Literature is wasted on high schoolers

Kate Chopin was someone we were assigned to read in school at a time when politically correct curriculum designers were looking for women and minorities to balance all the dead white men authors. I don't remember much time or effort being spent on her. But a book of her short stories and novella, Awakening, is one of the books I snagged from my mother's house to read during cold Bosnia nights, of which there are many even in July.

Well, she's a revelation now. Awakening should be assigned reading for people going through divorce court. The book opens with the image of a caged parrot and ends with a seagull diving into the sea as the heroine commits suicide.

Chopin, an American Jane Austen, had six children and was successful until Awakening, a book that shocked because the heroine rejects family and marriage only to find there wasn't anything much better. Chopin, a St. Louis native who lived for years in New Orleans which is the setting for much of her stories, wrote at the turn of the century.

Here's a good summary of the major themes she write of that I found online:

"Whatever we may do or attempt, despite the embrace and transports of love, the hunger of the lips, we are always alone. I have dragged you out into the night in the vain hope of a moment's escape from the horrible solitude which overpowers me. But what is the use! I speak and you answer me, and still each of us is alone; side by side but alone.' In 1895, these words, from a story by Guy de Maupassant called 'Solitude', which she had translated for a St Louis magazine, expressed an urbane and melancholy wisdom that Kate Chopin found compelling. To a woman who had survived the illusions that friendship, romance, marriage, or even motherhood would provide lifelong companionship and identity, and who had come to recognize the existential solitude of all human beings, Maupassant's declaration became a kind of credo."