Pearl K. Bell
KATE CHOPIN AND SARAH ORNE JEWETT
In the waning years of the nineteenth century, two
remarkable women, exact contemporaries living at opposite ends of
the immense American diversity, dissented from the cultural shib–
boleths and popular taste of their time in the way they wrote about
the life they knew best. Kate Chopin (1851-1904) was consciously
defiant of the decencies and sexual prudery of the 1890s, and sought
to uncover the sensuality and discontent of women which the stulti–
fying conventions of the age refused to acknowledge. Sarah Orne
Jewett (1849-1909) preferred to look back rather than forward to the
emancipated future envisioned by Mrs. Chopin; her sensibility and
values were deeply anchored in the past of a rural New England that
was rapidly disappearing in her lifetime, but she, too, shunned the
idealized versions of actuality which a culture dedicated to gentility
demanded of its literature.
Immeasurably different though they were as women and as
writers, neither Mrs. Chopin nor Miss Jewett showed any affinity
for the noble morality and complacent optimism represented by the
three venerable New Englanders-James Russell Lowell, Oliver
Wendell Holmes Sr., and John Greenleaf Whittier - who were still
revered as the high priests of American literature. Even so staunch a
defender of realism as William Dean Howells could go only so far
and no further in accepting writers who dared to concern themselves
with the seamier and less benevolent aspects of American society
toward the end of the century. In the notorious statement that
blighted his reputation for years, Howells urged American novelists
to deal with "the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more
American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the
social interests."
Several notches below this arch conception of literary art, the
popular taste of the time was equally uninterested in the depiction of
actual life, and the great mass of American readers couldn't get
enough of the historical romances churned out by such best-selling
novelists as Francis Marion Crawford, who wrote dashing claptrap
Editor's Note: A different version of this essay will appear
in
the forthcoming
New
Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume IX: American Literature.
