Meeting Dates:
7/28, 8/18, 9/8
In Person at The Center for Fiction

In this reading group, we’ll look at three novels that chronicle midlife escapes centered around transgression. In each novel, a protagonist’s shift to a new setting—to coastal Louisiana, Venice, and the Mojave Desert, respectively—acts as a catalyst for a profound psychological reorientation.

First, we’ll start with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which anatomizes its midlife protagonist’s drift from the customary responsibilities of Victorian motherhood towards a reckoning with her unlived life—her desire for independence and erotic freedom. Then we’ll shift to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which an escape from social duty prompts an increasingly dark erotic obsession. Finally, we’ll consider Claire Vaye Watkins’s feminist remake of the male escape plot, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, in which a protagonist facing postpartum depression leaves her husband and baby for the Mojave desert to reclaim her creative and erotic registers.

All three novels ask serious questions about the stakes of pursuing an unlived life and explore the ways in which new environments create an expanded palette of possibilities and desires.

Reading List:

• The Awakening by Kate Chopin

• Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

• I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins