America’s Untouchables

Title: Caste

Rating: 5 Stars

Since it’s one of the most serious issues the US faces, over the past years I’ve read many books that deal with racism. The uphill challenge that each of these books faces is the word racism. That has become a trigger word for white people. The word conjures up horrific overt acts like Bull Conner and his attack dogs in Birmingham, Alabama. With few exceptions, most people are horrified by such acts and disavow them.

So, when the word racism is used, white people will reflexively recoil from the argument. After all, I don’t want any physical harm to come to Black people. I don’t use racial epithets. My ancestors never owned slaves. My ancestors only came to this country a couple of generations ago. It’s not like everything has been handed to me on a silver tray just because I’m white.

If you start talking about systemic racism, people’s eyes glaze over. What systems are you talking about? Who invented these systems? When you get right down to it, what even is a system? It sounds like pointy headed liberal talk.

Wilkerson takes a different tack. In her book, you’ll still hear about all of the instances of racism that is described in other works. You’ll read about how Black Americans were excluded from New Deal programs. You’ll read about how Black Americans were shut out of the post WWII housing boom via redlining. You’ll read about how slavery was continued in all but name by the legal system in the reconstructed South.

What Wilkerson does different here is to put it in terms of caste instead of race. Black Americans in the US serve the same function as the Dalit do in India. In India there is a very specific, well defined caste system that pigeon holes everyone into their appropriate slot. It’s so ingrained into their culture that few people are even aware of it. From birth, members of a certain caste are taught to behave in a specific way.

At the bottom of the caste system are the Dalit. Once known as Untouchables, technically they are so low that they aren’t even a caste. Stuck in dangerous, filthy jobs, they are considered so undesirable that if they even cast a shadow upon a member of the Brahmin caste, the Brahmin feels defiled and must take purifying actions.

Starting from the first days that the US was settled in 1619, Black people have filled the same role that the Dalit do in India. They have always done the work that no one wants to do. Even when desperately poor, white people can at least look at a Black person and think that at least I’m not black.

Looking at race relations from this lens yields interesting thoughts. The idea of whiteness and blackness becomes even more absurd. Immigrants, so near to the Black caste line, desperately try to prove their whiteness to escape the stigma of being the bottom caste. Even Black people will emphasize their African heritage to avoid the Black American stigma. In fact, Wilkerson makes the point that the concept of a black race doesn’t even exist in Africa.

Often, lower income whites seem to vote against their interests. If you’re struggling, why wouldn’t you want adequate health care and benefits? When the dominant caste falsely paints these benefits as primarily benefiting the subordinate caste, in their desperation to appear not to be a member of the subordinate caste, they will willingly forego items that would seem to benefit them.

This helps explain the current voting patterns. Republicans are now seen as the party for white people. This has been true since the Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As amazing as it is to contemplate, LBJ is the last Democrat Presidential candidate to win a majority of white votes. You read that right. From 1968 to 2020 (14 Presidential elections), no Democrat has won the majority of white votes. This includes Southern candidates like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The majority of white voters didn’t experience some sudden conversion to conservative principles. They are voting to preserve the caste system which they see the more diverse coalition of Democrats as threatening.

In these challenging economic times, it’s getting harder and harder for the borderline members of the dominant class to avoid sliding into a lifestyle that appears similar to the subordinate caste. The despair that this brings is causing this group, alone among all other groups, to have a lower life expectancy.

This also explains the periodic paroxysms of violence that erupts against peaceful, moderate, middle class black communities (eg Tulsa massacre of 1921). Concerned that the subordinate caste appears to be beginning to rise from their preordained place, the dominant caste, especially those on the lower fringes, will kill and destroy whatever gains the subordinate caste has made. This puts the lie to the idea that the reason why the subordinate class is down is because they are somehow lazy or stupid. If they were just smarter or worked harder they could take their place among the dominant class. In fact, as long as the caste system is in place, any gains will inevitably be destroyed.

The caste system does allow for some members of the subordinate caste to be successful. Specifically, those members that entertain the dominant caste can achieve great success. Entertainers and athletes can become quite successful as long as they stay within their role as performer for the dominant class. Once they try to do more, they are told to ‘shut up and play ball’.

For us to move on and begin healing as a nation, we have to deal with our original sin that is still with us 400 years later. I certainly don’t know what the answers are, but we have to figure out how to move forward. If we think, not just in terms of race and racism but think in terms of the less loaded term caste, this might at least allow us to start having conversations.

An Experiment In Noir

Title: Dark Passage

Rating: 4 Stars

I read a lot of books and I watch a lot of films. I usually read around 80 books and will watch somewhere between 50 to 100 films in a given year. If I wrote a blog entry each time I would be spending much more time than I want writing about what I read or watched. Therefore, one of my pretty solid rules is not to write about anything that I completed more than three days ago. I want to write about my fresh experiences. I want to write about how I felt as close to the moment as possible.

I watched the film Dark Passage several weeks ago, so this is a flagrant violation of my rule. However, in the subsequent time, I found myself coming back to it repeatedly and thinking about it. I think that I need to write this just to exorcise it out of my mind.

The film is based upon the David Goodis novel (which I did write about here). Goodis’ novel is a great example of noir. A man (Vincent Parry) is wrongfully convicted of a murder. Sentenced to life imprisonment, while in San Quentin, he seizes an opportunity to escape. Now on the run, he’s trying to stay free while at the same time trying to solve the murder that he was wrongfully convicted of. He meets Irene Jansen, a wealthy young woman that helps him. Will he be able stay ahead of the police? Will he figure out who really solved the murder? Does he have a future with Irene?

The film stays pretty true to the novel. Humphrey Bogart stars as Vincent Parry. Lauren Bacall, Bogart’s wife, plays Irene Jansen.

This brings up the first interesting issue regarding the film. One of the key plot elements that allows Parry to escape law enforcement is that he visits a cheap, disreputable, underground plastic surgeon. For something like $200, the doctor dramatically changes his face, allowing Parry to go around unrecognized as he investigates.

OK, so you cast Humphrey Bogart, one of the most recognizable faces on film, and halfway through the film he has to dramatically change the features of his face. What do you do? Do you go all Lon Chaney (ala Werewolf) on him and use extensive makeup and/or prosthetics for a dramatic before and after? Or maybe just ignore the plastic surgery angle all together?

Nope. Instead, the decision was to never actually film Bogart’s face before the plastic surgery. The few times that his character was in frame, his face was in shadows. Most times the film was shot from a viewpoint over his shoulder. Most times it felt as if I was playing a First Person Shooter game. I’ve seen very few films that shoot for large amounts of time from this perspective. It makes for a more intimate film. As Vincent talks to Irene, you feel as if Irene is talking directly to you.

The plastic surgery takes place somewhere around the 40 minute mark or so in the film. As you can imagine, the studio executives weren’t particularly amused by this choice. They have Humphrey Bogart, the most recognizable and biggest box office star of this time and for the first half of the film, you don’t even ever see his face? Considering that this film was made in 1947, this must have been considered pretty revolutionary.

The other thing that I found interesting about it was that it seemed to be making a nod to the German Expressionism films of the 1920s and 1930s. The plastic surgeon was simply just a creepy, eerie figure. When Vincent was anesthetized for the operation, the film represented his thoughts as some psychedelic, hallucinatory swirl of thoughts. Later in the film, when he is caught up in his fear, there was a similar moment where he was being haunted by a kaleidoscope of thoughts. Interestingly, this expressionist flow of wild thoughts also appears in the Goodis novel.

Being Hollywood, the film does sell out the ending a bit. It’s more ambiguous in the novel, but the film makes it pretty clear that Vincent and Irene will live happily ever after.

I enjoy noir films. Even as I enjoy them, I understand that they have a tendency to be formulaic. You have the world weary private dick. You have the sultry femme fatale. You have the tough but sometimes fair burly police Sargent.

