If Kate Chopin’s The Awakening had not existed, feminist criticism must have invented it. Here was a lost and indeed fallen 19th-century novel, an orphan of the critical storm, whose rescue in the 1960s captured all the themes of the emerging women’s liberation movement.
If Kate Chopin’s The Awakening had not existed, feminist criticism must have invented it. Here was a lost and indeed fallen 19th-century novel, an orphan of the critical storm, whose rescue in the 1960s captured all the themes of the emerging women’s liberation movement. Chopin’s heroine, Edna Pontellier, awakens from the New Orleans marriage in which she is a pampered chattel, first to her own sexuality, and ultimately to the claims of a selfhood beyond romance, family, even maternity, which impels her to defy ‘the soul’s slavery’ by walking naked into the sea: ‘She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known .The water
was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
Chopin was thus re-introduced to the American public as a martyred female genius, the ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ of Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, who tries to write about the body as freely as her brother, but is reduced to obscurity, shame, even death. Recalled to life by Seyersted, a Norwegian scholar who had chosen her as the subject of his Harvard PhD, Chopin was quickly taken up by feminists and Americanists who recognised in The Awakening a missing literary link: the great American women’s novel of the 19th century.
Source
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n08/elaine-showalter/shakespeares-sister
Read it!
Source
Edna’s eroticism, and her choice of suicide rather than the bondage of domestic roles, raised feminist issues that seemed starkly modern. So, too, did the history of The Awakening and its author. On its initial publication in 1899, The Awakening was condemned for indecency in a barrage of hostile and scandalised reviews. ‘A Daring Writer Banned’ was the title of the chapter in Per Seyersted’s influential biography of Chopin in 1969, and other scholars accepted and repeated the story that the novel had been removed from library circulation, and that Chopin had been blackballed at the St Louis Fine Arts Club. Finally, according to Chopin’s children, the novelist had been so wounded by the treatment she received that she had been unable to write again. Her health and confidence shattered, Chopin died five years later, a silenced victim of the book’s misogynist reception.
If Kate Chopin’s The Awakening had not existed, feminist criticism must have invented it. Here was a lost and indeed fallen 19th-century novel, an orphan of the critical storm, whose rescue in the 1960s captured all the themes of the emerging women’s liberation movement. Chopin’s heroine, Edna Pontellier, awakens from the New Orleans marriage in which she is a pampered chattel, first to her own sexuality, and ultimately to the claims of a selfhood beyond romance, family, even maternity, which impels her to defy ‘the soul’s slavery’ by walking naked into the sea: ‘She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known .The water
was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
Chopin was thus re-introduced to the American public as a martyred female genius, the ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ of Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, who tries to write about the body as freely as her brother, but is reduced to obscurity, shame, even death. Recalled to life by Seyersted, a Norwegian scholar who had chosen her as the subject of his Harvard PhD, Chopin was quickly taken up by feminists and Americanists who recognised in The Awakening a missing literary link: the great American women’s novel of the 19th century.
Source
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n08/elaine-showalter/shakespeares-sister
Read it!
Source
Edna’s eroticism, and her choice of suicide rather than the bondage of domestic roles, raised feminist issues that seemed starkly modern. So, too, did the history of The Awakening and its author. On its initial publication in 1899, The Awakening was condemned for indecency in a barrage of hostile and scandalised reviews. ‘A Daring Writer Banned’ was the title of the chapter in Per Seyersted’s influential biography of Chopin in 1969, and other scholars accepted and repeated the story that the novel had been removed from library circulation, and that Chopin had been blackballed at the St Louis Fine Arts Club. Finally, according to Chopin’s children, the novelist had been so wounded by the treatment she received that she had been unable to write again. Her health and confidence shattered, Chopin died five years later, a silenced victim of the book’s misogynist reception.
No comments:
Post a Comment