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

Aside from their nearly identical aesthetics, the most powerful congruities of Chopin and Egerton-the topical and thematic-can be theorized through the cultural and historical moment in which both authors wrote and to which their texts respond. As scholars of the literary culture of the 1890s on both sides of the Atlantic concur, this decade was a time during which the identity of women, both in and outside of marriage, was richly contested. Debates about the institution of patriarchal bourgeois marriage filled the pages of mainstream periodicals of the day, and along with real examples of women leading newly independent lives, they gave rise to the movement classified as "New Woman Fiction" in English literature. While British authors such as Mary Cholmondeley or Sarah Grand are most commonly associated with the genre of New Woman Fiction, however, many American authors in this era likewise focused on questions of marriage, motherhood, and professional pursuits for women, from Ellen Glasgow and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Chopin and Egerton's texts may be seen as engaging in this cultural discourse, calling for a more complete representation of the New Woman that acknowledges her sexuality. At the same time, both authors distinguish themselves from the more polemic texts of some of their peers in refusing to prescribe what constitutes a fulfilling existence for women.

A juxtaposition of Chopin's best-known text with the stories in Keynotes illuminates pervasive thematic similarities that necessitate our historicizing Chopin within the cultural moment of New Woman Fiction that Egerton epitomized. From its earliest pages, The Awakening enacts an essential theme of this genre: a female protagonist's realization of the limits that the hegemonic construction of womanhood and the institution of patriarchal marriage place upon her. As several critics have discussed, this theme may be seen throughout Chopin's text, from Edna's tense conversations with her husband on Grand Isle, in the opening chapters of the novel, to her eventual move out of his home in order to pursue her work as an artist.14 Two stories in Egerton's Keynotes, "An Empty Frame" and "Under Northern Sky," similarly play upon on this theme.

The first piece concerns a woman's acknowledgment of her lost potential for rich emotional attachment and of the arbitrary societal emphasis upon marriage, anticipating not only Edna's realizations in The Awakeningbut also those of the protagonists in a handful of Chopin's short stories.15 In Egerton's story, a woman sits before the fire gazing at an empty picture frame. She thinks of a past suitor, recalling the words of his letter telling her that he loved her, but that he could not enter a conventional marriage: "I worship you; but you know my views. I cannot, I will not bind myself to you by any legal or religious tie" (119). She refused to remain with him in such a relationship, and instead married another man who admired her. However, the protagonist now senses the probability that her husband is engaging in an affair, and she realizes with irony how little her capitulation to broader societal pressures to marry was worth: "Now those who know and understand me . . . think of me as a great failure" (122). The revelation of the protagonist's buried life of lost possibilities is aptly symbolized by the blank picture frame she contemplates, and which she puts into the fire at the close of the story. Even Egerton's metaphoric use of the picture frame anticipates a key symbolic detail in Chopin's delineation of Edna's character; the latter keeps on her desk a framed portrait of the famous tragedian with whom she was infatuated as a young girl, an object suggesting her analogous desire for lost romantic opportunities.