The novel Dark Passages transcends these stereotypes to create a more interesting novel. Similarly, the film Dark Passages abandons the well trod path and in the process, discovers fresh new more interesting tracks.

 

Iago Wears A Dress

Title: Cousin Bette

Rating: 4 Stars

Balzac was quite the prolific author. In a writing career spanning twenty years, he cranked out more than 40 novels, not to mention a bunch of novellas and short stories. Writing within a grand design called The Human Comedy, his goal was to dissect and describe all parts of post Napoleon French society. He would wake up at midnight and write from one to eight every morning, fueled by endless cups of coffee.

Cousin Bette is one of the novels in The Human Comedy. It is from the poor relations part.

It’s the story of Bette, a plain cousin to the much more attractive Adeline. Even growing up, Bette was put to work in the fields and doing drudgery work while Adeline was pampered. Eventually Adeline made a marriage to the Baron Hulot. A hero of the Napoleonic era, Hulot assumes a prominent place in society. Bette, now looked upon as a poor cousin, is consumed with envy and rage. Her one project is to ruin the Hulot family and their children.

Fortunately, Baron Hulot makes it easy on her. A profligate womanizer, he squanders his entire fortune, acquires ruinous loans, and finally commits fraud against the state to keep to keep his lover happy.

The lover, Madame Marneffe, is the perfect tool for Bette’s revenge. A merciless coquette, she effortlessly wraps the Baron around her finger and demands ever greater gifts from him.

Marneffe becomes pregnant. She somehow manages to simultaneously convince Hulot, his son-in-law (the feckless sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock), Hulot’s daughter’s father-in-law (the wealthy retired merchant Crevel), and some random Brazilian dude that they’re each actually the father.

By the time Bette and Marneffe are done, Hulot is jobless, homeless and on the run from debt collectors, his virtuous wife is shaking with palsy from all of the emotional blows that she’s suffered, his daughter has been abandoned by her husband, and his son is hopelessly in debt.

At 500 pages, I was worried that this nineteenth century French novel would be dry or plodding. It was a needless worry. It is a potboiler melodrama, full of fainting fits, shouts of anger, true love, calculating love, turns of fortune, and deaths by poison, suicide, and shame. The plot was propelled from page to page.

One major theme appeared to be that all men are scum. Nearly without exception, men behave without honor. If there’s a woman involved, the men lose their head and promptly begin behaving irrationally. Hulot is the worse of the lot. Even into his seventies, when he is living in a hovel estranged from his family, he manages to carry on an affair with a sixteen year old girl. When his wife rescues him from poverty, he plaintively asks her if he can take the girl with him. Um, no, you can’t.

Looking at it from the year 2021, there are unfortunate racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic attitudes expressed. Polish and Jewish stereotypes are called out as fact. The Brazilian has mysterious ‘Negro’ practices. It’s a blot on the text that has to be acknowledged.

Another issues is that it was definitely written to portray a certain class of life in France in the 1830s and 1840s. That’s well and good, but it includes some very topical references to that time and place. Balzac mentions styles, major figures, and artists that have long since faded from scene. This is a common problem to all literature that take place in the here and now. References that pull today’s reader directly into the story will repel tomorrow’s readers that will have no context. I’ve mentioned this before, but this might keep some modern authors from becoming ageless. For example, even now there are many references in Joyce’s Ulysses that are now lost. Gravity’s Rainbow, deeply immersed in World War II and its immediate aftermath, is another novel that will be interesting to see how it stands the test of time.

Cousin Bette is the personification of revenge. She is a Fury determined to pursue the Hulots to their doom. In her implacable hatred, I see echoes of both Othello’s Iago and Titus Andronicus’ Aaron the Moor. In all cases, operating purely on instinct responding to ever evolving facts on the ground, they are all vehicles of single minded destruction.

