Freedom

Introduction

One principle foundation of the book is contained in the title: the utilization of instruction as the purposeful movement of engaging and of utilizing opportunity. The book originates from the perspective of an African-American lady from the South. She encountered both racially segregated and desegregated education. She found that the political and social plan of her african-american teachers more qualified her than the conditions in the integreated condition. She takes note of that whether as an outcome of being female or minority, or white and male, the fundamental encouraging given in coordinated schools run by whites was to obey and to regard the authority of ‘authority figures’. The work is a genuine book of the twentieth century.

It was distributed during the 1990s, by a female teacher in New York City. Educating is her normal everyday employment; she is actually a writer and she realized this some time before she at any point turned into an educator. This book is devoted to instructing. Through 14 sections, a list and a presentation, the creator explains various sentiments, discoveries and hypotheses about training. From the earliest starting point, she affirms that the study hall and the aptitude of educating are unimaginably significant. Before the end of the book, educators and understudies should both have new mindfulness and thoughts they can execute about how to improve instruction in the homerooms in which they get themselves.

This book tends to various issues encompassing race, sexual orientation and class. It is clear in its inspiration to destroy oppressive social structures, in this setting they are named: racial domination, man controlled society, and class. Heterosexuality is assumed. In every section, issues are tended to as they have showed up before the attention to the creator.

A significant number of her perceptions, while situated in any event one rendition of reality, ran into trouble inside the setting of racially incorporated advanced education during her years as an understudy. The purpose behind this is a large number of them were seen as conceivable disruption and defiance. Her plan is to teach for freedom. Here, the undeniable issue is the relationship of trust, and the scarcity in that department inside the framework as one that sets a few people up for disappointment even as it professes to set individuals up for progress.

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy”― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. This point demonstrates that to stay away from violence against our students, to think about them, to cherish them, intends to stir their soul. For some, their spirits lie lethargic, having been hushed to rest by social realism and whipped by scholarly realism. Thus as we teach, we should counter the realist sacrament that has submitted this viciousness against them. The compartmentalization of psyche, body, and soul should be fixed — and it must start with those of us who look to teach. What’s more, we should look for every step of the way to sustain what has decayed in our understudies, in their entire being, not just their ability to store and recover data.

“As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.”― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. This explains that in a service-learning course, understudies share their very own accounts and responses to the work they are doing as a technique to associate what they are realizing inside the homeroom to the work they are doing outside of it. Yet, the associations built in service-learning classes can possibly expand well past the study hall dividers. Through guided reflection, understudies can figure out how to perceive their very own accounts in the lives of others and in the networks where they live and work.

“To fulfill that mission, my teachers made sure they “knew” us. They knew our parents, our economic status, where we worshipped, what our homes were like, and how we were treated in the family.”― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. This quote was chosen as a main point. because This amazes me and I think this training model is great. Educators know and care about understudies. They know your base and need to help you as long as they can. From my perspective, such instructing models these days are uncommon and valuable. More understudies will improve their learning if more schools like this show up.

Diversity Focus Theme: RacismToday, prejudice has become a major problem that not only affects the way an individual is viewed, but also their education. The purposeful abhorrence of a given race, or gathering of races and the deliberate creation and authorization of guidelines that keep those of a specific races in the lower classes of the general public in general, is the definition of racism and bigotry. The methods for doing this can be basic, or confused. Bigotry in this book, centers upon an extremely limited type of it. Nonetheless, bell hooks took a gander at is the prevailing structure found in the United States: here the worry is about the relations between American whites and American blacks. While blacks are a long way from the country’s just racial minority, this gathering is the predominant one and has an exceptional history.

Therefore, the centralization and involvement of racism and how it affects a students’ education, presents the diversity focus in the novel Teaching to Transgress– Education as the Practice of Freedom, by Bell Hooks. Author SummaryGloria Jean Watkins (conceived September 25, 1952), known as bell hooks, is an American creator, teacher, women’s activist, and social dissident. The name “bell hooks” is acquired from her maternal grandma, Bell Blair Hooks.

The focal point of hooks’ books has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and sex, and what she depicts as their capacity to create and conserve frameworks of mistreatment and class domination. She has distributed in excess of 30 books and various academic articles, showed up in narrative movies, and took an interest out in the open talks. She has tended to race, class, and gender in instruction, craftsmanship, history, sexuality, broad communications, and women’s liberation.

In 2014, she established the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.Hooks’s began a teaching career, in 1976 as an English educator and senior teacher in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. She instructed at a few post-secondary organizations in the mid 1980s and 1990s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Yale, Oberlin College and City College of New York.

In 1981 South End Press distributed her first significant work, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, however it was composed years sooner while she was an undergrad understudy. In the decades since its production, Ain’t I a Woman? has increased across the board acknowledgment as a powerful commitment to women’s activist idea.All the years Gloria Watkins has developed her career, made her very influential and the perfect spokesperson for education and how to include all people; such as those whom have a different race, gender, class. This is important to understand because education is a critical step in many lives. By being treated as a minority, it lowers one’s opportunities; Mrs. Watkins recognized this, and she made the action to use her authority and credibility as an educator and activist to fight for equal rights in and outside the classroom.

Conclusion

Social scholar, hooks, intends to challenge previously established inclinations, and it is an uncommon peruser who will have the option to leave her without significant idea. In spite of the incessant appearance of the dry word ”pedagogy,” this assortment of articles about educating is definitely not dull or confined. hooks starts her contemplations on class, sexual orientation and race in the homeroom with the admission that she never needed to instruct. By consolidating individual story, paper, basic hypothesis, exchange and a dream meet with herself (the last counterfeit build being the most disastrous), hooks proclaims that instruction today is negatively affecting students by declining to recognize their specific accounts.

Condemning the showing foundation for utilizing an over-factualized information to deny and smother assorted variety, hooks blames partners for utilizing ”the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power.” Far from a chastisement of her field, notwithstanding, Teaching to Transgress is brimming with expectation and fervor for the probability of training to free and incorporate. She is a delicate, however firm, critic, as in the essay ”Holding My Sister’s Hand,” which could all around become a great about the doubt among high contrast women’s activists. While some will discover her dismissal of certain troublesome hypothesis extremist, it is a small flaw in an inspired and thought-provoking collection.

References

1. Bell hooks, bell. (2017). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.
2. Bell hooks. (2019, November 11). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks.

Freedom, always a main concern of Americans and their way of life, was what prompted even the earliest American literature. The Puritans, who fled England to gain religious freedom, wrote about their beliefs and their way of life. To show their beliefs, writers like Jonathon Edwards and John Winthrop wrote things that appealed to the average Puritan, but today we see these beliefs as a little overbearing and controlling. Jonathon Edwards, who wrote Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, was considered to be the last of the great Puritan preachers, but his hellfire and brimstone approach to writing and preaching led to the decline of Puritanism. As for John Winthrop, he wrote, in A Speech to the General Court, about the civil laws and the courts of the Puritan Era. His Puritan beliefs came through in his belief of obedience when he said that man should submit to civil laws.

The two most contrasting styles of the very earliest American literature can best be represented by John Smith and William Bradford. In Smiths The General History of Virginia his style is very laid back and seems more like an adventure movie that a factual interpretation of things that really happened. Bradford, on the other hand, seems to know exactly whats going on, and he makes sure to explain how it will effect their everyday life. Of Plymouth Plantation is considered to be more accurate than The General History of Virginia, and even though theres not as much embellishment, its still very interesting.

Most writing during this time focused on the everyday life of the people who wrote is and few poets emerged. Of note, though, is Anne Bradstreet who wrote To My Dear and Love Husband. In her poem, Bradstreet expresses her emotions and feeling, and she is generally known for her use of extravagant language.

Although the Puritans portrayed their freedom of religion excellently through their writing, America was still under British rule. The 1700s changed the American way of life through writers like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. They risked their lives to write things like The Declaration of Independence and The Crisis. In this time of great debate Thomas Paine said, These are the times that try mens souls. Jefferson wrote that there are certain unalienable rights: and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To write these things at such a time of change for American proved that we had really become a nation.

In this time of freedom-fighters, Ben Franklin stuck out as a very satirical writer. His style was what caught the readers attention in things like Poor Richards Almanack and The Speech of Polly Baker. The funny things are sometimes what makes the best American writers.

The 1800s were covered with writers of romanticism. The best example of romanticism is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Romanticism is characterized by long descriptions of nature and impossible situations. Sometimes romantic tales can even seem like soap operas! Hawthornes story about Hester Prynne and her affair with a preacher during the Puritan times definitely falls into the category of romanticism because it idealizes the common man and portrays life as a love of the exotic. As for a love of the exotic, Edgar Allan Poe portrays the exotic and mystical well in The Raven, and is also categorized as a romantic writer.

America likes to bring everything into their homes and poets are no exception. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is known as Americas household poet because of his ability to make the average man a hero His style brought more Americans into the world of poetry. Among other poets of this time period you will also discover James Russell Lowell who wrote The First Snowfall about the loss of his daughter. He brought his pain to the surface when he wrote and related himself to the average man.

A thing called transcendentalism changed many Americans viewpoints during this time period. Transcendentalists believe that the truths of being and the universe lie outside the reach of the senses and are grasped through intuition. Ralph Waldo Emerson and later Henry David Thoreau

were the most well known transcendentalists of the time. They taught intuition through their writing and through their travels. Their style were thought provoking and started to change Americas mind.

Closing the 1800s, Stephan Crane and Mark Twain stepped into the spotlight. Stephan Cranes novel, The Red Badge of Courage, focused on the lives of the soldiers during the Civil War. His styles hid the identities and specific characteristics of the soldiers to make them seem more like just another number in their armies. While Crane wrote about war, Twain wrote satires about the follies of the common man. Twains styles made many people laugh, but also made America take a step back to look at their standards.

In the twentieth century, the Jazz Age left a big impression with works like The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms. F. Scott Fitzgeralds style could be described as a soup made of symbolism. His messages about the decay of society closely mirrored his own life and the hard lessons he had to learn. Ernest Hemingways story of love during the time of war sent the message of the unavoidable face of war, but gave us the image of courage through the worst tragedies.

The twentieth century also saw the publication of many theatrical works. Arthur Miller, Robert Lee, and Alfred Uhry published their plays, all about the strength of Americans. The Crucibletook place during the Salem witch trials and proved that love seems to withstand even the worst of times. Robert Less turned Thoreaus night in jail into a comical portrayal of the famous transcendentalist, and Alfred Uhry taught his readers about the importance of a good friend.

