New Year, New Meaning

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    This week in our book club for The Awakening we talked about Robert's weird character as he flirts with all the wives, Adele Ratignolle's "perfect" women characterizations, but mostly how she contrasts with the main character, Edna Pontellier, who consistently tries to shed her societal roles as a mother and wife. What stuck out to me the most though, was when Mrs. Feldkamp joined our book club and we started discussing about Edna's resentment for her kids. Edna has a maid who takes care of her kids for her, and it was stated multiple times in the story that she "forgot" about her children a lot. Mrs. Feldkamp was telling us how she read this book multiple times and how every time she see's the book in a different light, especially after having kids of her own. This struck a memory of a thought I had had just the year before.


    Last year in AP Lang we read The Great Gatsby, and to be honest I was a little underwhelmed. It was coveted to be one of the best American literatures, but I just didn't understand why. I thought it was a good book, but not one to have such acclaim, and one day when I was volunteering at a library, this topic came up. The kids my age were confused as to why the book was such a classic, and the librarian, hearing out conversation, piped in with the beginnings of my curiosities. She said that she too once didn't understand the popularity, but since then had read it 9 times, and she said that each and every time she read it, she understood and saw something different in the book. Every time she learned something new, and every time she saw something in the book that correlated with her own life at the time she was reading it. I was so confused, but she wasn't the only person I heard this "phenomenon" from. While I was researching the book online for my class assignment, I saw multiple other people saying they experienced similar things, and now I was hearing Mrs. Feldkamp say it about a totally different book. Can life experience really have that big of an impact on someone's understanding of a book? Will I one day read The Awakening or The Great Gatsby over when I'm thirty, and be amazed at what I once was to naïve to understand?

You know I probably won't experience these new self enlightenments for myself until a long while, but it really does interest me at how different people, at different points in their life, could read the exact same pages, of the exact same book and see the novel completely differently then they once had. At least I think it's pretty interesting to think about.


Till next time,
Melodi Yilmaz💕


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