Kissing a Photograph: Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Kissing a Photograph:Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy Arielle Zibrak (bio) The late-nineteenth-century writer Kate Chopin was fond of shocking people. It was perhaps for this reason that she kept a copy of Thomas Hardy's 1895 novel Jude the Obscure on display in her home.1 Her review of Jude, published in the St. Louis Criterion in 1897, begins with an anecdote about a polite female guest shocked to find the volume left out on a visiting-room table: "'Oh! how can you!' she exclaimed, 'with so many young people about!'"2 While this reaction clearly delights Chopin (her liberal use of exclamation points in the transcription is good evidence alone), she proceeds to trash Hardy's novel, stating outright that "the book is detestably bad" (714). Yet, in her prose, Chopin also betrays certain admiration for, or perhaps merely an uncomfortable identification with, the novel she purports to hate.3 When "one or two youngsters" ask her about the book, Chopin responds that it is "unutterably tiresome … but you might like it" (714). Indeed, her primary objection to the novel, reformulated and repeated throughout the review, is that it's incredibly boring: "ponderous … formidable … nothing alluring … the outward appearance of a Congressional Record … colorless … unpardonably dull" etc., etc. (713–14). She laments that no one was interested in the book prior to the controversy it stirred in the press, a controversy into which she, as yet another reviewer of the novel, has now entered; but under what terms? It seems rather irrelevant and late in the day to say all this about Jude the Obscure. It is only sympathy for the young person which moves me to do so. I hate to know that deceptions are being practiced upon him. He has been led to believe that the work is quite dangerous and alluring … I feel very sorry to think that he should part with so many good silver quarters and receive nothing in return but disappointment and dissolution. (715) [End Page 355] This ridiculous assertion of concern for "the young person" wasting his money on a boring novel is Chopin's satirical response to the overzealous parade of reviewers that felt compelled to damn Jude in both the English and American presses out of fear for what it might do to impressionable youths. Margaret Oliphant's notorious review in Blackwood's is a good example of this mode of criticism.4 Oliphant writes, "[T]o make [sex] the supreme incident, always in the foreground, to be discussed by young men and women, and held up before boys and girls … seems to me an outrage for which there is no justification."5 Chopin enters the debate not to defend the portrayal of sexuality in Jude, but rather to lament that the young reader who goes to the book in search of it will find little to gratify his or her curiosity. The performance of her own "outrage" at the dullness of Hardy's novel is less a gesture aimed at Hardy or Jude than it is a perverse counterstrike against reviewers who object to the "immorality" of novels that portray sexual desire. Chopin responds to the sex panic of Hardy's reviewers with an art panic of her own: our concern, she suggests, should be protecting the sanctity of children's minds from bad literature. In Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), Roger Lancaster outlines the social, cultural, and judicial power of sex panics from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Echoing Lee Edelman's 2004 polemic No Future, Lancaster asserts that "the constant element in successive waves of panic is the figure of the imperiled innocent child—a child whose innocence is defined in terms of his imagined sexlessness and whose protection from sex looms as an ever more urgent and exacting demand."6 This profoundly effective rhetoric is nowhere more present than in Oliphant's defamatory review. (And it is precisely this rhetoric that Chopin appropriates.) After repeatedly harping upon the dangers to young people that Jude and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) pose, Oliphant laments the extermination of Jude and Sue's children, who...