Kate Chopin's Scribbling Women and the American Literary Marketplace

Abstract

I want book to succeed, Kate Chopin wrote in an 1894 diary entry about her f t short story collection, Bayou Folk. Five years later -- despite disappointing reviews of her novel, Awakening -- she nonetheless queried her publisher, Herbert Stone, What are prospects for book?(1) Chopin's private and public writings confirm that she considered herself professional writer. But her sense of herself as woman writer, her comprehension of women's tradition, and her relationship with her foremothers -- that d_____d mob of scribbling Hawthorne lamented in 1850s -- are other, perhaps more interesting, questions.(2) In Private Woman Public Stage, Mary Kelley documents publishing travails of mid-nineteenth-century scribbling women, literary domestics whose professional identities were upstaged by primary self-identification as private domestic women.(3) And in Doing Literary Business, Susan Coultrap-McQuin finds that Chopin's foremothers, despite formidable success and devout career commitment, still had to contend with limiting stereotypes of women.[4] Thus it seems surprising that Chopin, who inherited these stereotypes when she began writing in 1890s, would also propagate them. In three career-spanning works -- Witherwell's Mistake, Awakening, and Stock's One Story -- chopin satirizes women writers in ways that strongly imply she wished to dissociate herself from traditional female litterateur.(5) These caricatures provide insight not only into Chopin's own career but also into status of female professional writer in late nineteenth-century America. Chopin specifically ridiculed women writers in only three works, but as Barbara Ewell notes, even her first novel At Fault (1890) managed to manipulate effectively techniques of romance [read women's popular fiction] to mock its conventions.(6) Elizabeth Ammons has proposed that Chopin belonged to group of writers in 1890s who desired to be artists as well as professionals. Breaking with past, these women assailed the territory of high art traditionally posted in Western culture as exclusive property of privileged white men.[7] In light of this premise, Chopin seems less atypical in her censure of scribbling women. Willa Cather, for example, claimed she expected little of women writers until they could produce a stout sea tale, manly battle yam, anything without wine, women and love.(8) Ironically, Cather treated Awakening to similarly uncharitable review. Objecting to its trite retelling of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Cather (in revealing trope) compares Chopin's narrative decisions to man acquiring mate: An author's choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write.[9] Cather's criticism, however, might be considered poetic justice, since Chopin had herself dunned her sister scribblers. Her first parody of woman, Witherwell's Mistake, was completed in November 1889 at beginning of her apprenticeship. Chopin's third published story, it appeared in February 1891 in St. Louis magazine Fashion and Fancy.[10] Echoing spirit of Hawthorne's oftquoted remark, Witherwell's Mistake derides scribbling women's trash and mocks their female readers. story recounts career of Miss Frances Witherwell, an unmarried journalist of seasoned age who contributes fiction and women's articles to small-town newspaper, Boredomville Battery. Notwithstanding Chopin's gesture in christening her character Wither-well, she also derides female journalist's hackneyed production: flagrantly Southern tale[s] of passion and self-important essays like The Wintering of Canaries, Security Against Moth (CW, p. …