Reconsidering the awakening: The literary sisterhood of Kate Chopin and George Egerton

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2003 by Rich, Charlotte

Beyond the biographical congruities between the two authors, shared aesthetic influences on Chopin and Egerton are another likely source for the radically similar themes and style of their most noted works, The Awakening and Keynotes. Chopin was inspired by the realism and frankness of French writers at the end of the nineteenth century such as Gustave Flaubert and, in particular, his protege Guy de Maupassant, as well as the feminism of female authors George Sand and Madame de Stael. Many of the short stories by de Maupassant that she translated into English contain topics or themes she was to return to with great effect in The Awakening: marital unhappiness, adultery, isolation, suicide, and sexuality.12 Chopin was also influenced by the subjects and themes of Scandinavian realist playwright Henrik Ibsen. Despite the fact that, according to an article by her friend William Schuyler, she thought Ibsen took life "too clumsily and seriously" (qtd. in Toth 244), Chopin conceded how "forcible and representative" of their era Ibsen was, in a review of Hamlin Garland's Crumbling Idols she wrote in 1894 (693). Moreover, she admired the short stories of one of his peers and countrymen, Norwegian realist writer Alexander Kielland.

During Egerton's years in Norway, in addition to her exposure to the works of Ibsen, she was introduced to other Scandinavian writers including Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg. She was drawn to the social realism of Ibsen, Bjornson, and Strindberg, who were willing to treat previously untouchable topics such as adultery or venereal disease in their works. She was particularly impacted by the impressionism and psychological verity of the writer Hamsun, whose novel Hunger she began to translate into English in 1890. Egerton even met and formed an acquaintance with Hamsun, which inspired her story "Now Spring Has Come" in Keynotes. Hamsun's work is noted particularly for its emphasis upon representing the fragmentary nature of consciousness, or "the indirect, at times wayward progress by which the mind assimilates thoughts and impressions" (Harris 32), and Egerton's stories reveal a similar emphasis.

Also, like Chopin, Egerton admired and practiced the short story form, producing striking work in a genre that underwent a flowering in the late nineteenth century. The short story liberated authors to work with narrative in new waysin particular, as Showalter has noted, to overcome the conventions of plot established by the lengthy Victorian novel, which usually ended with a heroine's marriage or death (ix). Moreover, the condensed form of the genre lent itself to experimentation with the use of allegory, fantasy, and "sketch" approaches, of which both Chopin and Egerton made use, and it allowed authors to transcend the intrusive, omniscient narrator so characteristic of the nineteenth-century novel.

These shared aesthetic influences are particularly reflected in stylistic similarities between Chopin and Egerton, for both may be remarked upon for their episodic, sensuous, and impressionistic narrative mode. The very first scene of The Awakening, which describes Leonce Pontellier's view of the beach at Grand Isle, epitomizes Chopin's visual impressionism: "He fixed his gaze upon a white sunshade that was advancing at a snail's pace from the beach. He could see it plainly between the gaunt trunks of the water-oaks and across the stretch of yellow camomile. The gulf looked far away, melting hazily into the blue of the horizon" (882). The opening of Egerton's story "An Ebb Tide" in Keynotes likewise contains strong visual and olfactory impressions of a nearly identical setting: