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  • The Paris Review

    What It Is to Wake Up

    by Carmen Maria Machado Jun 17, 2019 5 minutes

    John William Waterhouse, Miranda, 1875, oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

    It was hard to fully appreciate The Awakening when I first read it, given to me by my sophomore-year English teacher to appease my rage against all the Hemingway we were assigned. It was one among a small stack of books from her home library—including titles by Henry James, Gloria Naylor, and Gabriel García Márquez—that would begin to make up the backbone of my own personal canon. But I read The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, first. Its back flap copy promised a feminist classic, and it sounded pretty sexy besides.

    It was 2001. I was fifteen years old and neither mother nor wife (nor straight, though I didn’t realize it at the time). I understood ’s appeal in the abstract; I appreciated that, despite the seeming quaintness of its

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