However, Bette does not measure up to Iago or Aaron. The novel, not being a tragedy, refuses to leave the Hulots to their horrific fate. Hulot’s uncle, who Bette is on the verge of marrying so that she can truly lord herself over the family, dies from shame of Hulot’s actions before the ceremony. Madame Marneffe, on the verge of her victory, dies a horrible, disfiguring death as a result of poison administered by the Brazilian. From all of this death, the Hulot family inherits great riches and manages to escape all of the traps that have been laid by Bette.

In fact, Bette doesn’t even get a villain’s death. In both Titus and Othello, the respective villains are caught and will clearly be viciously tortured and murdered. Aaron, knowing that his fate is sealed, at least has the villain’s courage of saying that although he’s done 1,000 evil things, his only regret is that he did not have time to do 10,000 more (paraphrase, but that was the gist).

No such moment of negative heroics for Bette. Dying of some consumptive disease, all of the Hulots gather around her with tears in their eyes at the death of who they perceive to be their benefactress.  They never do learn that she has been the engine for all of their misfortune. As she lies dying, she doesn’t even get to enjoy their scorn.

My rating for this novel might be affected by low expectations, but I really enjoyed reading it.  It was a fast scenery chewing, moving, larger than life novel. This is one of those novels where you re-learn that many what are now considered to be classic novels were first of all, extremely popular in their time.

Yeah Baby!

Title: Blow-Up

Rating: 2 Stars

The major reason why I continue to subscribe to HBO Max is because a significant subset of the Criterion Collection films are available on it. These are the films that, in the old days, you’d have to schlep off to some little art house film theater to watch. There’d be about 50 seats, some of them broken. There might be five or six other people in the audience. A bag of stale popcorn will set you be back $5. You sit back, relax, and watch some subtitled film from the 1950s or 1960s as characters philosophize through hazes of cigarette smoke. 

With the pandemic rampaging, that’s not really an option. This is where the Criterion Collection comes in. If you want to watch your favorite elitist, critically acclaimed, seldom watched French, Japanese, Italian, or Swedish films, the Criterion has a significant subset of them. Since I’ve been trapped indoors for the past year, this has been one of the things to do when I have a spare hour or two.

Slowly but surely, I’m getting just a bit smarter on film. I’ll be watching some French film from the 1960s and some scene will come up that clearly has served as an inspiration for some American auteur film maker from the 1970s. Having that understanding helps me arrive at a deeper understanding of film history.

It was Blow-Up’s turn. Made in 1966, it’s the first English language film by the Italian film maker Michelangelo Antonioni. If a film critic anywhere has a best 1000 film list, Blow-Up is almost inevitably on it. It is advertised as a mystery thriller. 

A young man named Thomas (David Hemmings) is a fashion photographer. Needing a break, he heads out to a park. There he sees a couple. Are they kissing? Are they fighting? Intrigued, he takes out his camera and snaps some shots. The woman, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), sees him taking pictures and takes off after him to get the film from him. He manages to trick her and keeps the film. When he develops it, he sees something suspicious. Continuing to blow up the image, he thinks that he sees a man with a gun hiding in the bushes. At night, he goes back to the park and finds a body.

Has he seen a murder? Is he in danger?

As far as I can tell, not only does the film not answer those questions but it’s not even interested in attempting to answer them. Jane pops up a little later in the film, but Thomas quickly loses her. She is never seen again. Thomas comes back the next morning and the body is gone. After watching a couple of mimes play tennis, Thomas walks away. The film ends.

So, the film really doesn’t care all that much about plot or closure. Although billed as a mystery thriller, it wasn’t particularly mysterious and it certainly had no thrills.

Why all of the acclaim? Made in 1966, it was an early example of the non studio films that were about to take the world by storm. Made even before such films as Easy Rider or Bonnie and Clyde, it inspired the set of auteur directors that took over film making in the 1970s (like Scorsese, Spielberg, and Coppola). Antonioni was much more interested in angles, colors, and feelings than with such mundane ideas as plot or character.

