PEARL K. BELL
243
easygoing and cosmopolitan society of New Orleans than in St.
Louis. Yet she did not choose to be an outsider in her hometown,
where she was the hostess of a famous salon, and belonged to the
same literary club as T. S. Eliot's mother . At the same time, she did
not hesitate to say exactly what she thought about the suffocating
narrowness that dominated the American literary scene. In 1894,
after yawning through a conference of the Western Association of
Writers (its star was the folksy Hoosier poet James Whitcomb
Riley), she denounced the moribund songbirds:
The cry of the dying century has not reached this body of
workers , or else it has not been comprehended. There is no
doubt in their souls, no unrest .... Among these people are to
be found . .. a clinging to past and conventional standards . ..
and a singular ignorance of, or disregard for , the value of the
highest art forms . There is a very , very big world lying not
wholly in northern Indiana .. . . It is human existence in its
subtle , complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which
ethical and conventional standards have draped it.
In her view, that veil had been rolled into a noose, strangling
the sexual and intellectual independence of American women who
foolishly submitted to their husbands' notions. As Mrs. Chopin put
it in "The Gentleman from New Orleans," the ideal wife showed "a
certain lack of self-assertion which her husband regarded as the
perfection of womanliness." In story after story she deplored the
passive timidity of women - "self-assertion" was one of her favorite
terms-and she delighted in the plucky heroine of "Athemiise," who
runs away from her husband because "It's jus' being married that I
detes' and despise . . . . " As the author wryly commented on the
young bride's dilemma, "The day had not yet come when a young
woman might ask the court's permission to return to her mama on
the sweeping ground of a constitutional disinclination for marriage."
After her second collection of stories came out in 1897, Kate
Chopin realized that she needed a larger and more sustaining form
than the short story to dramatize her vision of female self-fulfillment,
and she spent the next year writing her prophetic novel,
The Awaken–
ing,
which was published in 1899.
There is no question that she had
Madame Bovary
in mind as she
began writing the book: both heroines resent their husbands, neglect
their children , take an adulterous lover, and commit suicide. But