As the twentieth century faded out, Southern literature slowly became accepted as a genre all its won. With such writers as Harper Less and Truman Capote, strong Southern values presented themselves to Americans. Using retrospective monologue, strong family bonds, and the land, Southern literature stepped forward to take a bow.

Although American literature has seen many different periods and faces, one thing has remained constant: the American drive for greatness. Every American writer has made their mark, whether it be through their use of symbolism or their desire for freedom. The American dream hasnt always been portrayed through American literature but with writers like Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ben Franklin the American ideal seems just a little closer.

Unbearable Realism: Freedom, Ethics and Identity in The Awakening Peter Ramos L ike the last lines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the ending of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening seems always to be read in the context of gender inequality at the turn of the last century. Both texts repeatedly establish the extent to which the patriarchal pressures of that period posed severe obstacles for even the most privileged women.

In regard to each text’s ending, however, the same set of questions tends to arise: is Edna’s suicide, like Gilman’s speaker’s descent into madness, a triumph—the best possible achievement of independence and agency under the circumstances? Or are her final actions a defeat—the fatal, inescapable result for any woman who tries to assert autonomy in the face of such debilitating, insurmountable patriarchy? Though critical responses have varied since The Awakening was first published in 1899— when the majority argued that Edna’s ulti- Peter Ramos is assistant professor of English at Buffalo State College.

He has criticism in The CEA Critic, The Faulkner Journal, and Mandorla. His first book-length collection of poems, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost,was published in 2008. 146 College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010] mate fate is only cosmic justice for her moral deviation throughout the novella—most readings have fallen into either of these two categories. 1 There are, of course, a few slightly different readings; Robert Treu, for example, along with a few other critics, suggests that Edna’s final swim does not necessarily lead to her intentional (or even unintentional) suicide (2000, 23).

But for the most part, these two interpretations of the novella’s ending remain the most enduring and prominent. A third, though far less popular, reading of Edna’s final actions insists they are inconsistent with her character and, as such, flaw the novella as a whole. George M. Spangler claims that The Awakening’s conclusion “undercuts the otherwise superb characterization of the protagonist and thus prevents a very good novel from being the masterpiece its discoverers claim that it is” (1970, 250).

Strangely enough, even one of Chopin’s staunchest defenders comes to this same conclusion—though from a slightly different perspective. Biographer Emily Toth has suggested that Chopin had Edna commit suicide in order to accommodate the moral demands publishers and readers would place on a woman who committed such transgressions. 2 Such a reading necessarily implies that Chopin, succumbing more or less willingly to outside pressures, produced a compromised piece of literature.

But these seemingly different readings share a common view of the society a woman like Edna faced, for each inherently suggests that the patriarchal-social pressures forced upon such a woman were either inescapably deterministic or, somehow, entirely avoidable through a kind of mythical rebirth achieved through the act of suicide. Even critic Marta CamineroSantangelo, whose book, The Madwoman Can’t Speak, argues against treating insanity or (presumably) suicide as a viable form of agency for women, makes the following concession regarding Chopin’s (as well as Gilman’s) text: It is surely no coincidence that “The Yellow Wallpaper” . . and The Awakening . . . , appearing within less than a decade of each other at the turn of the twentieth century, both depict female protagonists who retreat from a world of insurmountable obstacles into madness and suicide, respectively, nor that, in both cases, the retreat is highly ambiguous. (CamineroSantangelo 1998, 181; my emphasis)3 Such readings, though problematic, are understandable. We care about Edna and feel justifiable sympathy for her plight.

It’s far easier to see her either as an innocent victim crushed by a merciless, absolute patriarchy, or as having the last laugh by ducking out of life’s impassible and unfair obstacles. But these readings implicitly overlook the courage and discipline of women like Edna who did survive and rise above such pressures, including the very authors of The Awakening and “The Yellow Wallpaper”; both women had families and successful writing careers, endured divorce or a spouse’s death, Peter Ramos 147 and remained active public figures for most of their lives.

According to the logic of these enduring critical readings, women like Chopin or Gilman appear to be accidental survivors who inexplicably avoided an otherwise inexorable fate, or—worse—women who lacked the courage to make the ultimate stand of killing themselves or going mad to elude the patriarchal society they faced. 4 There is no question that the social roles and practical agency for women like Edna and the speaker in “TheYellow Wallpaper” were limited: both texts make this point abundantly clear.

The issue that merits further investigation, however, and one that The Awakening implicitly comments on, is what women could do, and who they could be, in the face of such restrictions. I would like to suggest another way to read the ending of The Awakening, and that is as a subtle, but intentionally crafted, warning. In this reading, Edna’s final actions serve as an example of what can happen to a protagonist whose unwillingness to continue dedicating herself to any of the available social roles leads her to abandon all of them in favor of an enticing yet everelusive freedom, the kind one associates with a tantalizing, idyllic childhood.

We know that Edna’s own childhood was far from idyllic, given her mother’s early death and her father’s stern personality, and this may have some relation to her life-long quest for such freedom. But Edna’s search for such an unrestricted, undefined and, ultimately, impossible state—a freedom from identity—ironically deprives her life of meaning (and finally of life itself). Identity, as we know, is at base a social construction, a practical fiction one inhabits, more or less intentionally and with a certain amount of will.

In many ways the definition of any particular identity seems arbitrary: how is one ever absolutely or inherently a mother or an artist, for example? At what point does an artist identify herself as such—after her first painting? Her 700th? The choice seems entirely up to her. Even the apparently self-evident definition of motherhood seems to possess a certain amount of flexibility; wouldn’t a woman who adopts, raises and nurtures a child have the same right to choose to call herself a mother? There are conditions one must face, of course, but one’s decision to take on an identity is, in important ways, akin to elieving in a kind of fiction, precisely because one’s identity is so often unrelated to the physical, biological being. But to take on an identity in this way, even if one were to modify it, must also involve confronting, and, ultimately, taking responsibility for the “real” effects and consequences of such a performance. This is especially the case when such a performance occurs in society, in relation to others. But this still leaves some room, even in an otherwise restrictive society, to willfully modify one’s social role or identity.

Historically in this country, this is precisely the way marginalized people have asserted their civil rights: by owning, and taking responsibility for, what social roles were available, and then by modi- 148 College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010] fying, over time and in greater numbers, their boundaries. Take, for example, women who have, over time, and with effort, successfully modified the boundaries and definitions of the role of “mother” to include someone who works both inside and outside of the home.

In other words, by taking control of the very means of representing or determining their social selves in a society that would otherwise determine or represent them, strong, dedicated women—like those in other marginalized groups—have overcome many of the social restrictions they faced (and, in many cases, continue to face). To take a conventional role available to women at this time and to modify it would be to achieve what Caminero-Santangelo means by “active creative transformation” (1998, 181).

Edna’s refusal finally to dedicate herself to an identity or creatively transform one for herself is a particular failure, one that ends in suicide. But this failure is not universal among all the female characters in Chopin’s novella. Both Mademoiselle Reisz and Adele Ratignolle explicitly inhabit social identities available to them only to actively and creatively transform them. In doing so they implicitly demonstrate the options available to women of this time period, options Edna fails to exercise and sustain.

Mademoiselle Reisz and Adele Ratignolle certainly face limitations— economic, social, political—because of their gender; each has a limited set of socially acceptable identities to choose from: mother-woman, artist. But as I hope to demonstrate, Chopin’s text also clearly illustrates the surprising amount of agency—given the novella’s historical and regional setting—these two women create for themselves precisely because they have learned to use and modify these social identities.

Because she’s an artist, and recognized as such in society, Madame Reisz is not expected to marry. Furthermore, she does not act or appear “lady-like” or even polite: she speaks her mind, even in public. That is, Madame Resiz inhabits or occupies a social identity, the definition and social limitations of which seem arbitrary—even, as previously defined, fictitious. But she does so with “real” social consequences, within “real” conditions she must navigate. Yet, she is also able to inhabit this role in a way that modifies and extends its boundaries.

Consider the way the reader is introduced to her: She was dragging a chair in and out of her room, and at intervals objecting to the crying of a baby, which a nurse in the adjoining cottage was endeavoring to put to sleep. She was a disagreeable little woman, no longer young, who had quarreled with almost everyone, owing to a temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample upon the rights others. . . . She was a homely woman, with a small weazened face and body and eyes that glowed.

She had absolutely no taste in dress, and wore a batch of rusty black lace with a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the side of her hair. . . . [And yet] A general air of surprise and genuine satisfaction fell upon everyone as they saw [Madame Reisz] enter. . . . Her playing had aroused a fever of Peter Ramos enthusiasm. “What passion! ” “What an artist! ” “I have always said no one could play Chopin like Mademoiselle Reisz! ” “That last prelude! Bon Dieu! It shakes a man! ” (Chopin 1988, 33–34) 149

So different from other representations of meek, self-effacing spinsters of this period, this woman here—an aging, un-married, impolite troublemaker—is not only tolerated but universally respected (Note that the last quote in the passage comes emphatically from a man). Of course it would be absurd to assume that Madame Reisz is absolutely free—in general, or from all the patriarchal pressures with which she must surely still contend. But here, at least, she manages to use her social identity in a very public way to navigate and even overcome some of the social restrictions one might assume to be in place at this time.

It’s also true that she lives alone, but Madame Resiz never appears lonely. (One could argue that Madame Reisz’s character only demonstrates how absolutely art and family were incompatible for women at this time. But, again, the examples of Chopin and Gilman weaken this claim. ) Madame Ratignolle, as I hope to demonstrate in greater detail, is also able to wield a significant amount of social power and agency, within and beyond her immediate domestic sphere.

Edna, too, succeeds in creating a significant amount of agency for herself after she comes to realize, when she learns to swim, the extent to which identities are fluid and fictitious (a point I’ll return to): she leaves her husband, seems free from a certain amount of childcare, and eventually earns money from her artwork. Unfortunately, she is also prone to constructing certain fantasies of identity—involving herself and Robert as lovers completely secluded from the world, for example—that she both nurtures and refrains from acting on, in part because of the social constraints and limitations she must face in the world.

More importantly, she lacks the will (and the belief) to commit herself to acting on these fantasies, even though they are no more fictitious than other, more conventional roles. Because these fantasies fail to become realized, the temptation, both for Edna and the reader, is to assume that no suitable identity for a woman like Edna is available. That is, Edna finally comes to believe that she cannot achieve individuality or personhood. 5 Her least realistic or achievable fantasies of identity also involve the abandonment of particular roles she cannot bring herself to relinquish, motherhood being the most obvious.