Although extremely tame by today’s standards, it was considered incredibly risque. Supposedly it was the first example of full frontal nudity, but actually it was really relatively modest. Thomas does have a somewhat odd, in 2021 very uncomfortable, menage a trois with two aspiring models that just want him to photograph them.  Although done in ‘fun’, it’s hard to argue that the models actually consented. In general, Thomas, and for that matter, the film in general, takes a stereotypical approach to women.

Made in London, it shows the Mod culture in full flower. Drugs and sex are rampant. Attitudes are permissive. Traditional values are discarded. Most times Thomas barely even seems interested in the fact that he might have witnessed a murder. Most of the time he just seems consumed by ennui and is just looking for something that will give him something to care about, even if momentarily.

Appearance and fashion are paramount. Watching Thomas, I can’t help but think that Austen Powers was directly inspired by him. His open shirts, his treatment of women, and his way of photographing models are just amplifications of Thomas.

Music, just as it is with Mod culture, is also important in this film. In fact, for some reason, the Yardbirds actually play a song in the film. Thomas, searching for Jane, stumbles into a club and there they are. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck are jamming away. Beck gets so annoyed with an amplifier that he breaks his guitar over it. Thomas fights the crowd and gets the guitar neck. Walking outside, he looks down at it and, as is typical with him, loses interest and just tosses it to the ground.

Brian De Palma’s film, Blowout, was inspired by Blow-Up. Starring John Travolta who is a sound man that thinks he has recorded an assassination, there are obvious similarities. It differs because De Palma, who also counts Hitchcock as an inspiration, made a much more conventional mystery thriller film.

On an even weirder tangent, one of Mel Brooks’ lesser films (although I still enjoyed it) is High Anxiety, which is a spoof of Hitchcock specifically but the whole mystery thriller genre in general. In one part, there is a scene where one character just continues to develop ever more larger prints of a single negative to solve a mystery. Now, some forty years after I saw High Anxiety, I finally get that joke.

The film begins and end with, believe it or not, mimes. You have to see it to understand what I’m about to say. They are the loudest group of mimes I’ve ever seen. Watching the anarchy that they produce in the streets, although it might be a stretch, they seemed to have served as an inspiration for Kubrick’s Droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

One final item of interest was the Hays Code. Starting in 1934, this was a strict set of morality rules that the film industry imposed upon itself. Well, Blow-Up violated many of the rules. Released under an independent studio that did not subscribe to the Code, its unexpected financial success and critical acclaim proved to be one of the fatal blows to the Code. Within a year or two, the ratings system that is still in use today was developed.

Bottom line is that I see why it makes the top 1000 film lists of critics. It was a film of its time, it inspired film makers, and I can see lasting impacts that it made on films that came after it. Having said that, unlike other films that have had similar impacts, it just wasn’t really all that entertaining. It was less than two hours, but even so, it lagged. With Antonioni so interested in visuals, there are long scenes in the film where there is not only no dialog, but really not even a whole lot of action.

Given that, even though I’m glad that I watched it, I really can’t recommend it.

Hail To The Thief

Title: Bag Man

Rating: 5 Stars

I read this book because I’d listened to the podcast. As a word of warning, there’s not a lot more information here than was already in the podcast. However, since it’s such a great story, reading it was just as fun as listening to it a year ago or so.

When people think of the Nixon administration, for good reason, everyone’s mind goes to Watergate. It was, after all, the largest scandal of the last 100 years (aside from any normal Tuesday during the Trump administration).

I was ten years old in 1973. Therefore, I do have memories of it, but they are the memories of a ten year old kid. I do remember that, before Nixon resigned, his Vice President, Spiro Agnew had resigned some months previously. From what I remember, it seemed to be some minor tax charge. He didn’t even plead guilty. He pleaded some fancy term like nolo contendere. Shortly after resigning, he’d appear on talk shows and complain about the over zealous prosecutors that had it in for him. He was just a victim of the justice system. At the time, it seemed to me like some minor kerfuffle.

Boy was I wrong. Spiro Agnew was, to put it mildly, bent like a pretzel.

