An Analysis of Kate Chopin’s “A Respectable Woman.”
...r. From 1890 to 1892 she was a charter-member of the women’s Wednesday Club of St Louis, eventually resigning because she disliked its reformist tendencies and the pressure of group identification. During this period she began publishing translations from the French and wrote many stories, which were published as a collection, Bayou Folk, in 1894. A later collection, A Night in Acadie, was published in 1897. Chopin’s intense period of publication between 1890 and 1900 was at the confluence of rapidly changing preferences in the reading public. In the mid-1800s, many North American women writers, referred to disparagingly by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1855 as a “d ---- d mob of scribbling women”, produced books which were bestsellers. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott are probably the best remembered. From the mid-century the magazines and journals referred to above contributed to forming a national sense of what literature should be. After the Civil War there emerged a strong market for a distinctively American literature which had moved away from European models. Thus regional writing, then designated rather pejoratively as “local color” writing, was much in demand and Chopin’s stories fulfilled this demand very successfully. She was deemed equally accomplished to other regional writers such as Grace King and Ruth McEnery Stuart. On the other hand, as notions of a literary canon became established, women writers were consigned to a lower literary rung than their male counterparts. Hardening opinion and gendered literary standards decreed that the so-called best American women writers excelled at close observation of the immediate and the domestic, had an improving moral influence on their readers, and were talented at producing stories and sketches of “local color”. These contradictory yardsticks first favoured Chopin’s work and then narrowly categorised it. In this context, The Awakening was both innovatory and transgressive in several ways. By employing symbolism, primarily of birds, clothing and the sea, it was a departure from her earlier writing practices. Its narrative, though chronological, operates like a musical composition with variations on these motifs repeated throughout. In this respect, the novel has many features of later Modernist writing, and may have been influenced by Chopin’s familiarity with French literature. The novel also “broke the rules” in its subject matter, because it expressed what was once taboo. The central character, Edna Pontellier, shows without prudery that many women experience sexual desire which is not driven by love or mother-love. More shockingly, there is no authorial condemnation when she follows the lead of her sexual impulses into adultery. Several critics have noted the similarity of plot to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), although Chopin did not acknowledge its influence. In comparison, The Awakening explores Edna’s inner life and describes untrammelled passions with much more depth and sympathy than Flaubert attributes to Madame Emma Bovary. Throughout The Awakening, Edna gradually wakes up to many undeveloped or repressed sides of her character, including an unfulfilled yearning to be a painter. Below is her response to the piano playing of Mademoiselle Reisz, a professional pianist who has followed her own vocation at the cost of remaining unmarried: The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs Pontellier’s spinal column. [ . . . ] She waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her (pp.29-30). This kind of coded writing which indicates female sensuality and sexuality, together with Edna’s adultery, pushed Chopin’s novel beyond the bounds of propriety. Although some contemporaries praised The Awakening, and although its publication was fortunate in terms of literary history, it was probably a professional misjudgement on Chopin’s part to place it in the public domain. It was certainly not due to naivety about the market force of public taste, as her more sexually explicit story “The Storm” shows. She wrote “The Storm” in 1898, but never submitted it for publication. It was not seen in print until 1969. Of the hundred or so individual stories published in Chopin’s lifetime, only six were published in the five years remaining to her after The Awakening and many more than usual were rejected. The Awakening was simply ahead of its time. Predominantly negative reviews of The Awakening did not deter Chopin from writing. She shrugged off her detractors by publishing a facetious apology, but it is likely that her publisher postponed indefinitely printing her last story collection, A Vocation and a Voice, partly because of this turbulent reception. This collection, edited by Emily Toth, one of Chopin’s biographers, did not see the light of day until 1991. There is no doubt that Chopin broke new ground with her last novel which gave a foretaste of Modernist writing practices. Even commentators who criticised it for immorality, especially since written by a woman, acknowledged its beauty of form. Furthermore, in hindsight it is easy to see that The Awakening belonged to its historical moment. It was in dialogue with contemporary political disagreement about married women’s property rights and with a fiercely debated issue in journals and magazines predominantly during 1895 concerning what was known as “the marriage question”. The debate interrogated the false rhetoric surrounding marriage. Feisty editorials and letters explored the psychological and social constraints on middle-class wives and mothers. In this respect The Awakening resembles Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “New Woman” novel The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), although Chopin was never politically active nor overtly feminist like Perkins Gilman. In addition, the discovery in 1943 of Louisa May Alcott’s thrillers, written under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, offers yet another literary comparison for contextualising Chopin’s writing. Alcott/Barnard’s novel Behind a Mask (1866), for example, shows how women can survive socially by leading a double life. The irruption of the darker side of the psyche through a more respectable presentation of self to others is a recurring theme in Chopin’s stories such as “A Lady of Bayou St John”, “A Respectable Woman”, “Her Letters” and “The Unexpected”. In these stories Gothic motifs serve to challenge beguiling myths about women’s lives at the end of the nineteenth century. Chopin died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1904 following a collapse from heat while visiting The World Fair at St Louis. She was fifty-four, though her gravestone in St. Louis Calvary Cemetery wrongly records her dates as 1851-1904. In the late 1960s Chopin's work and, as a result, a critical interest in her life, have made an uncanny return. It was almost certainly a matter of good luck in the early 1960s that French critic Cyrille Arnavon recommended Chopin as a suitable subject for a PhD thesis to Per Seyersted, a Swedish student at Harvard. The publishing of his thesis...