Unable, because essentially unwilling, to realize such fantasies, Edna ultimately responds by attempting to live outside of all social constructions, beyond any workable, practical fiction, entering what she imagines to be a space of unmediated reality beyond identity—a space that can neither be inhabited nor endured—as she comes to reject in succession the various social roles available to her: whether that of wife, mother, woman of society, artist and/or lover.

As the narrator states,“she had abandoned herself to Fate” 150 College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010] (Chopin 1988, 137). But her desire to live outside of all socially constructed identities cannot be realized, precisely because such an existence, even if achievable, cannot be sustained. In such a chaotic state, circumstance and whim would determine one’s existence, which would become akin to madness and, ultimately, would direct itself toward oblivion, toward self-annihilation.

Chopin thereby illustrates the fatal danger inherent in such a quest in which a woman/artist abandons all available social identities, what I am calling inhabitable social fictions. As William Bartley notes, Chopin . . . holds that any position on the best way to live is dependent upon what constitutes the best possible future—on what will always be a suitable [fictitious] image of an attainable future. Without such an image, anything that might count as ‘the best way to live’ would be as unthinkable, say, as the best possible vacation . . . ould be without ever imagining a destination. (Bartley 2000, 722) It’s important to remember, however, that Edna does make several radical life-style choices throughout the novella. In learning to swim, she experiences a moment of delicious joy and ecstasy, realizing that her potential is unlimited, that she is freer than she suspected:“A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul” (Chopin 1988, 36). However intoxicating, this sense of rejuvenation is a vital and necessary one.

Throughout the first half of the novella, Edna takes advantage of the epiphany: she becomes an artist, begins to question and then defy Leonce’s authority as her husband, moves out of the house, and develops romantic relationships with other men. Ultimately, however, her will flags, and she fails to sustain interest in, and dedication to, the new identities she has chosen. At the same time, she looks with increasing interest to Robert with whom she wants to experience a kind of hyperbolically romantic love affair, one she does not really think is possible or even, ultimately, worthwhile.

Toward the novella’s end, the narrator tells us,“There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him, would melt out of her existence” (Chopin 1988, 151). Believing that freedom is only a state of negation—a freedom from restrictions, rather than a freedom to take up and act on one’s choices—Edna makes the decision to resign herself to an existence so particular to itself (i. e. beyond any constructed, fictitious identity) that it leaves her no room in which to negotiate the very social restrictions she seeks to elude. As is the case with a similar reading of “TheYellow Wallpaper,” this interpretation asserts that Chopin’s novel neither belittles nor underestimates the odds and obstacles facing women, even middle class Southern white women, Peter Ramos 151 at the turn of the century, but points instead to a life beyond fatalism, a meaningful life set against, and necessarily within, the constraints of nature and society (and suicide obviously would not be a viable option for such a life). In other words, while The Awakening asserts that there is only a limited set of available social roles for a woman like Edna, it implicitly reminds the reader, at the same time, that the content of these roles—as well as their flexibility—is by no means completely circumscribed. As Edna herself comes to realize, she can exercise a certain amount freedom in choosing the kind of woman she wants to be. But this freedom is not enough: she must then act on and willfully sustain her choices in order for them to have any meaning beyond whim.

This is essentially the way one lives an ethical life—acting on, and being responsible for, the choices one is more or less free to make. According to Chopin’s novella, achieving such an implied ethical life (as opposed to a moral one) would be neither impossible nor immediate (nor simple) but would instead involve extraordinary strength, courage, and dedication. That Edna ultimately fails to sustain these qualities may mean that she fails to uphold and live by what I am calling “ethics. 7 But I would add that such an understanding must also take into account that women (as well as other then-marginalized groups) were for the most part prevented from living ethically. That is, they faced imposing, but not absolutely determining, nor absolute, restrictions. Critical readings of The Awakening have long pointed out the ways in which Chopin’s novella incorporates aspects of several turn-of-the-century literary movements, including romanticism, realism, and naturalism.

Such readings tend to emphasize the techniques of the latter two movements— realism and naturalism—and thereby remind us that Chopin’s novella illuminates the socio-economic and cultural realities women like Edna faced, as well as the physical desires and social needs society denied them. In fact, The Awakening also performs a subtle but compelling critique of realism and naturalism by revealing the limitations of these modes of representation in order to point to (or construct) practical possibilities that exist outside their realm.

Acknowledging that realism and naturalism include, respectively, an exposition of empirical, social and political realities, as well as the belief that fate— biological, social, or institutional—absolutely determines one’s destiny, I’m suggesting that Chopin’s novel implies that in order for women like Edna to survive, the philosophical boundaries and consequences associated with these literary genres can and must be overcome.

By illuminating the extent to which identities are mostly inhabitable social fictions, The Awakening complicates realism’s insistence on the empirical; by presenting women who seem to have a modicum of agency and autonomy, as well as a protagonist who mistakenly comes to believe that she has no say over her own fate, it undermines naturalism’s claims of determinism. 152 College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010]

As such the novella does not fail to remind the reader that on some level Edna is responsible for her destiny—despite—and precisely because of—the enormous social limitations society has placed on a woman such as herself. Her self-defeating choices stem, in part, from the fact that she believes with increasing intensity that no favorable identity or social fiction is available to her. Rather than sustaining or modifying her identities—recently separated wife, artist, mother, lover—or only abandoning the ones that seem to her impossible to realize, Edna abandons all of them in favor of stark reality itself.

It is not quite fair to say that she lacks imagination or a sense of reality; rather, Edna’s chief flaw, the novella implies, is that she lacks the will to maintain and inhabit (and possibly modify) any of the social fictions available to someone like herself. Her ultimate surrender to the brutal, brutally “real” aspects of nature becomes inextricably tied to this lack of will power, leaving her helpless in the face of an insuperable, obliterating reality. There is no question that the social roles available for someone like Edna to inhabit were limited in number.

One is tempted to imagine that if Edna could be truly autonomous and free she would commence living a fulfilling life. That is, according to the enduring critical arguments already mentioned that focus on the novella’s ending, Edna’s suicide seems related not so much to her intimacies with others (however unfulfilling or impossible these might be) as to the insurmountable social, patriarchal restrictions she must face. Of course these may overlap, but the central problem, so the critics contend, stems from the social restrictions (the lack of freedom) institutionally imposed on Edna.

As Joyce Dyer argues, “Society, as well as the conscience of Edna herself, offers no relief. . . . Motherhood and selfhood were incompatible in Edna’s century” (1993, 103). But again and again The Awakening’s implication is that what Edna longs for is not so much freedom (which she discovers and to a certain extent pursues after learning to swim) as meaning—which, increasingly for Edna, involves not selfhood but the unattainable yet always longed-for lover.

Having left Leonce and her old house, having become a somewhat successful artist, having in other words become significantly, almost exceptionally, free from the restrictive drudgery of domestic duties, including (it seems) many childcare responsibilities, Edna nonetheless feels empty: “But as she sat amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which came upon her like an obsession. . . There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable” (Chopin 1988, 118). Can it really be Robert she longs for who, if only he would devote himself to her, would bring all meaning and spirit back into her life? With its allusion to the unattainable beloved, the passage reinforces the sense of Edna’s lifelong inability to commit herself

Peter Ramos 153 to anyone or -thing, the feeling of safety (albeit mixed with sadness) she feels in falling in love with unreachable, and therefore abstract, lovers. This is the person who, as “a grown woman,” became infatuated with the face and figure of a tragedian, and who, without ever meeting the actor in person, much less consummating the relationship, takes her feelings for him to be “the climax of her fate” (23).

This sense of infatuation and helplessness returns as she realizes that Robert may not reciprocate her feelings for him, and the text implies the difference in her age now seems to have no effect on Edna’s ability to judge and act on her current emotions: For the first time she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman.

The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded. (Chopin 1988, 59)

Katherine Kearns, reading the text through Jean-Francois Lyotard’s writings on the sublime, points out that Edna’s quenchless desire here mirrors the feeling of sublimity she experiences when learning to swim or on first hearing Madame Reisz play the piano. According to Kearns, “The condition of sublimity is a pleasurable ‘delirium’ in which the ineffable is simultaneously felt and felt to be unattainable, but it is a pleasure that derives itself from pain. . . . It is a masochism available to the initiates of the ‘I’ who may luxuriate briefly in the piquant pain of conceptualizing the unimaginable” (1991, 75).

Ultimately, it is Edna’s conviction alone—and not the novella’s assertion— that the inaccessibility of “true” love for her, as with “true” art, is a symptom of how absolutely society prohibits her attempts at autonomy and selfhood. Kearns adds,“An unarticulated yearning for the ineffable may rise up like an ague and subside, but when Edna begins to learn the names of her oppression she discovers that the imagination cannot objectify a curative condition. . . . On a more comprehensive level it is an ignis fatuus [that is, an illusion] which convinces Edna that there is no way” (76).

According to Kearns, then, the novella’s apparent subscription to the values associated with naturalism, including the belief that forces beyond the control of the self absolutely determine the self, seems to be Edna’s alone, and such a view, Chopin’s text implies, is finally erroneous and deadly. The novella indicates that somewhere between the imagination and the conditions of reality exists a space where women of the nineteenth century with ambition, dedication and will might 154 College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010] inhabit and sustain a social fiction that would provide at least a modicum of autonomy and selfhood.

As both bildungsroman and kunstlerroman, The Awakening reveals the tragic failure of the life of a woman and an artist, though the fact that Edna ultimately refuses to perform the kind of hard work such a dual-identity requires should by no means incur our censure or blame. As a casualty, Edna compels sympathy, and her actions bespeak the terrific effort and endurance necessary for such a woman to survive in such a time and place. Still, even as the novella invokes sympathy for Edna, it does not withhold its implicit critique of her final choices.

Increasingly, Edna nurtures her infatuations, an easier, more tempting alternative to willfully maintaining her various social identities. Her feelings for Robert, like those for the tragedian and cavalry officer before, are ultimately a symptom not of realism but of romance, and one might be inclined to imagine that such romantic tendencies are the real cause of Edna’s grief. But as Bartley reminds us, Edna’s romanticism is of a particular kind. She longs for and imagines a future with these men, though in each case it becomes clear to Edna, almost immediately, that no such future is possible within the conditions of her reality.

