Chopin, Kate: General Commentary

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KATE CHOPIN: GENERAL COMMENTARY

SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR (ESSAY DATE 1989)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WILLA CATHER ON THE AWAKENING: JULY 8, 1899

A Creole Bovary is this little novel [The Awakening] of Miss Chopin's. Not that the heroine is a Creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a Flaubert—save the mark!—but the theme is similar to that which occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a second Madame Bovary should be written, but an author's choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but light, flexible, subtle, and capable of producing telling effects directly and simply.

Cather, Willa. Excerpt from "Four Women Writers: Atherton, Ouida, Chopin, Morris." In The World and the Parish, Vol. II: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, edited by William M. Curtin, p. 694. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Originally published under a different title in the Leader, July 8, 1899.

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FROM THE AUTHOR

EXCERPT FROM A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE IN WHICH CHOPIN ANSWERS THE QUESTION "IS LOVE DIVINE?"

It is as difficult to distinguish between divine love and the natural, animal life, as it is to explain just why we love at all. In a discussion of this character between two women in my new novel I have made my heroine say: "Why is it I love this man? Is it because his hair is brown, growing high on his temples; because his eyes droop a bit at the corners, or because his nose is just so much out of drawing?"

One really never knows the exact, definite thing which excites love for any one person, and one can never truly know whether this love is the result of circumstances or whether it is predestination. I am inclined to think that love springs from animal instinct, and therefore is, in a measure, divine. One can never resolve to love this man, this woman or child, and then carry out the resolution unless one feels irresistibly drawn by an indefinable current of magnetism. This subject allows an immense field for discussion and profound thought, and one could scarcely voice a definite opinion in a ten minutes talk. But I am sure we all feel that love—true, pure love, is an uncontrollable emotion that allows of no analyzation and no vivisection.

Chopin, Kate. Excerpt from "'Is Love Divine?' The Question Answered by Three Ladies Well Known in St. Louis Society." In Kate Chopin's Private Papers, edited by Emily Toth and Per Syersted, pp. 219-20. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998.

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REBECCA DICKSON (ESSAY DATE SPRING-SUMMER 1999)

SOURCE: Dickson, Rebecca. "Kate Chopin, Mrs. Pontellier, and Narrative Control." The Southern Quarterly 37, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1999): 38-43.
In the following essay, Dickson outlines Chopin's place in the context of her female predecessors such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, and contends that in The Awakening "Chopin envisioned and portrayed a woman more firmly in control of her own story and her own body than any of her predecessors had imagined."

Until the twentieth century, the vast majority of plots created by, for, and about women were focused on an ingenue and were controlled by men, either quietly or overtly. Even when a young woman is the center of the story, and even if male characters seldom appear in a given novel, a man with his financial power inevitably holds the key to a heroine's happiness while patriarchal economic, political, and moral structures determine her identity and behavior. So, in the end a man controls a woman's story. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, that domination was being challenged on many fronts. Kate Chopin was one writer whose work significantly disrupts this male control of plot and narrative, often by manipulating another male-controlled institution: marriage. Although she employs this strategy in many earlier works, it is in The Awakening, with its surprising protagonist Edna Pontellier, that Chopin most forcefully challenges male-determined stories. With Mrs. Pontellier, Chopin rejects assessing women according to their sexual status. In so doing, she continues a project that a handful of nineteenth-century women writers had devoted themselves to: gaining a measure of narrative control for women.

Nineteenth-century women writers were highly constrained by the traditional heroine that eighteenth-century authors had created: she was invariably an ingenue, a young naive virgin who had to find a husband while maintaining her chastity. That virginity, vital and frequently referred to, seriously limited the heroine's options. As Susan Morgan tells us, when virginity is considered an unmarried woman's most valuable asset, as it certainly was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, men will control both women and culture because male actions determine a woman's sexual status and social identity. Consider, as Morgan does, the novels of the eighteenth century: when a single young heroine encounters a man, she can only hope he is kind while she defends her all-important virginity from his demanding sexuality. The man, on the other hand, has several choices: he may ignore the woman (in which case she may become a spinster, generally construed a sorry fate), he may act nobly (the virgin thus becomes a wife), he may act ignobly (he may seduce her, and she becomes a fallen woman), or he may act viciously (he may rape her, likewise defining her as fallen). Often a heroine's highest accomplishment in an eighteenth-or nineteenth-century novel is that she maintains her virtue when it is threatened by temptation or male aggression. But this achievement is based on non-action, by what a woman does not do. As Morgan puts it, if a woman can "make nothing happen … that would constitute a happy ending" (348). Meanwhile, men act; they control the labels that are conferred on heroines (spinster, wife, whore)—in short, they control the plot.

