Kate Chopin's Private Papers (review)

Kate Chopin's Private Papers. Edited by Emily Toth and Per Seyersted; Associate Editor, Cheyenne Bonnell. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. xxiii + 333 pp. $49.95.

Anyone familiar with Kate Chopin studies will recognize immediately the names of Emily Toth and Per Seyersted, who as biographers and critics have done the most to make twentieth-century readers aware of Chopin. Who better, then, than they to serve as the editors of Kate Chopin's Private Papers? It is an unusual resource, which transcribes everything from the ten-year-old Kate's "Leaves of Affection" notebook, to the adult Chopin's "Manuscript Account Books," to the sheet music for her "Lilia" polka, to fragments of short stories rescued from a warehouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. In other words, this book is something of a crazy quilt; but Toth and Seyersted have done their best to impose order upon the disparate pieces, usually with good results.

One source of order is organization. The editors have divided Chopin's life into three sections: 1850-70, 1871-84, and 1885-1904. The earliest section, "Kate O'Flaherty," covers the time period from her childhood up through her honeymoon in 1870. It consists of two items, the "Leaves of Affection" diary and her "Commonplace Book." The third section, "Kate Chopin," offers materials dating from her widowhood to her own death in 1904. It is comprised of the written record of her professional career and later personal life, including her account books, newspaper pieces, translations, poems, letters, and even her "Last Will and Testament." Some of these documents probably have little scholarly value, such as her translation of a newspaper feature on paper dolls ("How to Make Manikins: Ingenious Ways to Cut Amusing Figures Out of Paper"). Other documents seem tailor-made for academic papers, such as her response to a February 1898 editorial in the Post Dispatch regarding a recent flurry of suicides of wealthy women in St. Louis. "Has High Society Struck the Pace that Kills?" Not really, opines Chopin: "Business men commit suicide every day, yet we do not say that suicide is epidemic in the business world. Why should we say the feeling is rife among society women, because half a dozen unfortunates, widely separated, take their own lives?" (222). One can well imagine a generation of Chopin scholars mining the third section of Private Papers, which positively twinkles with bits of ideas and images that seem to echo her stories and novels.

One cannot say the same about the second section, which covers the period 1871-84. The tablet, alas, is blank: "[N]one of the private writings from [Chopin's] fourteen years in New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish survive" (127). That period of time--which features her post-honeymoon years with Oscar Chopin, the births of their many children, their lives of genteel poverty while keeping shop in rural Louisiana, Oscar's unexpected illness and death, and the widowed Kate's being comforted by a dashing neighbor, Albert Sampite--could conceivably be the most interesting. No doubt she was quite busy--too busy to keep a diary of her private thoughts. But perhaps she was Victorian enough--or smart enough--not to entrust her deepest feelings to paper. Late in her "Commonplace Book" (in the first section of Private Papers), Kate Chopin mentions her engagement, but it comes as something of a surprise, since up to that point she has had so little to say about Oscar. Her bewildered excitement over her wedding day seems to reflect far more her regret over leaving her all-female family and the novelty of her new social status as a wife than her passion for her new husband. The entries in her "Commonplace Book" that date from her three-month honeymoon in Europe depict Oscar Chopin as a man who takes an occasional long walk, but mostly naps. Evidently he really was nothing to write home about.

Since there are no private writings from the...