Still, one must imagine and therefore fictitiously create one’s future, and this applies to everyone—characters in fiction, artists, and especially women in the nineteenth century who had to bear the brunt of societal pressures, laws, and institutions. Ethics, not morality, involves acting on personally chosen beliefs. To live ethically, then, is to choose, believe in and act on a fiction—though one can only do so against (and therefore, necessarily, within) the pressures, constraints, and conditions of one’s existence.

Bartley argues that such an understanding of ethics applies to Chopin’s novella and necessarily undermines both of the most popular contemporary readings of Edna’s final, suicidal action: as a necessary defeat before an all-powerful patriarchy, and as a kind of mythic triumph of selfhood over all conditions and limitations. As Bartley notes,“we are [and so, therefore, is Edna] something more than the helpless performers of socially scripted roles . . . ven as we fall short of the standard of sovereign selfauthorship we find in Gilbert’s account [in which Edna dies only to return as Venus]” (2000, 730–31). 8 That is to say, Edna is neither absolutely determined by patriarchy and its limitations, nor free from her social conditions and restraints—in any inhabitable, practical way—when she commits suicide. 9 The problem Edna faces, the more pressing and essential issue, is not so much a matter of how many available roles there are to choose from, but of how to fight for and dedicate oneself to (and then modify) any of those roles in the first place.

To ultimately reject all the available social roles, as Edna does by the novella’s end, is not to live freely but to live chaotically and without meaning, is to eliminate the very identities Edna would otherwise inhabit and use to represent herself. Her rejection thus leads to a kind of despair in Peter Ramos 155 many ways akin to madness, for both (madness and a surrendering of the will) involve relinquishing the sole means of self-representation in a society that already limits and undermines women’s ability to do so.

As CamineroSantangelo argues, referring to the relationship between madness in women and patriarchal societies, “insanity is the final surrender to such [dominant, patriarchal] discourses, precisely because it is characterized by the (dis)ability to produce meaning—that is, to produce representations recognizable as meaningful within society” (1998, 11). Contrary to the idea, then, that Edna’s rejection of all the roles available to her—mother, lover, wife, artist, friend— might lead to freedom, her withdrawals only succeed in obliterating the social positions she might otherwise use to determine as much of her own life as possible.

As even Adele Ratignolle tells Edna, sensing that her quest for freedom fails to take into account her responsibilities and social conditions, “In some ways you seem to me like a child. . . .You seem to act without a certain amount of reflection which is necessary in this life” (Chopin 1988, 127). The implication in Adele’s advice is not necessarily to stay married and have more children but to thoroughly investigate, live within, accept responsibility for (and possibly modify) a fictitious but practical role—in other words, to cease from being a child by taking the freedoms and responsibilities that come with adulthood seriously.

Acting childishly in this way is something Edna does with more and more frequency: “She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility” (Chopin 1988, 42). Rather than being a determining factor imposed on her from without, however, this trait seems characteristic of Edna’s refusal to maintain a certain amount of willpower, something Adele perceptively identifies.

Certainly Madame Ratignolle is not the model of a modern free woman; she is, even as the novella points out, “the mother woman” absolutely bound by her domestic duties. Still, she does not seem unaware of herself. She seems both to know the limitations of her role and to embrace that role, nonetheless. In some cases, Adele is able to extend the very boundaries of her social identity: if her agency and control are limited to the domestic space, she nonetheless manages to push the boundaries of that sphere beyond her household. No one seems to dispute the ocial power she wields in her extended community, her ability to publicly flirt with and socially manipulate Robert and the other younger men who surround her. In fact, Kathleen Streater goes so far as to call Adele a feminist in her own right: [B]y allowing Adele—a pregnant woman—to hint at a sexual identity, Chopin contests the boundaries of Adele’s assigned gender roles: is she a mother? a femme-fatal? a saint? a wild woman? Chopin suggests Adele is all of them, and, in doing so, she reveals an identity that confuses, and thus 156 College Literature 37. [Fall 2010] belies, static stereotypes, and, importantly, she reveals Adele’s ownership and authority of the mother-woman role beyond the male-prescribed definitions. It is a quiet revolution of sorts. (Streater 2007, 407–09) Not only does Adele understand how fictitious the social identities or roles available to her are—with their fluid, contestable boundaries—she inhabits them in a practical way and thereby modifies the overarching identity the novel, perhaps a bit playfully, assigns for her: mother-woman. Madame Reisz gives similar advice to Edna.

When Edna tells her friend that she plans to be an artist, Madame Reisz does not tell her, cannot say, if this will become a reality. That is, the occupation and identity is, on one hand and on some level, something predetermined (and in this more closely aligned with nature, even fate): “one must possess many gifts—absolute gifts—which have not been acquired by one’s own effort”; and on the other, as Madame Reisz warns, such an occupation requires strenuous willpower and action :“Moreover, to succeed, the artist must posses the courageous soul . . the soul that dares and defies” (Chopin 1988, 84). Yet, just moments before Edna confesses to Madame Reisz that she loves Robert, the narrator tells us that Edna “had resolved never again to belong to another than herself ” (106). After Edna confesses to loving Robert, Madame Reisz asks “what will you do when he comes back? ” (note the verb in the question), to which Edna replies “Do? Nothing except feel glad and happy to be alive” (108). For all of the older woman’s attempts to get Edna to recognize the necessity of will and ction in forming a meaningful identity—to be an artist and/or to go and love Robert, in any case to do something—Edna stubbornly refrains from actively choosing and dedicating herself to any single social role. “One of these days” she tells Robert,“I’m going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for candidly, I don’t know. . . . I must think about it” (109). Nonetheless, after Edna has freed herself from Leonce, from her roles as wife and woman of the house, including many of her child-care responsibilities, she still feels empty, feels her own life to be without meaning. She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness,—not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference” (Chopin 1988, 137). It’s not reality that has gone out of her life but “all sense” of it—as if reality can have meaning but only to the extent that one approaches it within certain meaningful roles or terms.

Believing that her fantasies of running away with Robert and leaving her children behind cannot be realized within the conditions of her existence, Edna assumes nothing is left for her but stark reality, merciless as fate—existence without Peter Ramos 157 hope or will, unbearably real because unmediated by the social and practical terms one might otherwise choose, agree to, and live by. Let me compare the passage quoted in the previous paragraph to another that comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Here we get a description of Augustine St.

Clare, the good-hearted, apparently carefree Southern aristocrat whose paralyzing skepticism prevents him from acting on his true beliefs—one of which is that slavery is a sin against God. For St. Clare, life has become meaningless. This skepticism begins when he is prevented from marrying the woman he loves: And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue, sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, as gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare—exceedingly real. Of course in a novel [my emphasis], people’s heart’s break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life [my emphasis] we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living yet to be gone through; and this yet remained to Augustine. Stowe 2003, 152) Admittedly, Stowe’s novel comes from a different era. A mid-century work in a different set of genres—sentimental, Christian, domestic—Uncle Tom’s Cabin promotes a kind of feminism, or proto-feminism, in so far as its female characters are morally stronger than the males because of their natural capacity for Christian sympathy. Yet such women are bound to, even if in control of, the domestic sphere. But this passage is significant, and not just because it strays from the novel’s otherwise Christian, sentimental view of existence.

Here we get the sense that reality, the real, in its most naked, unmediated manifestation is not liberating but imprisoning, an oozy chaos without form or order; it is essentially that which cannot be taken up into a system of signification. 10 But the passage also illuminates the necessary connection between a certain amount of inhabitable, “livable” fiction and a meaningful existence. Implicitly set against the fiction-less, awful “real” is the kind of fiction one might use “in real life” (as opposed to an unrealistic “novel”) in order to live— the kind of fiction St.

Clare, despite being a character in this novel, seems to have lost and without which “all that makes life bright dies to us. ” I would suggest that this fiction-less real is precisely what Edna finds herself up against by the novella’s end. As such, The Awakening, for all of its realism, its literary mode of presenting the conditions of women at the turn of the century, is also making a subtle but compelling critique of realism, of the belief implicit in such a mode of representation that one might find in the 158

College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010] open, texture-less freedom of an empirical reality beyond all (apparently inhibiting) social constructions a kind of practical, fulfilling agency. At least in the first half of the novella, Edna seems to have no problem choosing new identities; her gradual refusal in the second half to work towards sustaining such (fictitious) identities adumbrates a pattern, the logical end of which is suicide. But as Kearns points out, Edna seems to believe that the fictions themselves are impossible.

Unlike Stowe’s implication—that without certain (inhabitable) fictions which are essential for survival, existence itself takes on a hostile, hopelessly “real” quality—Edna’s actions and feelings in the second half of the novella suggest a desire to shed all such fictions (having lost the will that is necessary to sustain them): “she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference. ”That is, Edna’s life becomes as unbearably real and meaningless as St.

Clare’s, yet she cannot muster the same strength to simply endure or sustain her various new identities. Set against Edna’s agonizing hesitation and ambivalence, her in-action, are the anonymous, almost faceless but stable figures on the beach that come and go with the official regularity of a Greek chorus: the united lovers and the Lady in mourning. 11 These are “types”—romance stereotypes almost— people defined entirely by the roles they play, yet moving on, “playing” their respective parts.

In terms of the literary techniques associated with realism, such types would be considered outside of the genre, or worse—as sloppy, toointensely allegorical representations of reality. In light of my argument, however, such background-types actually serve as a contrast to highlight Edna’s own unwillingness to play her own part or role. As such, the text performs a subtle critique of the values associated with realism by pointing (at the very level of language) to figures beyond realism’s usual mode of representation—its places and characters portrayed in all their life-like details and particularities.

Thus, the novella reiterates the sense that a certain amount of human individuality and agency can be achieved by women at the turn of the century, but these can only be expressed through the available social roles or identities that such women maintain, and possibly modify, by force of will. (The novella also takes a subtle but comical jab at the genre by lampooning Madame Ratignolle’s high opinion of the realistic qualities of Edna’s paintings:“‘and this basket of apples! [gushes Adele, whose opinion in this matter Edna reliably considers “next to valueless”] never have I seen anything more life-like. One might almost be tempted to reach out a hand and take one’” (Chopin 1988, 73). ) If one admits that such figures as the lovers and the Lady in mourning, along with Adele Ratignolle and Madame Reisz, occupy one end of existence or experience—an identity more or less determined by some social, socially acceptable role, whether young lover, woman in mourning, motherwoman, or woman-artist—one might see Edna’s initial experience of learn-

Peter Ramos 159 ing to swim at night as occupying the opposite end of experience—that of the inspirational, and infinite, potential of the self. In learning to swim by herself, Edna first encounters what Emerson calls the soul or over-soul in herself:“She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself ” (Chopin 1988, 36).