Two bestselling American novels from the eighteenth century illustrate this male dominance of narrative: both Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) focus on a good-hearted but naive young woman who is seduced and abandoned by a man. In both novels, the patriarchally constructed seduction plot ineluctably unfolds. Both women must regret being seduced, and do; both women must sink emotionally, socially, economically, and do; both women must die, and do. Well-loved by American readers and considered highly instructive, these novels were still in print in Chopin's lifetime, and she likely read one or both of them. She certainly was familiar with the seduction tale, in which men have choices while women effectively do not, in which male actions determine the predictable plot, and where young women are valued according to the condition of their vaginas.

Not all novels written about ingenues end unhappily, of course. In Susan Warner's bestselling The Wide Wide World (1850), a novel Chopin did read (Toth 51), the heroine, young Ellen Montgomery, whose innocence is repeatedly stressed, faces one taxing experience after another. By learning to suppress her emotional impulses, however, she survives with hymen intact and is rewarded with a virile minister as her husband. Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854), another bestseller when Chopin was a girl, similarly focuses on a young virgin whose happiness is entirely defined by men or their institutions; like Ellen, young Gerty Flint's innocence is her key trait, and she too must learn to be passive. While Ellen and Gerty are presented first and foremost as ingenues who must overcome their stubborn, emotional natures, their male counterparts, Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn, are presented as adventurous souls who express their frustrations by escaping "sivilization." That Huck, who is the same age as Gerty and Ellen, is also a virgin, is irrelevant to his story. From such works, readers learn to ask of women, is she chaste? whom will she marry? But of men we ask, what is he like? what has he done? The cultural effects of these wildly differing questions are obviously enormous. Perhaps this disparity explains why Chopin read so many European writers, for several European women novelists were asking different questions about women.

Jane Austen, a writer on the other side of the nineteenth century whom Chopin read,¹ was largely uninterested in the classic ingenue. In defending Austen's sexless tales, Morgan maintains that in not focusing on sexual intrigues and virgins, Austen allows her protagonists to concern themselves with something other than their virtue by making that virtue simply a given. Consequently, a woman's sexual status ceases to be the engine of plot, if not wholly irrelevant. Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Marianne Dashwood never cower with bosoms heaving for fear of some man's aggression. Each of them meets new people, reconsider themselves and their assumptions, decide they were wrong in some key matter, and change for the better. As Morgan makes clear, given the literary history of heroines, Austen's innovation is vital, for her protagonists have a chance to engage in self-reflection and self-correction, which are imperative in becoming mature adults. After Austen, heroines had a precedent for growing up, and sometimes had the emotional freedom to do so.

Chopin also read Charlotte Brontë, whose protagonists are much like Austen's: their virtue is presumed, which allows them to concern themselves with other matters. Brontë is determined to keep narrative control in her heroine's hands, so determined that in Jane Eyre (1847) she maims and blinds the puissant Rochester in order to give Jane a more dominant role in their relationship. In Villette (1853) she drowns the male protagonist, enabling Lucy Snowe to maintain her independence as a teacher and thinker. Brontë also wrote Jane Eyre and Villette in a bold first person, which is unusual in novels by women in the nineteenth century and another strategy for allowing women some control over their own stories.

But Chopin read French writers as often as she did English ones, and since she was intrigued with women who broke conventions, she read George Sand.² Sand, like Austen, shuns the ingenue. Consider her most famous novels: in Indiana (1832) the exploits of a married woman who has an affair are followed, and in Lélia (1833) a nun who feels that her life and work have been meaningless is encountered. Sand also developed a new form of narrative that Isabelle Naginski calls androgynous, a "double-voiced discourse" through which she could express her own complex identity while simultaneously reflecting the changing role of women in France and Western culture (2-4). There was no place in Sand's complex narrations for the conventional young heroine whose virtue was paramount.

