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Kate Chopin
By Willa Cather
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THE AWAKENING. Kate Chopin. $1.25. Chicago: H. S.
Stone & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
A Creole Bovary is this little novel of Miss Chopins.
Not that the heroine is a creole exactly, or that Miss
Chopin is a Flaubertsave 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 authors 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. The story she has to tell in the present
instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. Edna Pontellier,
a Kentucky girl, who, like Emma Bovary, had been in
love with innumerable dream heroes before she was out of
short skirts, married Leonce Pontellier as a sort of reaction
from a vague and visionary passion for a tragedian whose unresponsive
picture she used to kiss. She acquired the habit of
liking her husband in time, and even of liking her children.
Though we are not justified in presuming that she ever threw
articles from her dressing table at them, as the charming
Emma had a winsome habit of doing, we are told that she
would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she
would sometimes forget them. At a creole watering place,
which is admirably and deftly sketched by Miss Chopin,
Edna met Robert Lebrun, son of the landlady, who
dreamed of a fortune awaiting him in Mexico while he occupied
a petty clerical position in New Orleans. Robert made
it his business to be agreeable to his mothers boarders, and
Edna, not being a creole, much against his wish and will,
took him seriously. Robert went to Mexico but found that
fortunes were no easier to make there than in New Orleans.
He returns and does not even call to pay his respects to her.
She encounters him at the home of a friend and takes him
home with her. She wheedles him into staying for dinner, and
we are told she sent the maid off in search of some delicacy
she had not thought of for herself, and she recommended
great care in the dripping of the coffee and having the omelet
done to a turn.
Only a few pages back we were informed that the husband,
M. Pontellier, had cold soup and burnt fish for his dinner.
Such is life. The lover of course disappointed her, was a coward
and ran away from his responsibilities before they began.
He was afraid to begin a chapter with so serious and limited a
woman. She remembered the sea where she had first met
Robert. Perhaps from the same motive which threw Anna
Keraninna under the engine wheels, she threw herself into
the sea, swam until she was tired and then let go.
She looked into the distance, and for a moment the
old terror flamed up, then sank again. She heard her
fathers voice, and her sister Margarets. She heard the
barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore
tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he
walked across the porch. There was a hum of bees, and
the musky odor of pinks filled the air.
Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary are studies in the
same feminine type; one a finished and complete portrayal,
the other a hasty sketch, but the theme is essentially the same.
Both women belong to a class, not large, but forever clamoring
in our ears, that demands more romance out of life than
God put into it. Mr. G. Barnard Shaw would say that they are
the victims of the over-idealization of love. They are the spoil
of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment. The unfortunate
feature of their disease is that it attacks only women of brains,
at least of rudimentary brains, but whose development is one-sided;
women of strong and fine intuitions, but without the
faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about things.
Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing
about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a
rest from feeling. Now with women of the Bovary type,
this relaxation and recreation is impossible. They are not critics
of life, but, in the most personal sense, partakers of life.
They receive impressions through the fancy. With them
everything begins with fancy, and passions rise in the brain
rather than in the blood, the poor, neglected, limited one-sided
brain that might do so much better things than badgering
itself into frantic endeavors to love. For these are the
people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of the
poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas great creation,
Marguerite Gauthier. These people really expect the passion
of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature
only intended that it should meet one of many demands.
They insist upon making it stand for all the emotional pleasures
of life and art, expecting an individual and self-limited
passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure and distraction, to
contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable
exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense
idealists. So this passion, when set up against Shakespeare,
Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have staked everything
on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the blood
until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves up
to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation
is impossible. Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every
sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the
nerves get even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then the
awakening comes. Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic,
as it came to Emma Bovary, sometimes it is carbolic
acid taken covertly in the police station, a goal to which unbalanced
idealism not infrequently leads. Edna Pontellier,
fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea on a summer
night and went down with the sound of her first lovers spurs
in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I
hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent
style of hers to a better cause.
Pittsburg Leader, July 8, 1899
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