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

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2003 by Rich, Charlotte

The sea quivers under an armor of silver scales, and laps, laps with a laugh as it runs into the creek. The sails of the ships glisten whiter than any snow. The sun distils the scent from the clover carnations . . . until the air is heavy with a smell that would cease to be perfume, were it not filtered through the salt ooze of the incoming sea-breeze that flutters the flags on the tall white poles. (155)

However, though Chopin and Egerton's work is filled with such impressions, or perceptions of the physical world, both authors took their literary impressionism beyond a mere recording of that reality. Their texts mutually anticipate expressionism, the artistic movement that followed impressionism and presaged modernism, by connecting impressions with subjective states of mind. In fact, both authors' texts assert a link between sensory perceptions and memories that trigger emotions. As Egerton's protagonist sits alone after her husband's death in the story "An Ebb Tide," the narrator comments that "when numbed in mind and heart by some great trouble," one's senses "are more alive to outward sounds and scenes": "Eyes and ears and above all sense of smell are busy receiving impressions, storing them up . . . to reproduce them with absolute fidelity if any of the senses be touched in the same way by the subtle connection between perfume and memory" (173). The idea that impressions evoke memories and emotions also appears in an important passage early on in The Awakening. Edna, visiting the beach with her friend Adele Ratignolle, gazes out at the water, and her sensory perceptions stir a childhood memory full of significance for her now, as she explains to Adele:

The sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky. . . . The hot wind beating my face made me think-without any connection that I can trace-of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. . . . Likely or not it was Sunday . . . and I was running away from prayers. . . . I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided. (896)

Edna's reflection, thematically central to the novel, suggests her desire to escape the newly recognized constrictions of her context, but it also exemplifies how Chopin's text, as well as Egerton's, asserts links between sensory impressions of reality and memory or emotion. This quality is also exemplified in Edna's suicide, described in the final lines of the novel. Drowsy, peaceful sounds and smells of her distant Kentucky childhood return to float through her consciousness, as if she is being lulled to sleep among the waves: "Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. 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 the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air" (1000).13 In representing such connections between sensory impressions and emotion and memory, both authors supersede Victorian realism and anticipate literary modernism.