it begins to wear on you.  The trade-off for working in a soul-sucking office environment is that you have plenty of free time to make friends and relax, right?  You discover that your job, when it’s a full-time job with no time for play, is designed to drain you of your life force so you become a company zombie.  You have just enough free time to realize that you’re offended by this imposition on your humanity - glued to a chair and the telephone and email, getting paid what now seems like a pittance for the vast amount of unfulfilling work you’re doing. Then you begin coming home depressed every day.  Then you either implode or get out of there.  This was the third and final Great Compromise.  Now I make $50 (net) less per paycheck, come home stress-free, and spend my entire day with books and people who like books.  To me, this is what freedom from job tyranny feels like: going to work at a place where I’d enjoy spending 8 hours even if I wasn’t being paid for my taskwork.

So this book?  Edna Pontelier’s transformation?  It resonated with me.  It even included the discussion on art that I have been trained to look for in every story, delivered here by Edna Pontelier’s pianist friend, Madame Reisz:

“To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts–absolute gifts–which have not been acquired by one’s own effort.  And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul…The soul that dares and defies.”