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

The woman gives her admirer her glove as a token and promises to return in a year, warning him that "'Next time I must be sure, and you must be sure'" of the risks involved in both marriage and divorce (113). Egerton's story shares the focus of Chopin's "Madame Celestin's Divorce," which recounts how the narrator, a lawyer, urged the young Madame to divorce a shiftless husband who neglects her and may also abuse her. She considers the lawyer's advice, though she is admonished by her family, her priest, and even the bishop not to dream of such an undertaking: "It would move even you, Judge, to hear how he talk' about that step I want to take; its danga, its temptation. How it is the duty of a Catholic to stan' everything till the las' extreme" (278). However, Celestin soon returns to his wife and vows to turn over a new leaf, and at the small influence of his promise of improvement (along with a hint at their sexual, if not marital, compatibility), Madame capitulates to the prevailing sentiments of her family, church, and society. Chopin's first novel, At Fault, shared this critique of social and religious prejudices against divorce in portraying the unhappy life of David Hosmer, bound by wedlock to a woman who has revealed herself to be an alcoholic. When he falls in love with another woman, Therese Lafirme, the latter self-righteously considers him a "cruel egotist" (768) for prioritizing his own happiness in desiring a divorce, though at the end of the novel she sees her error.

The other remaining story in Egerton's Keynotes, "The Spell of the White Elf," reveals themes that also appear in Chopin's oeuvre, and which further suggest the possibility of Egerton's influence on the American author and their mutual interest in treating such "indelicate" subjects as venereal disease. In this tale, the speaker befriends an Englishwoman and learns of the latter's "modern" marriage: she writes, while her husband keeps the house. The Englishwoman is also raising a child adopted from a relative's troubled home, and the child's description as a frail, white "elf along with other contextual hints implies that she was born with inherited syphilis. This maternal experience has added deep fulfillment to the Englishwoman's life, for all her progressive ways. One theme in the tale that links it with Chopin is the implication that motherhood may be as desirable for some women as it is constricting for others, an idea echoed in Chopin's stories "Athenaise" (1896) and "Regret" (1894), the latter involving a woman's realization too late in life the rewards of mothering children. A second theme in Egerton's "The Spell of the White Elf" locates it in the "Social Purity" subcategory of New Woman Fiction by suggesting that the child regrettably suffers from congenital syphilis; Chopin's story "Mrs. Mowbry's Reason" (1893) also reflects the influence of this genre, implying that a young woman's mental illness tragically arises from similarly tainted blood in the family.

Taken together, George Egerton's Keynotes and Kate Chopin's The Awakening may be seen to perform astoundingly similar cultural work through their engagement with these pervasive themes of New Woman Fiction. Their powerful congruities, from general topics to specific stylistics and imagery, suggest the probability that Chopin was aware of and influenced by Egerton's work, while they at the very least imply the effects of biographical similarities, common literary influences, and a shared historical and cultural milieu. What makes Chopin's and Egerton's work even more alike and sets them both somewhat in opposition to other, more polemic New Woman texts is their mutual hesitancy to prescribe exclusive answers to the Woman Question or the marriage debate. Chopin portrays contrasting examples of fulfilling lives for women in The Awakening, suggesting that the unmarried musician Mademoiselle Reisz is as content with her chosen path in life as is the "mother woman" Adele Ratignolle, completely defined by her maternal role. In the very same way, Egerton's portrait of the happily newly-single protagonist at the end of "Under Northern Sky" does not suggest that she feels greater satisfaction than the woman delighted to learn of her pregnancy in "A Cross Line" or the adoptive mother of "The Spell of the White Elf."