Chopin was also familiar with American writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, who were shifting their focus from the ingenue to other characters: widows, old women, poor women, married women. Seldom do Jewett and Freeman write of the young virgin who will marry at the end of the story, and we know that Chopin frankly admired their works (Miscellany 90). Certainly their narrative choices influenced her own.

To wrest control of narrative from male authors and characters as these writers did, the virgin must be removed and the male-determined plot rejected. But while each of the above writers took these critical steps, their fiction betrays their limitations. Austen's heroines develop character and mature, and they enter marriages that promise to be unusually egalitarian and fulfilling, but Austen never offers a glimpse of female desire. Though in many of her works Sand portrays physical love as healthy, she too hesitates to depict female sexuality. Brontë still feels compelled to lock the sensual woman firmly in the attic, and Jewett and Freeman ignore or restrain female desire. In contrast, Chopin places a sexual woman center stage in the form of a Protestant-bred Kentuckian who has married a pillar of New Orleans's creole community. Significantly, however, we never see The Awakening 's Edna Pontellier express herself sexually with her husband. In that notable omission, Chopin takes the battle for narrative control to an entirely new level.

What Chopin is playing with in The Awakening (1899) are the reader's expectations of heroines and married women. A nineteenth-century reader would have expected the heroine to be young and unmarried, for both in fiction and in everyday life, then as now, a married woman's life is generally dismissed as uninteresting and plotless. Once married, Western culture assumes that a woman's future—sexually, economically, and socially—has been settled.³ But Chopin recognized that the married woman could be a more promising heroine than the ingenue. With a married woman, the titillating question about a heroine's sexual status becomes moot, giving the writer room to develop her character, instead of the fate of her virginity. A married woman also has greater freedom than a single woman, something that was certainly true for the married women on the Grand Isle of Chopin's novel. While the lady in black serves as an apparently self-appointed chaperone for the unmarried lovers who are forever trying to elude curious eyes, Edna may involve herself in a heated relationship with Robert and no one thinks it unusual. Fully accustomed to unflagging sexual loyalty in women, even her husband Léonce considers Edna's actions innocuous. "[T]he Creole husband is never jealous," Chopin explains, "with him the gangrene passion is one which has become dwarfed by disuse" (CW [The Complete Works ] 5: 891).

Given this assumption, Chopin may place her married heroine where a single woman of the 1890s simply could not otherwise go. A married woman might attend the horseraces with a man whom she barely knows; a single woman of "good" family could not. A father would hardly let his single daughter move into her own "pigeon-house," but Edna's husband does not object. Kate Chopin herself took full advantage of the freedoms allowed a married woman. While in Germany on their honeymoon, she and her husband Oscar wanted to visit the university in Bonn, but they were told that it would be unseemly for a woman to be observed by the all-male students. The new Mrs. Chopin tried to persuade the curator that "being married might in a manner abate the[ir] interest" (Miscellany 73). Her strategy failed, but it reveals Chopin's awareness of the license allowed married women. A few weeks later, the nineteen-year-old Mrs. Chopin strolled through Zurich unescorted, a pleasure which she herself finds remarkable (Miscellany 81).

Chopin's interest in married women as protagonists is evident in many of her short stories as well as in her two surviving novels (Thérèse Lafirme of At Fault is a widow).⁴ In The Awakening, Chopin eschews the ingenue almost entirely; she devotes little ink to the few virgins present and portrays them generically. The female half of the two lovers on Grand Isle, presumably a virgin, has no name, no face, and no identity other than being part of a couple. Chopin gently makes fun of the Farival twins, who are fourteen and always clad in virginal white and blue; she allows Made-moiselle Reisz to despise them openly (CW 16: 931). Mademoiselle herself is cantankerous, old, and wise, and her alleged virginity is irrelevant.⁵ And Mariequita, young and unmarried, is savvy and sensual rather than demure and passive. Given the language surrounding Mariequita and the stories she tells (12: 914-16; 39: 997-98), the reader can assume that she knows as much about sex as does Edna, a matron of twenty-nine.