As we know, this begins Edna’s search for individuality and freedom, for the transcendental power within that will give her life meaning while freeing her from the constraints and boredom of her current domestic roles. As previously mentioned, there are a few critics who read Edna’s final actions as a desire to repeat this experience, to find in the cleansing salt water a return to her inner, infinite self. Some even suggest the possibility that her final actions do not lead to her drowning.

I would argue that accepting this involves overlooking important passages in the final paragraphs. While swimming out, Edna thinks of Leonce and her children, and then we get the following lines: “How Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew! [as if ventriloquizing for Madame Reisz, Edna then tells herself] ‘And you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies’” (Chopin 1988, 152). Treu claims that Edna, in remembering Madame Reisz’s words about he courageous artist,“feels the irony of her situation. This is a language of rebellion and renewal, although the line between suicide and survival can be razor thin” (2000, 30). His implication is that Edna is trying once again to find herself in the ocean, as she does earlier when she learns to swim. But if this were the case, neither Edna nor Madame Reisz would have any reason to mock such an attempt to discover and channel her inner-strength. In the final sentences, we get the following description: [T]he shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone.

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister, Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks. (Chopin 1988, 153) Treu suggests that this last sentence “with its unexpected reference to the fertile smell of pinks, is lyrical, and mysterious, suggesting the allurement that life on the shore still possesses for Edna” (2000, 30).

But this is asking much; in effect, we must ignore this scene as a memory from Edna’s distant (and therefore irrecoverable) childhood, and overlook the fact that Edna is turning, in the same passage, to the equally inaccessible, the always inaccessible yet ever longed for male figure—the distant father and, more immediately, the cavalry 160 College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010] officer of her girlhood. Relying on textual evidence, then, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to read this final paragraph as depicting a triumph of autonomy or even a longing to return to the present on “the shore. Edna ultimately fails to achieve the promise the initial experience in the ocean offers her, but the novella implies that such an achievement is not beyond possibility by suggesting that one might dream and live between the two aforementioned spheres or ends of experience—from inspiration and a knowledge of one’s infinite potential to the ability to then commit oneself to (and modify) the social role or fiction, even if already constructed, one has chosen to live up to or within.

Unlike Edna, whose last name means “to bridge” in French, women like her might conceivably begin with an ideal and nevertheless make the necessary leap of practically inhabiting and sustaining it. Ultimately, Edna comes to see Adele and Madame Reisz as occupying opposite and mutually exclusive social roles, or points of feminine identity. But as Bartley and Kearns imply, the novella offers us glimpses of other (or slightly but significantly modified) social roles Edna might have chosen to live by and sustain, implicitly revealing that her sense of the practical, available social identities is erroneously and therefore tragically limited.

As Bartley reminds us, Leonce must finally acknowledge and even accommodate Edna’s departure from the house. It is true that he “speaks” her story by providing an excuse for Edna to their friends and family, but Leonce’s fictional explanation for her leaving is nonetheless a sign that he is willing to renegotiate the old (and more conventional) terms of their marriage, including how much responsibility over childcare and childrearing Leonce might be willing to take on himself.

Should marriage prove impossible for Edna, she might develop the friendship she has started with Adele, and/or Madame Reisz. Together all three might approach other women in similar circumstances and join a women’s rights movement. There is also her artistic career, of course, and though it seems to have stalled, she might conceivably find a new, more fulfilling approach to her own artwork; she can also, for the present, make money at it (Bartley 2000, 738–40). Each of these possibilities is implicit in Chopin’s novella, reminding us that “The present moment is radically inconclusive. . . [B]ecause people are capable of creativity, because the past never exhaustively defines them, and because an unceasing dynamism exists between the individual and social milieu, there is potential for various outcomes” (Bartley 2000, 738). Had Edna fought off her sleepiness while reading Emerson, she might have come to the following passages from “Experience,” a later essay, and understood that idealism (or fiction) and practical reality (and the willpower it demands) need not be—indeed cannot be—mutually exclusive if idealism is to serve our needs at all:

Peter Ramos At Education Farm the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. . . .We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. . . . Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. . . . We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation.

Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry—a narrow belt. . . .The mid-world is best. (Emerson 1981, 335, 336) 161 As Steater herself argues, “No matter how much Edna’s absolute rejection of her conventional gender roles resonates with a sense of feminist triumph, it is a type of literary romanticism that can quickly dead-end in despair once the book-cover is closed: Edna’s escape through death may feel freeing, but ultimately, she offers us no hope” (2007, 415).

Given her knowledge of the author’s biography and personal views, even Toth must finally admit “Chopin’s own attitude toward women’s suicide was more critical than sympathetic. (And of course, she was no suicide herself)” (1991, 121). The point is worth repeating: Chopin, like Gilman, faced social pressures and obstacles as an artist and a mother at the turn of century much like Edna’s, without committing suicide or going mad.

Nor did she ever endorse such methods of escaping patriarchy, in correspondence or public writings. Edna and the speaker in “The Yellow Wallpaper” are pitiable figures whose fates remind us of the magnitude of the obstacles women like them faced. But their creators remind us—by their own example as well as that of other women and inherent possibilities within their stories—that such obstacles, though they demanded remarkable strength, creativity, discipline, and will, could ultimately be overcome.

Notes Robert Treu reminds us, interpretations for the most part either “come out of what Suzanne Wolkenfeld calls ‘the feminist fatalism of presenting Edna as the victim of an oppressive society,’” or they come from those who see Edna “more positively . . . as ‘a solitary, defiant soul who stands out against the limitations that both nature and society place on her, and who accepts in the final analysis a defeat that involves no surrender’” (2000, 22). Or, as William Bartley otes, summing up the most popular (and apparently mutually exclusive) responses, At one pole of critical consensus, then, is the judgment that Edna’s suicide is the despairing act of a spiritually exhausted woman, defeated in her confrontation with patriarchal constraint. . . .This response, or rather family of responses, is flatly contradicted by another: that Edna’s suicidal swim is a heroic moment of self-creation and self-possession, even of mythic apotheosis in the high romantic mode. (Bartley 2000, 724) 1 As 162 College Literature 37. [Fall 2010] 2 Although scheduled to give the key note speech at this event—the 2007 CEA conference in New Orleans—Emily Toth was in the audience and made this suggestion at a smaller panel on Chopin’s The Awakening. She offered her own comments and opinions after the panelists had presented their papers. 3 Caminero-Santangelo’s book effectively and admirably argues against the notion that madness served as a form of social resistance and agency for women, a notion that reached the peak of its popularity among certain critics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Except for her use of the term “insurmountable,” which I emphasize in the passage, I agree with her assessment of both texts. (I also have no problem with the claim that both retreats, or endings, are ambiguous—provided this means both can be read in different ways and not that they must remain un-readable or beyond any particular reading. ) Carminero-Santangelo goes on to insist, “Instead of privileging the retreat into madness [or, presumably, suicide], then, let us privilege the forms of agency, and of active creative transformation in all its forms, which women engage in.

And in doing so, let us open an imaginative space for women to be able to escape from madness by envisioning themselves as agents” (1998, 181). Part of this paper’s claim is that The Awakening implies this very argument, both by including women who, despite the restrictions of their social roles, actively wield a surprising amount of agency, given the limitations they face, and by showing, in the case of its protagonist, the consequences of attempting to escape all available social roles in favor of an unrestricted though ultimately elusive “freedom. ” 4 Of ourse, Charlotte Perkins Gilman did commit suicide, but her decision to do so seems entirely related to being told that she had inoperable cancer, and that this would not only end her life but render her incapable of working or writing when the end drew near. Even if Gilman did believe that the social, societal obstacles she faced were insurmountable, this seems to have had no bearing on her decision to end her life at the age of seventy-five. She writes, I did not propose to die of [cancer], so I promptly bought sufficient chloroform as a substitute.

Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune or ‘broken heart’ is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. (Gilman 1972, 333) Although her husband passed away twelve years into her marriage, Chopin raised six children and had a successful writing career, publishing her work until just two years before her death (Toth 1999, 236). A more sophisticated though essentially similar argument comes from Jennifer Fleissner, who claims that Edna’s Darwinian experience of the endless rhythms of existence leads to a sense that individuality is an illusion, that all is simply infinite multitudes swarming and rocking endlessly: [Edna’s] ‘awakening,’ then, appears much less as an ideal self-realization than as the terrible question of how to understand selfhood at all in the face of its radical negation. At its most powerful, The Awakening’s romanticism takes the form not of a blissful transcendence but rather of freedom construed as the encounter with ‘the

Peter Ramos unlimited’ from which it is impossible to reemerge whole or satisfied. All the most serious rhythms at work in Chopin’s text . . . work neither to collapse humanity into nature nor to allow their differentiation; rather, they define being a person as the pitched confrontation with nature’s meaningless endlessness, a sea that we enter and against which we can only pit our own peculiar rhythms. (Fleissner 2004, 242) 163 This quote makes it difficult to tell whether the critic implies such confrontation and epiphanies are Edna’s alone, or all women’s, or all persons’ who exist.

If we are only dealing with Edna as a particular fictional character with this particular experience of reality, then I have no problem with this reading: my argument is in relation to those who read Edna’s experience and actions as typical or symbolic of most women like her at this point in history. If Fleissner has in mind more than just Edna (and the language in this passage leads me to believe that she does) then the questions become, “Why do we not get the same sense of futility from Mademoiselles Ratignolle and Resiz? Do they lack Edna’s wisdom or sensitivity? There is little evidence of this in Chopin’s text. Furthermore, we are once again implicitly locked into one of the most enduring critical readings of the novella’s ending—that faced with an accurate sense of life’s futilities, Edna understandably makes the only choice she can: self annihilation. 6 Bartley reminds us that living itself relies on fiction as a means of imagining what one should or could live for, what future one has in mind toward which to strive. If one acknowledges that ethics involves choice, as well as action, one observes that life and fiction mirror one another—both require the imagination.

In life, one must imagine (i. e. , create fictitiously) a future one hopes to eventually inhabit. We have only to think of an utterly familiar, quotidian turning towards composing fiction in the form of the hypothetical scenario (athletes, dieters, and people who try to quit smoking are accustomed to calling this ‘creative visualization’) as a ground for choice and action. ” But he also reminds us that “Our choices are of little consequence if these otherwise instrumental fictions fail to acknowledge deflections of circumstance that presumably motivate their composition in the first place. Bartley 2000, 725) In other words, for such fictions to be of any use, they must of necessity acknowledge and accommodate the real limitations and obstacles of our conditions. According to Bartley, therefore, Edna’s failure comes from not being able to imagine a practical future: it is a failure of the imagination. But I would say that ethics involves acting on one’s choices and beliefs, and that, ultimately, the will precedes the imagination in so far as one must choose to imagine before one imagines imagining.