It started off when he was elected a county executive. This was during the 1960s, when there was a huge suburban building boom. This called for all kinds of infrastructure. Roads needed to be built. Bridges needed to be built. Agnew figured that the paltry salary of an executive wasn’t near good enough. He called in some people from engineering firms and asked them to come up a proposal for how much kickback he could reasonably ask for. Dutifully, they came up with a number around five percent.

From then on, the cost of doing business in the county included a five percent kickback. In some cases, he quite literally had a bag man. The bag man’s job was to serve as the intermediary between the guy (and yes, of course they were all white men) with the cash in the envelope and Agnew. For some of the more trusted of his criminal cohorts, Agnew cut out the middle man and accepted cash in an envelope himself. It was bribery in its most venal and primitive form. You want work, you pay me cash.

A few short years later, he was elected Governor of Maryland. His increase in responsibility drove up his need for cash. Now responsible for state wide projects, his graft increased in scale. 

After just two years of being the Governor, Nixon picked him up out of complete obscurity to be his running mate. As the red meat conservative, he was able to deal out the race baiting, antisemitic, anti-feminist, media hating vitriol while Nixon could keep himself ostensibly above the fray. This combination was effective. They barely squeaked out a victory in 1968 but crushed the Democrats in 1972.

Through all of this, Agnew saw no need not to keep his hand stretched out. He felt he was still owed for those contracts that were awarded in Maryland while he was Governor. He even tried to reach out and take over responsibility of some federal contracts. Believe it or not, while in his office at the White House, people were still coming to him with envelopes full of cash. In fact, sometimes when people would come in, he’d point at the ceiling to warn them that they were being taped. They’d slide him the envelope full of cash, he’d open a desk drawer, and slip the cash into the drawer. Tony Soprano couldn’t have been smoother.

Just to reiterate, people were passing around large amounts of cash in anonymous white envelopes in the White House to the Vice President. That sentence just kind of blows my mind.

The Maryland federal attorney’s office got wind and launched an investigation. Fairly quickly they had Agnew dead to rights. The IRS was able to trace the cash payments. The people making the payoffs kept detailed records. All of their visits to the White House were logged. All flipped and were willing to testify against Agnew. These were not exactly master criminals. 

Keep in mind that at the same time that prosecutors were actively gathering evidence that could send Agnew to prison for years, a whole different part of the Department of Justice was investigating Watergate. These two investigations could (and eventually did) bring down both the President and Vice President.

At the same time, President Nixon was beginning to show signs of the stress that he was under. At one point, he ended up spending a week in the hospital with a severe case of pneumonia. He was suffering from fits of depression. It was unknown how long he would hold on.

It became vital to get Agnew out of the succession to the presidency. The Attorney General, Elliott Richardson, already under tremendous pressure because of his support of the Watergate special prosecutor, had to work hard and fast to get Agnew to resign. Because of this urgency, Agnew’s lawyers was able to drive a hard bargain. Instead of going to jail for multiple years for the many overt acts of bribery for which the prosecutors had him dead to rights on, Agnew’s lawyers were able to negotiate it down to a single tax evasion charge, a plea of nolo contendere, a relatively small fine, and resigning from the office of Vice President. This was actually done under such secrecy that the press was shocked when Agnew quickly strode into a court house one day to plead to the charge.

This was done in the nick of time. Only ten days later, Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate Special Prosecutor. Richardson refused and resigned. His deputy refused and resigned. The Solicitor General, Robert Bork (infamous if you’re up on your Supreme Court history), took over as Attorney General and fired Cox. This was the Saturday Night Massacre. 

What would have happened to Agnew’s case if the principled Richardson was no longer around to support the Maryland prosecutors? That is a great unknown. Could Agnew have hung on and succeeded Nixon instead of Ford?

If so, how big would those envelopes have been if they’d been delivered President Spiro Agnew in the Oval Office? 

