Kate Chopin, choice and modernism

Abstract

Much of the best work on Kate Chopin's fiction over the past two decades has sought to contextualise her writing firmly within the discourses and contexts of the nineteenth century. Valuable and influential essays have been written, for example, on Chopin's debts to French nineteenth-century authors such as Maupassant and Flaubert; on Chopin and the New Woman; on New Orleans and the figure of the female flâneur; on Chopin and other women authors of the fin-de-siecle period such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton; on Kate Chopin as part of the nineteenth-century American literary tradition; on Chopin and Darwinism. Indeed, the essays in this volume continue and richly develop work in these areas. By contrast, publications on the connections between Kate Chopin's work and modernism have been halting and piecemeal. Moreover, they have invariably focused on The Awakening , either dwelling on its formal and experimental aspects or emphasising its relation to the New Woman, sexuality and feminist thought. Michael T. Gilmore's essay, 'Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening ' is a good example of the former approach, stressing as it does similarities between Chopin's work and impressionist painting and music. Marianne DeKoven's essay 'Gendered Doubleness and the “Origins” of Modernist Form' extends consideration of the formal experimental qualities of The Awakening into an argument that elements of ambivalence and contradiction in the story are not only typical of early modernist writing but also that they result in a 'self-cancelling narrative stance' that indicates an ambivalence about feminism itself: 'given the depth and intractability of the fear of punishment for female anger and desire [...] inherent doubleness of modernist form is precisely what allows the expression of feminist content at all.'