Movie Reviews for Writers: Kate Chopin: A Reawakening

Full disclosure. I teach Kate Chopin's The Awakening every year to my students when we reach our unit about literature as protest. And I fully believe her work is as seminal to the feminist experience as the works of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and Zora Neale Hurston are to desegratation. Not only that, it's a master class in writing outward clues to the subtle inner life of a character who is only slowly growing to actually DO anything as an act of her will. 

Okay, that said, I found this awesome documentary for my students to watch to introduce her work. So, now you have to suffer... I mean jump for joy through it too.

There's a bit from The Awakening that I think applies here to Kate herself, both as a woman and as a writer: "She was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her."

That's where we all start as creators though, isn't it? If we don't realize our positions as an individual with something worth saying and how crucial that message might be to the world within and around us, then what's the point of writing anything at all? It would be as empty as shoveling air into a truck for load after load all day as empty trucks drive off and return for another load of nothing. 

Write What You Know

From that kernel of knowing she was a unique individual with something to say, Kate found a voice that began with the stuff she had experienced and knew something about. 

Say's the narrator: 

"On the eve of the 20th century, Kate Chopin confronted the fundamental dilemma of what it meant to be a woman. In a stream of stories and in her novel, The Awakening, she explored the unsparing truth of women's submerged lives."

What Kate knew was what it meant to be a woman in the late 1800s, valued merely as a mom or wife, judged by housekeeping and childrearing with little thought given to dreams that may have reached beyond that cage. This idea wove into her work, from short stories such as "The Story of an Hour" and "A Pair of Silk Stockings" to her magnum opus novel The Awakening. 

I would guess that she wasn't trying to start a movement, just tell the kind of story she could relate to and she figured maybe other people could as well, society be damned. 

As the documentary voiceover tells us, "Chopin's stories were set in Louisiana in the aftermath of war. It would be a landscape she would draw from memory in the final years of her life." Perhaps that is why her settings seem so effortless and precise. And not only the settings but the people who, well, peopled them. As Barbara Ewell says:

"There was great demand for short fiction at that period, and one of the genres that was most popular was the one known as 'local color,' which offered descriptions of the varied parts of the country, exotic parts of the country. It was pretty clear to her early on that it was her southern stories, her Louisiana stories that sold... While the land inspired her imagination, her time there was limited."

No matter how limited, her experiences in New Orleans offered characters and settings to explore.

And explore them she did.

After her husband, Oscar, and her mother, Eliza, died, Kate was alone with six children to support on a modest income. In the 1880s, writing was one of the few ways women could make a living, averaging from "$l5 to $30 a story, and a few hundred for a novel" according to our narrator. So, at 45 years old, Chopin started on the path toward becoming a published writer.

Her first work was a poem that appeared in January 1889. However, she soon learned that her short stories were what was in demand -- and were her most successful published works. 

Write Passionately

Chopin's writing was not just filled with well-described settings and people though. It had a passion that was part of who she herself was. She chose short stories as a form because that's where her passion lay. 

Says Barbara Ewell: 

What drove Kate Chopin was her passion for writing, and her willingness to let writing take her into places that she had never been herself, necessarily. And certainly, the literary traditions out of which she came had never really gone.

Adding to this, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese says: 

She's one of those writers whose sense of craft puts her right on the edge of poetry... The writer she especially admired was the short story and novella writer, Guy de Maupassant, who perfected a kind of writing that she took very seriously.

'Here was life, not fiction," she wrote in a private diary aout the novella writer Guy de Maupassant. "Here was a man who escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw."

Write To Change the World,
(Even If It's Not Intentional)

In 1897, Chopin began work on her most ambitious novel, The Awakening. Understand, Chopin did not set out with the goal of becoming a feminist writer. Truth be told, she probably couldn't have told you what a feminist writer was, if such a thing existed in the zeitgeist of her times. What she did set out to do, however, was to tell stories about the human beings she knew inside and out -- people who just happened to be female and who just happened to be denied the very right to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness their husbands, fathers, and even sons could grasp on a daily basis. 