Two Feminists’ Tales

Title: The Awakening

Rating: 2 Stars

Title: The Yellow Wallpaper

Rating: 4 Stars

I read these two works closely together. There is a temporal linkage between the two. The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in 1892. The Awakening is a novel (a pretty short one, nearly a novella) written by Kate Chopin in 1899.

On the surface, the two works of fiction seem completely different. The Yellow Wallpaper is, to put it mildly,  creepy. It’s an example of Gothic horror. The narrator, writing in a journal, is a woman. She and her husband have rented a house for the summer. Her husband, a doctor, has diagnosed the narrator as having some kind of nervous condition (typically called hysteria in those times). Despite her need for outside stimulation and her desire to actually do something, she is confined to bed rest. There, she apparently begins to go mad. She becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in the room. She begins to see moving patterns in the wallpaper and eventually thinks she sees a bent over woman crawling about the wallpaper, seeking to escape. The narrator, determined to help the woman, tears the wallpaper from the walls. When her husband finally opens the door, to his horror he sees the narrator creeping, on all fours, on the floor of the room. The husband faints and the woman continues to creep along the floor, stepping over the body of her husband.

The Awakening is much different. With a husband and two young children, Edna Pontellier is apparently a typical satisfied Southern belle housewife. While on a vacation, she meets and becomes attracted to a young man named Robert. At the same time, she hears an especially moving piece of music by the pianist Mademoiselle Reisz. To preserve both of their honors, Robert runs away to Mexico.  All of this triggers an awakening in Edna. She sees the vacuousness of her life. She sees the passionless marriage to her well meaning (at least by 1899 standards) husband. She sees the artistic emptiness of her friendships. She even sees the mundane existence of being a mother to two young children.

Being awakened, she seeks to rebel. She sends the children to stay with their mother-in-law. While her husband is away on business, she moves out of their house. She conducts a love affair with a rather shallow young womanizer. Robert comes back from Mexico. After trying to stay away from Edna, Robert bumps into her and they each confess their love. Robert, again consumed with guilt, leaves once more. Edna, not willing to go back to her previous figurative state of sleep, goes out into the sea and drowns herself.

Stylistically, The Awakening is quite different than The Yellow Wallpaper. Reading The Awakening, it kind of reminded me a bit of Henry James. Like James, Chopin’s characters are all upper class sophisticates. Therefore, they are so well behaved that they nearly appear sterile. Beneath the elegant words and manners, emotions are turbulent.

In my own opinion, I much preferred The Yellow Wallpaper. Although The Awakening is elegantly written, the emotional distance of the characters’ upper class manners left me cold. It’s probably a problem with me, but the tragedies of the very wealthy sometimes ring hollow to me. The Pontelliers live on the most fashionable street in New Orleans. They vacation for an entire summer. They are planning on going on an international tour. They have many servants to take care of all of their needs. Is suicide really the only option that Edna has available to her? Speaking of which, it must have been the most languid suicide ever. It was the suicide of someone that had never worked a day in her life. The writing did not impel me to read. It was one of the longest 110 page works of fiction that I’ve read.

The Gothic horror of The Yellow Wallpaper is more my style. The story had much more tension. It had elements that propelled me forward. I cared much more about the narrator than I did for Edna.

The common theme that runs through these two works is feminism. Both written in the late 19th century, these were times when men were actively keeping women suppressed. Women were intentionally placed in clothes that were so constrictive as to restrain movement, if not breathing. Women were treated as  terminally nervous cases where doctors would routinely order hysterectomies to calm their ostensibly hysterical nerves. Women were actively being both physically and emotionally repressed and had little power to change their state.

In this environment, both of these works are cries for feminist freedom. Edna, refusing to abide by conventions, begins to flagrantly flaunt them. Not willing to lapse back into the traditional roles that she’s just awakened from, she willingly sacrifices her life. The narrator, being actively repressed and her creative impulses stymied, manifests her desire to escape the restrictive life that she’s trapped in her by her imaginings of the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper.

A couple of decades before women won the right to vote, these works are cries in the wilderness for women to break free of the chains in which they have been trapped.