Solitude
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Solitude
Men and women have always had specific roles according to society, but as the years have gone by more women started standing up for themselves and began taking up the same roles as men. Throughout this achievement women have learned to become independent in their ways and now they are pushing toward something deeper than just sheer independence. In this essay I will be discussing Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, Charlotte Alters article Girl Gone Wild: Rise of the Lone She Wolf, and Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, to reflect upon how Cheryl Strayed’s lone hike on the PCT challenged our thoughts on the gender roles placed upon women and how aloneness can be perceived as something positive. Both of these books and the article all bring forth this fresh idea on how aloneness is a positive state of being for ourselves.
Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, is about her journey through the Pacific Crest Trail alone in hopes to reconnect with her true self after the heart breaking death of her beloved mother. Cheryl goes through some very dark times in which she feels the only way to move on with her life and better herself is to hike the PCT all by herself. In the TIME magazine article Girl Gone Wild: Rise of the Lone She Wolf, by Charlotte Alter she discusses how Cheryl Strayed is the new frontier of aloneness and how portraying women as alone is foreign to us yet inspiring. In Henry David Thoreau’s chapter “Solitude” from his book Walden, he describes his home out by Walden Lake and his lifestyle out in the woods by himself, he explains to us his self-reflection on what achieving solitude means even though he’s not entirely alone out there in the woods. These texts all have similar views on how being alone is something we never thought of as positive for ourselves and a time for reinvention.
Women are almost never seen or portrayed as lone creatures, they are always surrounded by something or someone, until now. After decades of striving for women’s rights and equality we now successfully stand here with Cheryl Strayed who has brought forth a new frenzy of aloneness among women. In Charlotte Alters article Girl Gone Wild: The Rise of the Lone She-Wolf, she reveals to us how women are never truly portrayed as alone, they are either in states of aloneness or always intact with other people. She explains, “If a woman’s not half of a couple, she must be part of a gaggle.” It is almost a forbidden scene for a woman to be caught alone since they are always seen around other people or in relationships with others. Strayed really pushed those expectations by setting out on the Pacific Crest Trail alone. After eight days on the trail Strayed has her first human encounter with two men and she proclaims, “None could fathom what business a woman had hiking it by herself, and Frank and Walter had told me so, in jovial, gentlemanly terms” (Strayed 73). Everyone she came into contact with along the trail were either men or in pairs but never alone. This gained her some respect from the other hikers and the random people she encountered, since she was the only lone woman out on the trail. In a conversation Strayed has with some of the hikers that accompanied her they say to her, “People always want to give you things and do things for you…they never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact” (Strayed 296). Strayed attracted a certain attention from people only because she was a lone women on a trail where you would normally see men so right away people were quick to take interest in her.
In Charlotte Alters article she elaborates on how Cheryl strayed is the first women to be portrayed as completely alone in a foreign yet inspirational manor. Society admires independent women, but now it’s becoming a trend of the past as we begin to study people like Cheryl Strayed. Alter states in her article, “Aloneness is at the root of real independence, it’s where self-reliance begins and ends.” This is utterly true in regards to Strayed because she set out on her journey to reconnect with who she was before the damage of the aftermath from her mother’s death and she says the only person who can fix her is her. For a story like Strayed’s to come out and display her journey to finding self-reflection and realization it challenges some of our views on how women have the ability to improve their lives on their own. Indeed this is a healthy new perspective and can be a time for women to rethink about what true independence is and how achieving solitude can be positive.
When some readers imagine someone achieving radical aloneness they don’t see Cheryl Strayed as meeting those expectations because she always had people on the other side helping her in some way. Yes Strayed did have connections at the end of her trails with the boxes being delivered to her and all the hikers she came in contact with that wanted to help her along the trail. However, the point of her trip was to find who she was before her life spiraled downward, by being out in the wild. In some sense