I have enormous sympathy with your situation, and even empathy for parts of it.
I too have disability that isn't visible to the naked eye (though x-rays reveal it with leaping out clarity that even I can see it).
I've just been swotting Kate Chopin's The Awakening for a presentation - discussion in a college course next week. It had been a while since my last re-reading, but yet again this time I still think Edna Pontellier's condition isn't that of oppressed WOMAN as much as it is about her tendency toward depression, and what looks suspiciously very like what we now diagnose as mani-depressive. But as this novel was published in 1899, this vocabulary for such conditions was in the most nascent of stages. All the medical establishment was certain of is that "women's nervous systems are fragile and unpredictable," so lets medicate or put into asylum or send on a journey overseas (I like that last one ...).
Oddly, in my evidently rash declaration that I don't see Edna's story as a particularly 'feminist' one, and the reasons I give, has provoked a firestorm over on LJ. One of my oldest friends has declared I'm no feminist, ignorant of second wave feminism and what sorts of social and legal conditions women were up against then, and stabbing her in the back. Essentially she personally slapped me. Lively times.
no subject
I too have disability that isn't visible to the naked eye (though x-rays reveal it with leaping out clarity that even I can see it).
I've just been swotting Kate Chopin's The Awakening for a presentation - discussion in a college course next week. It had been a while since my last re-reading, but yet again this time I still think Edna Pontellier's condition isn't that of oppressed WOMAN as much as it is about her tendency toward depression, and what looks suspiciously very like what we now diagnose as mani-depressive. But as this novel was published in 1899, this vocabulary for such conditions was in the most nascent of stages. All the medical establishment was certain of is that "women's nervous systems are fragile and unpredictable," so lets medicate or put into asylum or send on a journey overseas (I like that last one ...).
Oddly, in my evidently rash declaration that I don't see Edna's story as a particularly 'feminist' one, and the reasons I give, has provoked a firestorm over on LJ. One of my oldest friends has declared I'm no feminist, ignorant of second wave feminism and what sorts of social and legal conditions women were up against then, and stabbing her in the back. Essentially she personally slapped me. Lively times.
Love, C.