The contrast first became glaringly obvious to me when I was a guest at a friend’s family pool party in rural Costa Rica this past winter. As someone who tends to be quite awkward around strangers, especially ones who seem to be impossibly jolly for a family function, I spent the beginning of the party in the corner observing. More »
Kate Chopin’s classic novel, “The Awakening,” documents the sexual emergence of its upper-class, female protagonist, Edna Pontellier. Metaphorically likened to a caged bird, whose chirping and twittering no one in high New Orleans society comprehends, Edna realizes that there does not exist an adequate language for her newfound sexuality. Disillusioned by the reality of her own social order and unwilling to conform to Victorian standards of femininity and motherhood, Edna, in the novel’s conclusion, drowns herself in the ocean. More »
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