246
PARTISAN REVIEW
women , but by rejecting the human burden of obligation. Kate
Chopin sympathized with Edna Pontillier's craving for indepen–
dence , but she also perceived its irresponsibility. She did not
subscribe to the moral fallacy of the disconnected life.
In 1899, however, her readers missed the point of her cau–
tionary wisdom, and took
The Awakening
to· be a shocking defense of
adultery . One reviewer blustered that the novel was "too strong
drink for moral babes, and should be labelled 'poison.'" Another in–
toned that "it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement
and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction ," a genre
that existed only in his overheated fantasies, and the
Atlantic,
which
had published her stories, took no notice of the novel at all. The St.
Louis libraries quickly acted on the scandal by banning the book
from circulation . Mrs . Chopin was ostracized by polite St. Louis
society , and blackballed for membership in the Fine Arts Club. She
was deeply wounded by the general verdict throughout the country
that
The Awakening
was morbid and disgusting, though it does seem
odd, given what she knew about the Pecksniffian atmosphere of the
time, that she was surprised by the hostile response . Her only con–
solation came in a letter from an English doctor, who applauded her
courage in depicting the facts of life, and deplored the "accursed
stupidity of men ," which persuades young women that sexual pas–
sion is unvirtuous.
This was not much help to Kate Chopin on her home ground.
When her publisher turned down a new collection of stories without
explanation, she felt totally despised and rejected, and in the five
years before her death , at the age of fifty-three , she wrote very little.
In the new century her name was forgotten, and it was many years
before she was newly discovered, by Edmund Wilson, who devoted
some appreciative pages to her in
Patriotic Gore
(1962), his study of
the literature of the Civil War and its aftermath. Academic hunters
of lost writers had picked up the scent earlier, but it was Wilson's
recognition that mattered.
But Kate Chopin came fully into her own when feminist critics,
eager to redress the neglect of a pioneer, began reading
The Awaken–
ing
in the 1970s . It has by now been widely reprinted and has be–
come a sacred text. Yet, like many novels that acquire an ideological
halo,
The Awakening,
as a work of literary art, is often read too un–
critically today. At times Mrs. Chopin relied lazily on heavy-handed
abstractions that tell rather than show what she wants to say, such as
the flaccid apostrophe about Mrs. Pontillier's "position in the
