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

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2003 by Rich, Charlotte

Egerton's three-part story "Under Northern Sky" thematically anticipates Chopin's portrait of marriage in The Awakeningas well, drawing upon the author's own ill-fated experience in Norway with Henry Higginson to depict unsentimentally what can happen after the vows are spoken. In this story, the protagonist's husband is a possessive, yet needy, alcoholic man who, like Leonce Pontellier, regards his wife as a "valuable piece of personal property" (Awakening 882). In fact, the possibility that Chopin read and was inspired by Egerton's work is particularly suggested by a scene in this story that finds a direct counterpart to Chopin's novel; both echo arguments made in Thorstein Veblen's The Theory ofthe Leisure Class and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics in suggesting the wife's function as a display of her husband's wealth. Just as Pontellier expects Edna to put her expensive rings back on as soon as she has finished swimming, in the emblematic first scene of Chopin's novel, the husband in Egerton's story demands to know where his wife's rings are, telling her, "'Go and fetch them! Blast it! I don't buy you rings to leave them upstairs'" (143). In a strikingly similar fashion, both authors also utilize the wives' rings to symbolize their status as the possession of their husbands, within the construct of patriarchal nineteenth-century marriage.

Also, as in The Awakening, "Under Northern Sky" invokes a pervasive metaphor in New Woman narratives that embodies the desire of the protagonists to transcend their restrictive contexts: the woman as a bird.16 Edna is repeatedly compared to a bird throughout Chopin's novel, most notably by her friend Mademoiselle Reisz, who reminds her that "The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings" (966). The protagonist in Egerton's story is likened to a bird taking flight as well. An elderly gypsy woman who comes to the house to tell the couple's fortunes senses the freer, stronger soul hidden beneath the wife's patient exterior: "A mole on your cheek, and a free Romany heart in your breast, your spirit fights to be free as the Romany chai. Seven suns rise and seven moons, and the flag is half mast, and the cage opens and the bird [takes flight]" (148). Like the words of the enigmatic artist figure Mademoiselle Reisz in Chopin's novel, the gypsy's comparison of the woman to a bird functions prophetically, for the protagonist does indeed "take flight" back over the ocean to England after the death of her husband.

In addition to the candid, even uncomplimentary depiction of marriage so widespread in New Woman narratives, The Awakening may be seen to articulate a corresponding theme of New Woman Fiction that equally informs Egerton's work: a woman's abandonment of sentimental Victorian ideals of love and marriage. Socialized within a culture that referred to romantic love in elevated terms and idealized matrimony as a transcendent union, Chopin's Edna, while growing up, had romantic dreams about various unattainable men: a calvary officer, a friend's fiance, and a famous actor. However, her own marriage to Leonce Pontellier has opened her eyes to the degree that she now considers a wedding ceremony "one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth" (948). Though Edna once again succumbs to such ideals in falling in love with the young Creole gentle-man Robert Lebrun, by the end of the novel, she realizes their incompatibility; while he can imagine a future with her only as his wife, if Pontellier were willing to "free" her, she has outgrown the paradigm of patriarchal marriage altogether. She now knows that pursuing this illusion of love brings only pain and regret, as she tells Dr. Mandelet: "Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life" (996).