Freed by marriage from the ingenue's pursuit of a spouse and from the wife's dreary labor by her husband's wealth, Edna has time for self-reflection. Since her husband can afford a nanny, she has time to pensively reconsider her own childhood, when she ran away from Presbyterian prayers to explore green meadows "idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided" (CW 7: 897). With Adèle's encouragement, Edna tries to articulate her own story, to trace how she shifted from a girl running from church to a woman learning how to swim, both symbolically and physically. She no longer concerns herself with silly infatuations for a cavalry officer or tragedian and instead tentatively attempts to understand the underlying rebellious impulses that prompted her to create those fantasies.

Because there is no pressing need to find a man, Edna can also immerse herself in others' stories. The visitors on Grand Isle share gossip and read racy novels, and Edna joins in (albeit shyly at first). Robert tells her of himself and his adventures (CW 2: 884) and of what could be found on the islands around Grand Isle (12: 915-16). When Edna and Robert visit Chênière Caminada, Madame Antoine entertains them with accounts of ships, Baratarian pirates, and other exploits (13: 920). Edna's impressionable mind embraces such tales, as she gradually learns to construct her own. When Dr. Mandelet dines with the Pontelliers, Léonce tells stories of his childhood, Edna's father tells a somber and self-involved yarn, and the doctor recounts a didactic tale about a woman who returns to her "legitimate" love. And then Edna tells her own story, one she makes up about "a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back" (23: 953). Novice though she is, she proves a compelling storyteller:

[E]very glowing word seemed real to those who listened [to Mrs. Pontellier]. They could feel the hot breath of the Southern night; they could hear the long sweep of the pirogue through the glistening moonlit water …; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown.
(23: 953)

Chopin here emphasizes that Edna is doing what the men are doing—telling stories—but she is also trumping them: she rejects Dr. Mandelet's conclusion as to what should happen when a woman wanders sexually. She tells a fib as well, which, of course, a good Protestant girl is taught not to do: she insists that hers is a true tale, an account she heard from Madame Antoine. But Edna's story is her own, an oral landmark in her personal history that she is shaping as never before.

The last months of Edna's life do make for a remarkable story, one that she alone has constructed. Consider Edna's plot: she falls in love with a man while on vacation one summer; loses that lover; learns that she can make her own money (through gambling, through painting); rejects her father's autocratic influence; finds a new lover; removes herself from her husband's house and his economic and social protection; and announces she will not be owned by a man. Several key figures among Edna's acquaintance recognize the unexpected shape her story is taking and try to impose their more conventional plots upon it. But Edna consistently repels every attempt to appropriate her story, especially those offered by men.

While on Grand Isle, Léonce is oblivious to Edna's emerging independence, but once back in New Orleans, where she has social obligations, he tries to rein her in. He expresses outrage over a wife who is not comporting herself properly, but Edna is unimpressed—she is perfectly content to eat her dinners alone while he dines at his club. She battles with Léonce, at times fiercely, at times fondly, and consistently wins. Alcée Arobin, a practiced womanizer, also needs to control women, but through illicit liaisons rather than the marital proprieties. While Edna explores her own character and potential, Alcée tries to reduce their relationship to a mere adulterous affair that he manipulates through shallow compliments, practiced sensuality, and oily devotion. But he fails and is often frustrated when Edna's attention wanders. Edna so firmly maintains control of their affair that Alcée becomes passive and effeminate: while she is moving out of Léonce's house, he dons a dustcap for her and becomes her servant, following her directives (CW 29: 968).

Robert frequently tries to impose his story upon Edna's, especially when he senses that she has experienced something meaningful. After her swim, he tries to make her achievement fit his fanciful myth of a Gulf spirit that occasionally seeks out a worthy human recipient. Edna quickly cuts him off: "Don't banter me" (CW 10: 909-10). She knows she has accomplished something personally momentous, and Robert's mythicizing annoys her. After Edna abandons the heavy atmosphere of the little church on Chênière Caminada and awakes to explore her own body in Madame Antoine's cottage, Robert, who realizes that Edna's flight from church is significant, tries to commandeer her story once again. When Edna invents a tale of a new race of beings having sprung up, Robert interjects his own fancies about her merely having slept for a hundred years. Edna ignores his interjection (13: 919) and maintains firm control of their relationship. It is her idea to go to Chênière Caminada, and it is she who sends for Robert. When they meet in New Orleans at Catiche's "small, leafy corner," Edna decrees that he share her dinner, and then abruptly asks him why he has avoided her. They argue, but he goes back to the "pigeon-house" with her, where she leans over and kisses him for the first time. In response, he attempts to redirect their relationship to a more traditional course by telling her he wants her to be his wife. She simply mocks him:

"You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both."
His face grew a little white. "What do you mean?" he asked.
(36: 992)

Certainly Robert should go pale, for this woman wants to control not only her story, but his as well, which is contrary to everything he has learned about the known universe. It is hardly surprising that he disappears after Edna's announcement that she is no longer a possession.

