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Reconsidering the awakening: The literary sisterhood of Kate Chopin and George Egerton
Southern Quarterly, Spring 2003 by Rich, Charlotte
The adventurous life of George Egerton reveals similar subversions of the expectations of nineteenth-century middle-class women. Born to a charming but irresponsible ex-military father, she experienced a great deal of instability in her youth, living at various points in New Zealand, Chile, Wales, Ireland, and Germany. When her mother died when "Chav" was sixteen, she played the role of stepmother to a large number of younger siblings. As a young adult she worked in London, the United States, and Dublin before eloping to Norway in 1887 with Henry Higginson, an older married man who had already once committed bigamy. Like Chopin, she outlived her partner; the alcoholic Higginson died within two years. She later married George Egerton Clairmonte, a shiftless Newfoundlander whom she supported with her writing, borrowing part of his name under which to publish her work. After divorcing him, Egerton married Reginald Golding Bright, a drama critic and agent fifteen years her junior.
Both women's backgrounds also possess a cultural plurality that informed their choices of subject and techniques as writers. Chopin's father had immigrated to the United States from Ireland as a boy, while her mother was of Creole heritage, having ancestors among the French settlers of St. Louis and relatives in Louisiana. Egerton was born of an Irish father and Anglo-Welsh mother. The tensions of these mixed cultural backgrounds continually surface in their texts, as Chopin wrote repeatedly about the complicated dynamics of culture and race in Creole Louisiana, while Irish turns of phrase and folk metaphors appear throughout the narratives of Egerton. Though this discussion is more concerned with representations of gender roles than with those of cultural or ethnic identity in the two authors' works, Chopin's and Egerton's mutual preoccupation with the latter is another rich point of comparison between them.
As might be inferred from the manner in which these two women lived, both strongly believed in personal and artistic freedom and had a corresponding dislike for orthodoxy and "preaching." In an essay entitled "Confidences" (1896), Chopin writes with contempt of a "Madame Precieuse" who urged her to "cultivate the religious impulse" and use her fiction to uphold conventional mores: "Some wise man has promulgated an eleventh commandment-'thou shalt not preach' " (702). Similarly, Egerton's personal writings reflect a dislike of self-righteous moralizing, particularly when literature is used for such purposes. Her letters are peppered with comments such as "I can't stand cant of any kind" (qtd. in White 32), "I hate books with a purpose," and, in good aesthetic form, "I love books for their own sake, art for its own sake" (qtd. in White 36). In Egerton's story in Keynotes, "Now Spring Has Come," the protagonist echoes pervasive sentiments in the author's personal writings as she muses upon public outcry over a controversial book: "I wonder shall we ever be able to tell the truth, to live fearlessly according to our own light, to believe that what is right for us must be right? It seems as if all the religions, all the advancement, all the culture of the past, has only been a forging of chains to cripple posterity, a laborious building up of moral and legal prisons based on false conceptions of sin and shame, to cramp men's minds and hearts and souls, not to speak of women's" (40-41).10 Indeed, the challenges to the dictates of Victorian True Womanhood-Purity, Piety, Domesticity, and Submissiveness-evidenced by Egerton's and Chopin's own lives" are reflected throughout their fiction, from Edna Pontellier's rejection of her marriage and assignation with Alcee Arobin in The Awakening, as well as Chopin's pervasive use of such subjects in her other fiction, to the treatments of adultery, marital discord, and divorce throughout Egerton's short stories.