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese says: 

"With Chopin the dark crannies of the human soul were part of what is to be human. It was part of her war against platitudes. If you look only at the surfaces you're not going to begin to understand what people are about. It's a measure of both her talent and her character, her strength as a woman, that she didn't find the depths of the human soul, even human depravity, threatening."

Through Edna, Chopin wrote of what a life awakened to the idea of embracing the daily joys might mean... for a woman. Sure, a man could also identify with her needs (if you don't believe me, read Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome -- I once did a paper on how similar these two awakenings are), but to a woman reader, the story takes on an additional meaning, one that a man will not typically be able to identity as missing from his own life. 

Barbara Ewell says of this: 

Its spontaneity, and its physical demands opens up Edna to places in her heart and in her soul she'd lost contact with, maybe had never known were there...

I don't think any other writer of the period, certainly no male writer, and I don't think any other woman writer tried to understand what happens when a woman experiences her own sexual being and her own self. And of course, that's exactly the tragedy and the dilemma that Chopin is exploring in her fiction which is, what happens, how do you get past this, this bind for women that if you possess your own self, if you possess your own body, you know that the options the society offers you are marriage and death.

By novel's end, Edna has awakened to herself, but finds no place for that self in the world she knows. She swims out to sea till her strength is gone.

For Edna, awakening can bring only defeat. The world will simply not allow her to not be a "mother-woman." For Kate Chopin, the novel was something of a defeat as well. While there were a few positive letters and reviews, by and large, the reviews were critical and somewhat scathing. Americans, it seemed, simply were not ready for such emancipated fiction. 

The question was whether Americans were prepared to read such emancipated fiction. There were a few positive letters, but then the critical reviews came in.

David Chopin says of this: "They destroyed her spirit when they came out with all this adverse reaction and one of the newspapers called it pure poison and not fit for babes, and there was an awful lot of criticism."

The world isn't often ready to see change happen. 

Says Barbara Ewell: 

"Once you begin to push against those margins, against those limits, you begin to offend people. You begin to offend convention and expectations, and that's exactly what Kate Chopin ran into with The Awakening."

After such an unforgiving reception of the novel, Kate disappeared into her private life and became more or less obscure in literary circles. 

However, in the late 20th century, her work was rediscovered. Stories and books came back into print, and they found new audiences and new acceptance, even praise, among the critics. Not only that, her stories were being taught in schools, and let's be honest, that's what really brings a writer back from the etherous void.

So, even if she never saw it in her time or even approached writing as a form of protest or world-changing action, she accomplished it just the same. 

According to Emily Toth: 

I'd first read her when I was given a copy of The Awakening by a woman who said to me, "You should read this book," and the big question that we asked ourselves was how did Kate Chopin know all that in 1899?

Can you imagine someone asking something similar about you in the year 2099? Why not?

Movie Reviews for Writers: Flannery

 

Flannery O'Connor is not only one of my favorite writers, but she's also the subject of a PBS documentary named after her. Known as perhaps the Grand Dame of Southern Fiction, O'Connor is THE voice to be reckoned with in the world of fiction seen through the eyes of the South.

 

But she wasn't what she seemed, neither a Southern lady nor a rebellious feminist. In fact, according to Conan O'Brien, discussing her and her work in an interview: "You think it's this bitter, old alcoholic who's writing these really funny dark stories, and then you find out she's a woman and that she's devoutly religious." Her work and her life didn't always line up with straight edges. There was overlap, and there were gaps where they didn't quite join up like they should. 

But to limit her to merely a Southern writer, as Harvey Breit says, isn't fair to her legacy:

I for myself think that although Ms. O'Connor can be called a Southern writer, I agree that she's not a Southern writer, just as Faulkner isn't, and that they are, for want of a better term, universal writers. 