Seeing Edna after her summer on Grand Isle, kindly Dr. Mandelet also recognizes that she is transforming, sexually and otherwise. Despite the fact that he is impressed with Edna's shift from a "listless woman … into a being who … seemed palpitant with the forces of life" and even though "[s]he reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun," Dr. Mandelet cannot approve of Edna's story (CW 23: 952). He tries to intervene, first with his didactic dinner tale. After Adèle's baby is born, he tries again to interrupt Edna's narrative, gently cajoling her to confide in him. But Edna will not cooperate. She is wary of the doctor's efforts and will not allow Dr. Mandelet to advise her on how to handle her marriage or her children, however well-intentioned he may be.

Edna does, however, allow women to help shape her story. The devoted mother Adèle is the first to see that Edna's attempt to understand and express herself could have serious consequences. Immediately after their conversation in which Edna speaks candidly of her experiences, Adèle warns Robert to leave Edna alone (CW 8: 899-901). A woman who rethinks her own story destabilizes patriarchal structures, and as one who has cheerfully resigned herself to home and husband, Adèle is alarmed by Edna's behavior. Hours after Edna announces to Robert that men no longer control her, Adèle imparts a haunting message that finally ends Edna's exploratory tale: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!" (37: 995).

In a narrative created by a woman, for women, about a woman trying to elude male control, it is fitting then that a woman's words send Edna to her final swim. Even in its unsettling conclusion, The Awakening remains a woman's narrative. The reality of suicide aside, and the ramifications of Adèle's patriarchal acquiescence notwithstanding, Chopin's fictive resolution of Edna's story bids a metaphoric adieu to male control of female narrative—a woman serves as the catalyst for Edna's final act, not a man. Women—Adèle, Mademoiselle Reisz, who encourages Edna's rejection of the conventional, and Mariequita, whose open sensuality Edna admires—have more influence on Edna's story than the men in her life. The women shape her narrative from beginning to end. Thus it is ironic and deliciously subversive that Chopin undermines male control of the human story with a married woman as her primary tool.

Among the handful of nineteenth-century women writers who were determined to give women some control not only of their lives, but of stories themselves are Austen, Sand, Brontë, Jewett, and Freeman. But with the publication of The Awakening at the end of the century, Chopin envisioned and portrayed a woman more firmly in control of her own story and her own body than any of her predecessors had imagined. In so doing, Kate Chopin joins them in their effort to de-center the cult of the virgin—she posits the inadequacy of a woman's sexual label in defining her identity by creating a narrative that focuses on personal exploration and transformation rather than on a woman's sexual status. And, predating Virginia Woolf by nearly thirty years, Chopin suggests that what a woman most needs is a pigeon-house of her own, where she may construct her own story. On this the hundredth anniversary of The Awakening, it is fitting that we place Chopin in the international pantheon of writers to which she belongs, among those writers who knew that women had to envision themselves in control—in their novels, in their social narratives—before they could learn to navigate their own lives.

Notes

See Seyersted's discussion of Chopin's reading (25-26) or her reading list in the Miscellany (87-88).
Seyersted points out that though we have no record that Chopin read Sand, her daughter Lelia believed that she was named after Sand's famous heroine (101).
This attitude is most obvious in pre-twentieth-century novels, but it is also evident in today's mainstream movies and romance fiction.
An incomplete list of Chopin's stories about married women includes: "The Going Away of Liza," "A Visit to Avoyelles," "In Sabine," "A Respectable Woman," "The Story of an Hour," "Her Letters," "Athénaïse," and "The Storm."
Given Mlle. Reisz's open and effusive love for Edna, Mademoiselle may have been sexually active with women, which further disrupts male control of narrative.