Edna’s ultimate and critical failure, therefore, is more closely related to her lack of willpower, to her decision to quit dedicating herself to any vision of the future. 7 Let me reiterate that “ethics” here differs from “morality. ”The former involves action based on personal choices and beliefs; the latter is usually associated with socially and/or religiously based ideals of “right” and “wrong” implicitly agreed upon in any given society. Clearly, the first critics of Chopin’s novella found most of Edna’s actions immoral.

As clearly, the text does not seem to share this judgment. I am arguing that Edna’s final actions represent an ethical surrender, not necessarily a moral 164 College Literature 37. 4 [Fall 2010] one. Unlike Edna, both Chopin and Gilman lived ethical lives—that is, both lived and committed themselves to the life they chose. 8 Sandra Gilbert’s often cited article, “The Second Coming of Aphrodite,” proclaims, “Defeated, even crucified, by the ‘reality’ of nineteenth-century New Orleans, Chopin’s resurrected Venus is returning to Cyprus or Cythera” (1983, 58).

But as William Bartley reminds us, such a farfetched post-narrative assertion “cannot have taken place in The Awakening—the text simply will not permit it” (2000, 729). 9 A similar point can be made in reference to the ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper. ” Critics, as well as some of my own students, often read the husband’s fainting at the story’s end as further proof that the speaker’s madness has allowed her to transcend all boundaries of the patriarchal structure that oppress her.

I like to ask such students if they’ve ever seen anyone suffering from clinical psychosis and then whether they think such people seem free. I also ask what they think the speaker, who most agree is mentally unhinged at this point, is going to do after the husband faints: will she become a successful writer? an independent business owner? a lawyer or doctor? Such professional women were rare in Gilman’s time, yet the author made sure to include them in her other stories. In “Three Thanksgivings” and “Turned,” for example, we see the kind of strong, assertive women who would never have agreed to Dr.

Mitchell’s rest-cure, who have arrived at their stations not through the liberating qualities of madness but because of their active will-power and defiance. I remind my students that unlike the speaker in her story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself actively and openly defied both doctor and husband when they demanded she follow their restrictive medical, professional advice. As she says in “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper,” “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy” (1913, 271). 0 I’m grateful to Kenneth Dauber for pointing out in conversation the remarkable significance of this passage. In Stowe’s otherwise sentimental/religious novel, this passage seems implicitly to contradict her absolute faith in and assertion of the bonds of sympathy and Christian duty. Here the author, speaking through parabasis, seems to imply that ethical actions are not automatically set in motion by sympathetic, Christian love and duty but are instead derived from social fictions maintained by will and intentionality. 1 These nameless, faceless characters appear repeatedly throughout the novella: “The lady in black was reading her morning devotions in the porch of a neighboring bath-house. Two young lovers were exchanging their hearts’ yearnings beneath the children’s tent, which they found unoccupied” (Chopin 1988, 20); “The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the water oaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet. . . The lady in black, creeping behind them, looked a trifle paler and more jaded than usual” (27); “The lovers were all alone. They saw nothing, they heard nothing. The lady in black was counting her beads for the third time” (44);“The lovers were profiting by the general conversation on Mexico to speak in whispers of matters which they rightly considered were interesting to no one but themselves. The lady in black had once received a pair of prayer-beads of curious workmanship from Peter Ramos Mexico . . . ut she had never been able to ascertain whether the indulgence extended outside the Mexican border” (55). Works Cited Bartley, William. 2000. “Imagining the Future in The Awakening. ” College English 62. 6: 719–46. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. 1998. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chopin, Kate. 1988. The Awakening. Intro. Marilynne Robinson. 1899. Reprint. New York: Bantam Books. Dyer, Joyce. 1993. The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings. New York: Twayne Publishers. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1981.

Selected Writings of Emerson. Ed. Donald McQuade. New York:The Modern Library. Fleissner, Jennifer L. 2004. Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilbert, Sandra M. 1983. “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin’s Fantasy of Desire. ” The Kenyon Review 5. 3: 44–66. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1972. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York: Arno Press. ———. 1997. “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Other Stories. 1892. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications. ———. 1913. Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. ” The Forerunner, October, 271. Kearns, Katherine. 1991. “The Nullification of Edna Pontellier. ” American Literature 63. 1: 62–88. Spangler, George M. 1970. “Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’: A Partial Dissent. ” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 3. 3: 249–55. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 2003. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Reprint. Intro. and notes by Amanda Claybaugh. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics. Streater, Kathleen M. 2007. “Adele Ratignolle: Kate Chopin’s Feminist at Home in The Awakening. ” Midwest Quarterly 48. 3: 406–16. Toth, Emily. 1991. Kate Chopin on Divine Love and Suicide: Two Rediscovered Articles. ” American Literature 63. 1: 115–21. ———. 1999. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Treu, Robert. 2000. “Surviving Edna: A Reading of the Ending of The Awakening. ” College Literature 27. 2: 21–36. 165 Copyright of College Literature is the property of College Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Freedom Greeting Card Company Inc. (www.freedomgreetings.com) is a greeting card company that recently decided to create a website that would provide wholesale and retail customers with online services (Aspin, 2005). In the past, the company relied entirely on fax and phone orders. It grew into a multi-billion dollar business without even having a web site.

However, as customer began demanding faster service and the industry expanded, Freedom”s leaders realized that they would be eliminated by the competition if they failed to give the customers what they wanted (Aspin, 2005). The Internet seemed to be the offered a viable solution to keep in contact with a large customer base. Jay Levitt, president of Freedom Greeting, aimed to create a solution that would be easy to use and effectively boost productivity, while saving money on traditional methods of reacting to increases in demand such as staff and infrastructure expansion.

Levitt looked into the possibility of extending his existing business applications. Since 1999, the company was a customer of Aspin Management Systems, a software house based in the United Kingdom (Aspin, 2005). Freedom had invested in AMSolve™, an accounting and back office system which the company produces. The system handles many area of Freedom”s operation, including account ledgers, stock control, order processing and fulfillment. Levitt decided to extend the company”s services to the Internet.

The company found a solution that would give trade customers an easy to use method of quickly ordering products, without the need for customers to invest in expensive applications to interface with the company”s server (Aspin, 2005). This solution is a website that provides a catalogue of over five thousand products that can be ordered by industry customers. Customers login and browse the products, adding items or requesting stock through the Grid Ordering process.

According to Aspin Intercative (2005): “The customer or agent specifies the grids and pocket to re-order and the system displays the available stock for pockets as specified in AMSolve. The user then reviews the order, makes any adjustment to quantity and clicks a button to place the order. There is no need to enter any payment details and the order is encrypted and sent directly to Freedom”s AMSolve server for processing. Once the order is placed notification is sent via email, however, an agent representing a client or the customer themselves can log into the website at any time and place, and check that the order is in the system and once shipped, they can check its delivery status.”

The way the court should the decide this case to support the European Union’s commitment to labor mobility between member states is that they need to make a list of things they can do and have everyone in the court vote to see which suggestion is the best one. I don’t think people out-side of the country should be getting a child raising allowance check from Germany. Even if they use to live in the country. If they wanted the check they should have stayed in Germany.

Plus the plaintiffs husband works in Germany and the plaintiff herself works for border control. That means they can still live in Germany where it would be better for them to live and would still get a child raising allowance check every month. If the courts made a list of suggestions, then they can have multiple things that can happen. Also, if the one thing that they voted on just so happens to fail then what they can do is go over the list to see “what is the next best thing to do for the case. ” Lastly the court will need to make that the people of Germany and Europe would not have a pacific problem with what the courts choose.

If the citizens do not care for the court’s opinion the bad things will happen, like riots and protests. The similarities between Germany and Austria to Illinois and Indiana is they are both between two different places. What mean about this is that Germany is its own country and Austria is also its own country while Illinois and Indiana are both their own states. Now the similarities between the child raising allowance law and the unemployment law are that they are both place to help out the community. Also they are both used to help people outside of the country or the state.

They are both very helpful laws and are I am sure they are greatly appreciated by the people affected by them. The differences between the child raising allowance law and the unemployment law is that the child raising allowance law is for people in Germany that have children and only part time jobs, while the unemployment law is for people have either lost their job or never had one. But the unemployment law has nothing to do with whether the person has a child or not. Also Illinois and Indiana are a part of one country when Germany and Austria are two different countries and have different governmental spoke persons.

Nelson Mandela in his book, Long Walk to Freedom argues through the first five parts that a black individual must deal, coop, and grow through a society that is hindering their lives” with apartheid and suppression of their rightful land. Rolihlanla Mphakanyiswa or clan name, Madiba was born on July 18, 1918 in a simple village of Mvezo, which was not accustomed to the happenings of South Africa as a whole. His father was a respected man who led a good life, but lost it because of a dispute with the magistrate.

While his mother was a hard-working woman full of daily chores. His childhood was full of playing games with fellow children and having fun. In school, Mandela was given his English name of Nelson. After his father”s death, he moved to love with a regent, who was a well-off individual and owed Nelson’s father for a previous favor. The next several years were full of schooling for Nelson. These schools opened Nelson’s eyes to many things, which we will discuss later. He and the regent’s son, Justice decided to travel to Johannesburg and see what work they could find.

They left on their journey without the regent’s permission, but eventually escaped his power and settled down in the town. In Johannesburg, Nelson settled down in a law firm as an assistant and went to the University of South Africa and Witwatersrand University to further his law education. Witswatersrand University brought many new ideas to Nelson and awakened a spirit inside of him. For the next several years, Nelson met many new political friends and began his involvement in the ANC. Also during this time, he met Evelyn and they became married.

Gradually Nelson’s political involvement grew and his family life declined. Nelson and his good friend, Oliver Tambo opened a law firm, which took up most of Nelson’s time. Evelyn mothered two of Nelson’s children, but they gradually grew apart. Now, Nelson was an influential political individual, and bans and jailing began to follow him around. One day, a young woman came into his life by the name of Winnie and they got married. Winnie gave birth to two more of Nelson’s children. As time passed, Nelson’s spirit for freedom grew more and more each day.

Though his life was full of bannings and jailings, he never gave up his fight, but he knew that the south African government was becoming agitated with him and the ANC. The South African government became ruthless and strict and this forced Nelson to leave his family. After he left his family, he went underground. Nelson’s life has been full of hardships and decisions, but his heart for the struggle has never faltered. Now let us examine Nelson in closer detail. Nelson is an individual who fought through many hardships, but was also faced with decisions that affected his future, his family, and his livelihood.

As we look at Nelson deeper, we can see many interesting points. He was opened to new ideas and beliefs through his experiences in the schools of Heraldtown and Fort Hare, but knew there was something better. He decided to travel to Johannesburg to find new and greater opportunities. While, in Johannesburg, he believed education would be a key asset. While working for a small firm, he took classes at University of South Africa and eventually Wits University. Here is where his mind and social life flourished. He interacted with great minds and influential political individuals.

He talked to many Africans without proper education, who contained more knowledge and better social skills than many Africans with education. But, he still persisted in acquiring his B. A. Wits University brought his life to new extents. He was also talking to Indians, Coloureds, and whites for the first time in his life and Becoming friends with many more prominent African individuals. Nelson soon joined the ANC and became very prominent in the fight for freedom. Nelson was always open to listening to new ideas, but when his was just starting his fight.

He believed that just Africans should fight the struggle and that the Indians, Coloureds, and communists would hinder their fight. As the ANC grew, Nelson also became well known. He was part of the Youth League, another beneficial part of the ANC. Nelson was not president yet, but was powerful enough to voice is opinions, which many people listened to and believed in. As Nelson’s political involvement grew, the police became more aware of him. Nelson received ban after ban, which ranged from months to years. He also experienced jail time constantly. Eventually, the police”s pursuit of him forced him to go underground.

Nelson was also becoming more open-minded. He now believed that the fight should involve the Indians and the Coloureds. He also believed that Communism did have some good points, but he would never accept the whole communism aspect. There were many freedom fighters in South Africa. One that stood out was Dr. Xuma. Dr. Xuma was a friend of Nelson and the president of the ANC, but the struggle forces many hardships on one’s life. Nelson gave everything up to pursue his fight for freedom. He left his family, his prospering law firm, and his past for the struggle.

Dr. Xuma believed in the same ideas as Nelson, but would not give up his prominence with the whites and his wealthy occupation for the struggle. This decision had to be made by many freedom fighters. Nelson gave his life for the fight. While Dr. Xuma thought his career was more important. Now let us look closer at some issues seen through Mandela’s book. Through this paragraph, I will compare foreign influence seen in Long Walk to Freedom to foreign influence seen in Mexico through Professor Hornibrook’s lectures and notes. As I have seen through your lectures, South Africa was affected by foreign influence from the British and the Dutch.

Mandela’s autobiography helps give more detailed accounts of the European influence seen in South Africa. Ever since Mandela was born, the European”s power affected his people. European influence could be seen through every aspect of life. In Mandela’s school, he was given an English name and this was because “this was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education”. Also, “the education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture”. This shows that it was difficult to get away from the British influence even for children in school. The British and the Dutch governments passed several acts that were instituted to fight against the Africans freedom struggle. The Africans struggle for independence was slowly growing and this scared the government. A new term was being seen and it was called “apartheid”. The government enacted laws and acts that prohibited Africans from doing Many things that were vital to their fight and survival. The Group Areas Act was one example.

This act called for each racial group to be separated into separate areas. Another act was the Population Registration Act, which showed that race had become the most important and influential aspect of South African law and society. Another act was the Suppression of Communism Act. This act called for all communists to be brought to trial. The police could arrest anyone they believed were trying to overthrow the government by violence and communist ways. Lastly, the government put bans on individuals who were becoming to involved in the struggle and finally the government banned the ANC and all other liberation groups.

This ban now made freedom fighting was illegal in South Africa. The effect of foreign influence was drastic. Africans lost sense of African culture in schools. While, the foreign government tried everything to break down the Africans chance for liberty. The foreign influence seen in South Africa crushed the African”s hope and survival. While this was occurring in South Africa, Mexico was also seeing the effect of foreign influence. Americans and Europeans came into Mexico and gained much power. Haciendas helped their rise and foreign investment in many minerals and oil. But, Mexico did not approve of this and changed it.

In 1917, Mexico created a new constitution, which limited foreign investment and promised land reform. This showed that Mexico did not want an overpopulation of foreigners and would not allow it. While, in oil, the foreigners controlled much of the oil, which Mexico had an abundance of. In 1938, oil workers went on strike and the companies would not give in, but instead of allowing foreign influence to become too powerful. The Mexican leader, Cardenas sent in arbitrators. The arbitrators called for the one/third pay increase, but the companies refused. Therefore, Cardenas nationalized oil and limited the power of foreign influence in Mexico.

Now, Mexican oil was controlled by PEMEX, which is controlled only by Mexico. Mexico become a large influence in the oil market during the oil crisis, but also went though hyperinflation and eventually needed some foreign help. But, the Mexicans would not allow foreign influences to dominate the Mexican state as foreigners have affected South Africa. Now I will examine another issue seen in the book. In this paragraph, I will examine the movement seen in Long Walk to Freedom to the movement seen in China during the 1900’s. In South Africa, the movement I saw was the Africans fighting for freedom.

In their time of struggle, they had little help from those with power. The liberation movement involved peasants, educated, and well-off Africans. But, the government did whatever they could to put down this struggle. They set up organizations, such as the ANC, Youth League, and others, but as seen in other places the wealthy and powerful would not help the struggle. Many people were blind to the struggle. “Most of these wardresses had no idea why we were in prison, and gradually began to discover what we were fighting for and why we were willing to risk jail in the first place. Many individuals did not realize what the Africans were really fighting for and why the government was harassing them, but slowly they were learning”. Seeing prominent and educated white women discussing serious matters with a black man on the basis of perfect equality could only lead to the weakening of the wardresses” apartheid assumptions. The government tried to separate whites from blacks so whites would not turn sympathetic towards the Africans fight. This scared feeling made the government acts and laws stricter and harsher towards the African struggle.

Therefore, in South Africa, the movement received little help from the people who had influence in the country and the help they truly needed. While, in China, their movement involved their peasants and they had help, which truly helped their struggle. Mao stated that “In a very short time,… several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm… They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves… “(Mao, 24). Here Mao stated that the peasants would destroy the landlords and corrupt individuals.

He helped the peasants by making some reforms. He gave peasants land and made marriages a free choice. He also instituted the 100 Flowers Campaign. This campaign allowed peasants to speak out and have freedom of speech. We see here that the peasants had help in their struggle, while the Africans had very little. This assistance helped the peasants to get the things they were fighting for. Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, helped show the rise of an incredible individual, who fought with many of his countrymen against the oppression and apartheid of white supremacy in South Africa.

Throughout the book, I have seen Nelson’s open-mindedness. Nelson always listened to communist ideas and Indian goals, even though he did not agree with them. Nelson faced many hardships through his struggle and this had to cause some resentment against his oppressors. But if anyone would not be bias in his writing, I would say it would be Nelson Mandela. He has showed in his book that he is great individual and that he will not let his past feeling cloud his writing. You can see his feelings in his book and that is what makes it so good, but I believe he does not hide anything from us on both sides of the stories.

In conclusion, Mandela’s autobiography is a brilliant book written by an incredible individual. I wish I could of read the whole book for this essay, but that was not possible. It is hard to write an essay on the first 5 parts when I know some things that happened further in the book. I did not know if I should include that information in the essay, but I did not involve it. This book helped to show the other side of the story. We always hear victor’s story and in this class, we got to hear the other side of the story.

Freedom in the Modern World Freedom of Choice, Religion and Rights all depends on the amount of Freedom of the Press within a country.

Introduction

Unlike the past, the world today is more united in diversity. Most countries in the modern world, boast unity of people from different cultures and backgrounds with the same nationality. With unity in diversity comes freedom of oppressed races and culture.

Freedom is a word most of the young generations are very proud of; however, it is only a theory for some people from Third World countries and non-democratic nations. According to Sudeshna Pal who is an economist at Georgia College and State University, racial tension and other instabilities within a country, such as, crime, religious problems, ethnic clashes and many more, can be solved by giving more freedom to the press. (Bailey, 2011) The media is regarded by many, as a powerful tool to create peace within a country, given that journalists have the freedom to write what they need.

Creating a free press allows a country’s citizens to not only criticize their government’s activities but also to give them more knowledge about what is happening within their nation, and what they can do to revolutionize it, to improve its situation. Criticism for governments may not be the easiest to handle, especially when it’s coming from the majority of the nation’s people. It could be viewed as futile for some countrymen; nonetheless, it is a positive way of informing the government of what the country needs through the people’s perspective, in addition to theirs. Rummel, 1989) This research highlights the importance of liberty of the press, and its positive correlation to freedom of religion, freedom of choice, rights and overall freedom within a country. This is designed to compare and contrast the prevailing problems of different nations and the amount of freedom the press have, in relation to the overall rights of the people. Furthermore, I am going to discuss the countries with the least amount of freedom and the countries with the most, in the modern world.

My research also provides information about the conditions and factors that contribute to the overall liberty of each citizen within a nation. Freedom of the press: Advantages and disadvantages of Free Media Liberty in the press means that the government does not restrict much of what’s being published, especially the news that they think are politically threatening. All well-established newsmen know the importance of delivering the truth to the people especially the things that relate to politics.

According to R. J. Rummel, may it be politically undermining or encouraging, the citizens of a country have the right to know the truth about the activities of their current governments. The reason why freedom of the media is the key to national stability is because the citizens possess the power to suggest or show their perspective and views towards the government and it even promotes revolution if a political party is generally viewed as corrupting the system. Rummel, 1989) This allows a nation’s leaders to work in tandem with the citizens on improving all aspects of the country, and thus eliminating corruption and weak political figures, much like the natural selection in the theory of life. Such great advantages that comes with a free press is common during the “People’s Power Revolution” in the Philippines, in 1986. As an example of how a nation can be improved through media liberation, the act of revolution by the Filipino’s that year is well documented and known throughout the whole world.

This shows that with freedom of the press, the whole nation has access to the true intentions of their leaders and can stand united as one to overthrow him/her. (Delotavo,2006). Through lack of media censorship by the Philippine government, the people were well aware of the corruption of its political leaders. Despite the implementation of martial law, underground newspapers were distributed and a “call” by the Catholic Church for the nation to stand united against one common enemy (the president), was successful.