They're writing about all mankind and about relationships and the mystery of relationships.

To Flannery, that universal mystery she was writing about had a lot to do with craziness, according to Alice Walker:

She was able to go straight to the craziness without always trying to make the craziness black or the craziness white.

She just saw the mystery of the craziness.

Like any good and gifted writer, she embraced that craziness and darkness and humor within her. She embraced all of herself, the dark and the light, and that's what made her fiction stand out. Says Richard Rodriquez: "What's happening here is something so remarkable that the profane meets with the sacred, and it's within that comic meeting that the stories operate."

It's a place many writers don't reach for a long time, having to first discover who they are through their writing first. Hell, some writers never get there. They may hide one part while focusing on what they think readers want to read. They may hide all of themselves and chase markets. But all truly talented writers eventually learn that your best work doesn't happen, can't happen until a person's fiction integrates all the parts of the one doing the writing.

It's the clips from during her life that make this documentary so much fun. One stand-out moment comes from a television show in which she is asked to talk about the art of short stories.

Breit: What does a writer try to do in a short story? Or what does a writer try to do in a novel? What is the secret of writing? 

O'Connor: Well, I think that a serious fiction writer describes an action only in order to reveal a mystery. Of course, he may be revealing the mystery to himself at the same time that he's revealing it to everyone else. And he may not even succeed in revealing it to himself, but I think he must sense its presence.

As a writer who prefers short stories to any other literary form, both for reading and writing, i think she's dead-on in her assessment. But I don't think it only applies to "serious" fiction writers. I think all writers have a subconscious writer living inside their heads that works that kind of thing into even so-called popular fiction or genre fiction. I tend to believe it's the kind of thing a writer can't avoid ultimately. 

Throughout the last years of her life, having been diagnosed with Lupis, the same uncurable disease that killed her father, the "all of her" that made up her life got progressively darker. However, that only reinforced her will to write, to create, to tell stories. According to Hilton Als, "I think she loved writing so much because it freed her from the corporeal." Writing was her escape from pain being tapped by her body. Creating was her winged bird (thank you, Langston Hughes) that was free to fly her imagination beyond her diagnosis. Telling stories was her way of travelling the world since her weakened body wouldn't allow that dream to come to fruition. 

The documentary spends quite a lot of its run time on her time writing Wise Blood (my favorite of her two novels). Her first novel, it was important to her to get it right, to capture her darkly comic intersection of realism, grotesque, and religious. In fact, according to Michael Fitzgerald, she ended up going back to rewrite from the beginning after reading and being so taken by Oedipus Rex. Says Michael: "She was so shocked by the Oedipus Rex that she reworked the entire novel to accommodate Hazel Motes' blinding himself, as Oedipus does."

In a discussion between Robert Giroux and Sally Fitzgerald, the two share this exchange about how her own thoughts on Wise Blood and those of her publishers and the reviewers didn't mesh. 

Fitzgerald: I think you can see in her letters about working on Wise Blood and the process that she went through, her first publisher who didn't get it. 

Giroux: Flannery said that, 'The editor at Holt treats me like a dim-witted campfire girl.'

Fitzgerald: He called her prematurely arrogant.

Gooch: And O'Connor, very young, I mean, completely stands up for herself and the possibility that this book will never be published and just says that, 'I'm not writing this kind of novel.'

Fitzgerald: Publishers never intimidated her.

Mary Steenburgen (reading from O'Connor's journal): I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or the aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

This isn't uncommon. Our intentions as writers and what readers and (worse) reviewers read can be polar opposites. The ladies of her Southern small-town life saw the book as vulgar and actively irreligious, failing to notice the ragged shadow that followed Hazel Motes around with every step and wouldn't let him get away from faith no matter how he tried. Others simply saw some of her dialog as "proof" of her own racist beliefs and wondered how a sweet Southern lady would write such things into the mouths of her characters. 

