Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou.

Sinclair, Gail D.

Kate Chopin's work, which fell out of favor after publication of The Awakening and which remained virtually unknown and untaught for years, has moved from near obscurity to canonization in the past two decades. This is the view which Cathy Davidson suggests in her foreword to Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Davidson's contention is that what becomes important to American literary history is not the fictional Edna Pontellier's awakening; instead, the real story concerns "the high cost of literary feistiness." Chopin's failure to support the social conventions of the time quickly relegated her work to disfavor, but in the "newly gendered and multicultural canon" through which her work is now viewed, that feistiness paid off.

With a burgeoning interest in regional, American, and feminist studies, Chopin's work has found an audience. The inevitable aftermath of a rise from marginal to canonical stature, however, is the struggle to "place" the author and the work. Co-editors Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis have collected fourteen essays focusing mostly upon The Awakening and presenting a variety of critical approaches to Chopin's background and to her work. These include biographical, New Historicist, Marxist, poststructuralist, and feminist stances.

Perhaps the approach of least value in the book is the biographical one, and of the three essays in this section, only the first is useful or well argued. Emily Toth relates autobiographical details of Kate Chopin's life to their fictional connections. Chopin and her maternal paradigms - her mother and her grandmother - were all widowed at a young age and never remarried. Toth points out links between these women and their fictional counterparts' struggles to resolve the difficulties of placing "self" in a world which restricted the female role. The second essay discuses French Creole influence on Chopin. This is important to her regionalist fiction, but where the essay fails is in its centering of emphasis on Chopin's in-laws and their family history. I find little value or direct connection to Chopin and her writing in this discussion. Finally, this section includes a highly speculative article refuting Chopin's withdrawal from literary and public life because of bitterness over critical failure of The Awakening. Heather Kirk Thomas suggests that illness, not depression, forced Chopin's retirement from writing. The essay is filled with circumstantial evidence and repeats with annoying frequency words like "probably," "might have," "perhaps," and "in all likelihood." One might argue any premise using such speculative language.

As expected, the feminist section is the strongest in the book, and elements of this critical perspective are often fused with variant approaches and incorporated into other sections. Deborah E. Barker focuses on the familiar artist/art relationship, its importance in The Awakening, its transcendent implications to the writer and her work, and the function of the creator in the social milieu - the paradox of social loss to obtain spiritual gain. Edna becomes awakened to her place in the universe and is ultimately destroyed by the revelation. Nicely building upon Barker's essay is Dorothy Jacobs's. She also discusses Edna's painful self-recognition and awakening into a world which is not prepared for her autonomy. Jacobs's focus is upon the restrictive, patriarchal Victorian, and post-Victorian world and Edna's painful recognition of her confinement and impotence. She is caught in an existential paradox where self-realization is not a liberating force but one which makes her more painfully aware of limitations. Jacobs likens Edna to such tragic heroes as Oedipus or Lear who must grapple with stripped illusions resulting from the sudden ability to see clearly.

A third division in the book addresses the politics of economics and male domination. John Carlos Rowe incorporates the symbolism of body, the way it is clothed or unclothed, to suggest signs of dominance. He further relates Marxist emphasis on human productivity to the changing turn-of-the-centur-y economy which had increasing focus on a speculative capitalism. Edna is awakened to her sexuality, but realizing her economic and sexual subservience, she commits suicide. Rowe's premise is that the plight of Edna indicates corruption of physical labor by the new economics. He sees The Awakening as "socio-historical determinism" which moves "from naturalism to symbolism, from dreary realism to suggestive parable," and he concludes with the idea of the novel as a work of literary modernism which presents a view of failure and despair. The last essay in this section also emphasizes economic importance in the novel. Doris Davis points out Edna's conscious decision to strip herself of materialistic trappings. She hosts a farewell dinner party lavishing displaying signs of wealth and then turns her back on these to retreat to the pigeon house, and still later strips her clothing before committing suicide. Davis notes Edna's desire for independence and her lack of drive, knowledge, and economic autonomy, the elements for success. Edna pays for this inadequacy with the one currency she owns: her life. At any rate, Davis applauds the attempt.

The final section of Kate Chopin Revisited relating only to The Awakening presents a New Historical approach. Barbara Ewell emphasizes the Emersonian ideal of "self" and its elusiveness to the female gender in the late nineteenth century. According to Ewell, what Edna discovers is the difficulty, if not impossibility, of achieving self-actualization in a society where women are without "self" A second essay compares Edna's struggle to that of Godfrey St. Peter, Willa Cather's protagonist in The Professor's House. Katherine Joslin believes that the historical problem is the confinement and restriction of domestic life in general, not of females in particular. An awakening to the "self' must necessarily throw off these confines, but reality suggests that "self" cannot survive outside the boundaries of social living. The third essay in this section, the weakest of the three, is written by the book's co-editor, Lynda Boren. She argues the obvious. Edna Pontellier is a woman caught between ideologies of the past century and future currents. Clearly, Edna's failure is an attempt to be modern long before the world is ready for her or other women to be so. Boren points out the symbols of entrapment emphasizing Edna's condition but stretches the point to also posit a thematic connection to the darker world of slavery in the South. This interpretation seems tenuous considering The Awakening's focus only on a privileged class.

The ability to apply numerous analytic approaches helps substantiate Lynda S. Boren's claim that Chopin is worthy of canonization because her work transcends regional strictures in its movement toward a universal mythos. As a whole, Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou is a worthwhile collection of essays offering usefully eclectic critical perspectives of Chopin and her work.