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The Gift of the Mother-goddess

According to Joseph Campbell, the Mother archetype embodies two forces: creation and destruction, the good mother and the bad mother. In modern society, the creative force is easier to understand than a destructive force as creation corresponds to the Christian idea of good, whereas destruction equates with evil. In Women Who Run with the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Ests, PhD compares the urge to create as a river that "flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hollows, the arroyos, the channels that exist in us" (299). She emphasizes that creativity belongs not only in the realm of art but also in the everyday world with such actions as "ironing a collar," "tending a flowerbed," and "raising a child." The act of creation is an act of love (298); however, the other side of mother is the bad mother, the destructive forceshe is the one who abandons her children to the elements. By comparing the ocean imagery within both Walt Whitman's poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, I will show the two sides of the Mother-goddess, while revealing the effects that a creative awakening have on both Walt Whitman and Chopin's character Edna Pontellier.

Whitman's poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" reveals a personal experience from Whitman's childhood that awakens the creative force within him. He writes the following: "From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, / From those beginning notes of yearning and love within the mist / . . . A reminiscence sing" (73). This remembrance encompasses a triothe bird, the ocean, and his own emotionsto reveal the fullness of life, love, and death. The ocean, a background chorus in Whitman's poem, is the wise mother who reveals the word that awakens "my own songs." The word is "death, death, death, death, / . . . Creeping steadily up to my ears and laving me softly over" (78). The ocean reveals to Whitman that when a person accepts death he or she is also accepting life, thereby making each experience precious, each relationship sweet, and each day cherished. This wise "savage old mother" (77) represents two sides of life: creation and destruction. In The Masks of God Joseph Campbell writes that "water is the vehicle of the power of the goddess" and that the goddess "personifies the mystery of the waters of birth and dissolution" (64). Does this "savage old mother" of Whitman (77) represent the goddess written by

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