Some of the fault in that misunderstanding, according to Richard Rodriquez, comes from O'Connor's immense talent as a dialog writer and her ability to capture voice even in internal monologue.

Part of my worry as her reader is that she's too good, by which I mean that her mimicry of her voices around her is too acute.

In that accuracy, she doomed herself, because a lot of these stories are judged by modern readers as unacceptable.

Still, even with ticks against her, Flannery O'Connor's legacy is secure. I don't see "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" or "Everything That Rises Must Converge" disappearing from textbooks or bookshelves of voracious readers any time soon. Perhaps this quote from William Sessions best sums up her writing life:

The life of Flannery O'Connor and what she had to offer, in terms of her relationship to the greater mysteries of existence, are going to be things that people will tap into, because they aren't going away.

God, how'd I love for someone to honestly say that about my work one day. 

Movie Reviews for Writers: She Makes Comics

 

Some movies tell stories. Some movies teach. Some movies inspire. Some movies really (we're here to) pump you up. And some fortunate flicks manage to do all of that. 

While being a straight-up documentary, She Makes Comics is also the biographic story of the changing role of women in an industry that is largely considered THE home of the adolescent male fantasy trope.

I'll admit I haven't reviewed a lot of documentaries for this series of movies about authors, but so many of them suffer from being so scholarly that they don't really hit the proper cylinders for the mass market viewer. Well, this one overcomes that potential pitfall admirably. In fact, the director, Marisa Stotter, actually addresses than in an online interview with Bleeding Cool: 

"The trouble with a documentary that tries to span a long period of time is avoiding the 'classroom movie syndrome,' where you're throwing a lot of facts at the viewer and little of it has any emotional resonance. So we tried to find the middle ground between demonstrating the breadth of women's involvement in comics and highlighting particular women's stories that we felt were representative of the major milestones of comics history."

The real beauty of this documentary is not that it just has something to say not just about (and for) writers but about (and for) readers as well. In fact, historically, prior to the comics code pretty much reducing comics to a single market -- super heroes -- the readership was about 55 percent female. Quite an accomplishment. Now, that's a time when comics might be anything from westerns to sci-fi to horror to crime to romance to, yes, even superheroes, and women enjoyed them as much as men. The advent of the comics code pretty much wiped out a lot of the non-costumed hero books (either for being unsavory with all that kissing or all those creepy ghoulies and those violent goons with guns), and with them went that high percentage of female readers. 

Of course, that started to change again when a certain young editor, Karen Berger, climbed the ladder at DC and was allowed to start her own imprint, Vertigo Comics, for the company, an imprint renowned for opening its doors for more diverse topics and creators. 

And since then, the market and comics publishing world has continued to change and be a lot more welcoming to female artists and writers and editors. 

All the greats you'd expect are here: Louise Simonson, Trina Robbins, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Gail Simone, Marjorie Liu, Karen Berger, Jenette Jahn, Colleen Doran, Amy Chu, Jill Thompson, Wendy Pin, Nancy Collins, Ramona Fradon, G. Willow Wilson, Ann Nocenti, Felicia Henderson, and more. Their stories are tales of struggle, tales of endurance, and most important, tales of triumph. 

If there's a writer's theme to this film, it's this -- persevere. Stick it out. Chase the dream. Even when -- no, especially when -- the whole world stands against you and tells you it's pointless. 

Without women who chose to live that theme, well, this documentary wouldn't exist, and neither would so, so, so many of the industries favorite titles and characters. 

It works for comic books. And it works for major publishing houses. And it works for mid-size and indie houses too. 

It works for women. But it also works for all disenfranchised writers. Even you guys who can't get a leg up. It's not a gender thing. It's a keep at it thing. Write. Write some more, and then when you feel it's not getting you anywhere, keep at it and write even more. 

She writes comics. But you write what you write. And it'll take perseverance from you too, my friends.