The success of the press united all the Filipinos, which caused an uprising and resulted into the current regime (at that time), being overthrown, in the most non-violent manner. The streets of EDSA and majority of Manila (now Metro Manila), were flooded with millions of people as they sought to remove from power the current president of that time, Pres. Ferdinand Marcos. The people stood united, without any violent act. They were simply chanting words with the intention of pleading the president to step down from power.

With cameras feeding live videos of the revolution all over the world, it was inevitable for Marcos to surrender without any reaction. (Delotavo, 2006). Not long after Marcos, another president; Pres. Joseph Ejercito Estrada, got taken off from power and sent to jail, through the same process, in retaliation to the alleged “plunder” that he committed, which has been published by the press. After those incidents, the next generation of political leaders in the Philippines aims to be very truthful and convincing in each of their annual State of the Nation Address (SONA), which is broadcasted live on TV.

When the President states his/her plans and report the use of the government funds during the SONA, the entire nation is watching because that date is regarded as a national holiday in the Philippines. Such “revolution” is common all over the world today, and most countries have freedom of the press for the sole purpose of educating the people and keeping them knowledgeable about current political events. The sharing of non-censored information from the government to its citizens reduces the instabilities within a country.

These instabilities are measured in seven ways by Sureshna Pal as “ethnic tensions, external and internal conflicts, crime and disorder, military preparation in government, and religious tensions. ” (Bailey, 2011), as she analyzed the data from 98 countries. She found out from her analysis that a rise in freedom of the press creates a decrease of all the measures of instability within a country. These are the advantages of having a liberal media. According to the, World Public opinion; a report of results from 22 nations released during the International Freedom Day in 2008, most countries prefer freedom of the press.

As shown in Fig. 1, most nations, except for majority of the Muslim dominated lands which compose of Egypt, Turkey, Palestine Territories, Iran, Jordan and Indonesia, voted for the idea of press freedom. The average vote for liberty of the press between the 22 countries is 57% while only 35% believed that the government must have the power to censor the media from publishing things that could be politically threatening for the government. (World Public Opinion).

Most Muslim dominated countries believe that the government has the right of censorship because of the Islamic culture. Islam has a long history of authoritarian tradition, and press restrictions are considered as a right of the government by these countries to “preserve political stability”. Such stability is not necessarily the overall stability within the country which is described by Pal to be measured in seven different ways, but stability in terms of the people in power. However, this does not mean that such countries do not desire more press freedom.

Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, and the Palestine Territories are among those Muslim countries who voted that their nations could do better with more liberty of the media as shown in the chart below. Despite these figures and known advantages of having freedom of the press, many can still argue that too much liberty of the media, especially during conflict and war, can be a great disadvantage. This is because the press could be dominantly biased on one opinion, and that simple facts and figures could be manipulated. (World Public Opinion)

According to K. A Soxman’s article, TMI, Tet and the Media, most of the American people who are in the USA during the Vietnam War were easily persuaded that USA was going to lose the war, and many American soldiers have already died. The latter was in fact the truth; however, the media were convincing enough that the American citizens assumed that reports from the press were 100% accurate. This resulted in to a lack of support to the soldiers in Vietnam from the USA, and the majority of the American people sought the return of the soldiers back home.

The press were biased against the war and reported that the Tet offensive was a lost battle where in fact, US soldiers have won that fight and could have, arguably, carried on to ultimately win the war. (Soxman, 1980). The same happened during the war in Iraq. Since the tragedy of 9/11, rumors have spread that USA was trying to invade and conquer Iraq for their oil, and many other reasons. Those are rumors deemed to be true for some “irresponsibly biased” media who never revealed the true intentions of the American government.

Since then, such reports took its toll on the government, and they have been heavily criticized as liars and greedy by their own people. Biased reports made the US regime pay a heavy price after the war on Iraq with unlimited criticism. (Grieder, 2004). The disadvantages of freedom of the press are that it could be misleading. During war and conflict, as part of human nature, many take sides of a story and believe it to be true, even the media. With such beliefs, come strong arguments that can be very convincing if manipulated well by the educated. It can also be true in terms of political issues.

A certain group of the media may be on one side while another would be on the “other side”. This also explains why most of the Muslim dominated countries shown in Fig. 1 voted against press freedom because such countries have long history of documented internal conflicts. However, with the right precautions and the right of the government to question, not necessarily censor such reports, could resolve conflicts. With groups of the media on different sides of a story, the result could be disagreement in the short run, but, it is a perfect way to debate and analyze the positives from each side and create a positive resolution in the long run.

Freedom of the Press: The Countries with the Least Freedom of the press and its conditions According to the article, Countries with the Least amount of Press Freedom in the World, which used the data that was released by Reporters without Borders in October 2009, the top five nations with the least amount of liberty of the media are Eritrea, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Iran and Burma. Following the report in 2006 by the “Committee to protect Journalists (CPJ)” on the, 10 Most Censored Countries, North Korea was always among the top because of its Communism. Most of these countries are hardly democratic.

In a communist country like North Korea, reports of famine, poverty and even murder by government officials are never reported. This is because “all” the domestic news-related matters are fully controlled by the government. Radio channels, television and even newspapers always publish their communist leader, Kim Jong Il’s wisdom. On a tragic incident that occurred in April 2004 near the border of China, where a munitions train exploded, the amount of people who died were not reported, instead the North Korean press reported the loyalty of the people towards their leader by saving his portraits before their beloved families.

The picture shown in Fig. 3, however, shows the devastation of such incident, provided by the World Food Program, where there were 150 people recorded “dead” and thousands were injured. (“10 most censored countries,” 2006). Many of the negative occurrences within the country are never revealed to the world, leaving its citizens at the mercy of their leader. Almost all of the top ten least free countries in terms of media liberty have the exact same problem in that their leaders isolate the country from the rest of the world to gain full control of their nation and to erase all threats that could potentially overthrow them.

Freedom of the Press: The Countries with the Most Freedom of the press and its conditions Shown in Fig. 4, in the 22 nations that were assessed by World Public Opinion, the country which had the most amount of freedom of the media is the UK with 71%, voting for “ a lot”, and 22% voted for “some”, followed by the USA with 66% who responded with “a lot”, while 26% voted for “some”. Both countries are very democratic countries and have very few or no internal conflict between ethnic groups and racial tension.

The same pattern applies for the top ten countries with the most freedom of the media, from the data collected by Reporters without Borders, in the article Countries with the Least Amount of Press Freedom in the World. The nations which belonged to the bottom of that list has the highest press freedom and least government censorship, and those countries are Sweden, Norway, Republic of Ireland, Finland, Denmark and many more which are mostly from Europe and North America. Such results prove R. J.

Rummel’s argument on his article, Freedom of the Press—A Way to Global Peace, that free media promotes democracy to be and accurate claim. Overall freedom within a Country: The Measurement of Overall Freedom? Pal, according to Bailey in the article, Peace and the Press: Media Bolster Social Cohesion, has conducted an analysis of the correlation between press freedom and the “seven measures of instability” within a country. These instabilities were measured as ethnic tensions, external and internal conflicts, crime and disorder, military participation in government, and religious tensions.

Such instabilities are described by Pal to only improve with the increase of liberty by the press, quoting Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. ” (Bailey, 2011). Those measures were close to the actual measurement of a country’s overall freedom once compared to the thorough report of Freedom in the World 2011: the Authoritarian Challenge to Democracy, written and compiled by Arch Puddington.

Thus, the overall freedom of a country is measured based on these conditions: whether or not there is an open political competition, respect for religion and civil rights from the government, how significant the independent civic life is, independence of media, and strength of the rule of law. Given these conditions, three broad categories are derived, Free, Partly Free, and Not Free, with the conditions given in the Box (Fig. 5). A country, as stated in Fig. should possess positive values of the conditions written there, which includes freedom of religion, political right of the people, and right of speech which can be included in the category of independent media. According to Puddington’s report, there are 87 countries which represent 45% of the world’s 194 countries that are considered as “free”. That consists of 43% of the world’s population. However, there are 47 countries that were categorized as “not free”, which represents 24% of the world’s countries.

In total, the population stands at 2, 434, 250,000 people or 35%, a surprising number despite the increase of democratic nations throughout the years. Overall freedom within a Country: The Countries with the least amount of overall freedom Of the 24% of the World countries (47 nations) which are categorized as “not free”, there are nine which are absolutely the worst in terms of Overall Freedom. In relation to having the least amount of Press Freedom, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Iran and Burma are again amongst these countries categorized as the worst.

The people are thought to have no political rights, no freedom of choice and civil liberties which include freedom of religion and many more. This further proves the importance of a liberal media, and why it is considered by many as the most important tool within a country to keep its peace. It is well reported that lack of freedom only haunts the Authoritarian nations and cultures. Most democratic nations are categorized as “free” countries, where the press is relatively free of restriction and all the other measures of instabilities are low.

Overall freedom within a Country: The Countries with the most amount of overall freedom In Puddington’s review, he did not state the countries with the highest amount of overall freedom because of its lack of importance compared to the “not free” countries, in which his report focuses on. However, in the regional patterns shown in page 9 of his report (shown as fig. 6 below), the Americas and Western Europe, which has the most democratic countries, has the most number of free nations. This is similar to the “Countries with the Most Freedom”, in page 10 of this research paper; both regions also had the most liberty of media.

Analysis

Freedom in the world According to all the data collected in this research, Democratic Nations are the most “free” nations in the world in terms of all the conditions that were mentioned before. In the figures and charts taken from Puddington’s thorough review, which will be shown on the next few pages, it can be derived that Democracy is indeed “the best policy” and in relation to the data collected earlier in terms of Freedom of the press, most “free” nations, are democratic and have a high press freedom. Conclusion: Both Sudehsna Pal and R. J.

Rummel are right when they claim that press freedom is the key for democracy and peace. In the Country Breakdown by status, “Not free” countries are the last in terms of the number of nations within that category. However, it has the second largest population, shown in the population breakdown. In the Regional data, it is clear that the regions found to have the most freedom of the press, have the most overall freedom. It is very surprising that the countries that are “not free”, which have few political rights and civil liberties, have 35% of the world’s total population, whereas the countries which are “free” has 43%.

Nevertheless, there is a positive correlation between press freedom and overall freedom of a country. This shows the importance of a liberal press within a nation, because with no restrictions to report what is needed, the government could stay honest to its people to avoid negative criticisms. It also allows the citizens to be well educated about what is going on within their country and can act upon their own to help the government resolve internal issues.

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