PEARL K. BELL
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about aristocratic love and honor in exotic locales; Charles Major
(When Knighthood Was in Flower);
Booth Tarkington
(Monsieur
Beaucaire);
and Owen Wister
(The Virginian) .
(And still lower down
on the literary scale were the successors of the "damned mob of scrib–
bling women" that Hawthorne had railed against in the 1850s, who
flooded the market with their tear-drenched melodramas .) When
Crawford scornfully asked, "What has art to do with truth? Is not
truth the imagination's deadly enemy?" he was being exceptionally
cynical. Though Mr. Lowell and Mr. Holmes would not have said it
quite so nakedly, Crawford's haughty questions were not all that far
removed from what they believed and practiced .
Some few writers of the time thought otherwise. They knew in
every fiber of their confidence in themselves that art has everything
to do with truth, that the imagination can flourish only when it is fed
by the particularity of a writer's experience and judgment. But in the
last years of the century such writers as Stephen Crane , Frank Nor–
ris , Edward Arlington Robinson, and Theodore Dreiser were either
misread, ignored, or denounced because they sought to write more
openly about sexual passion and economic corruption than the
prevailing culture would tolerate. It was only in a later and different
America that the scope and courage of their achievement was
recognized.
Though they are admittedly minor figures compared to such
towering originals as Norris and Dreiser, Kate Chopin and Sarah
Jewett, in their distinctive ways, also rejected the idealization of
reality. In their quest for models of the kind of work they hoped to
accomplish, they were emboldened by their reading of Flaubert, and
sought to enact his axiom that one must write about ordinary life as
though it were history. In their dissimilar fashion, they were moved
by the same compelling need to trust what they observed and felt as
the truth of their literary art.
Kate Chopin (nee O'Flaherty)
W1iS
born a decade before the
outbreak of the Civil War in St. Louis, Missouri, of an Irish
im–
migrant father and a mother descended from early French pioneers .
Kate grew up equally fluent in English and French, but was always
drawn more strongly to French writers than to those of England and
her own country . When she discovered Maupassant at an impres–
sionable age, she felt an immediate kinship with a writer who offered
"life, not fiction, " because he was "a man who had escaped from
tradition and authority." It would be years, however, before she had
the time and confidence to think of herself as a writer.
