Tentative Transgressions: Kate Chopin's Fiction as a Mode of Symbolic Action
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Winfried Fluck is an Assistant Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin. After a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard and Yale, he is now finishing a book that investigates the Gilded Age as a form of symbolic action.
Notes
1. Anne Firor Scott, "The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-1872," History of Education Quarterly, 19 (1979), 4.
2. Scott, p. 4.
3. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd. ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1973), p. 1. For a shorter version of Burke's argument see also his essay "Literature as Equipment for Living" in the same volume. Some possible misunderstandings about the terminology used in this essay ought to be clarified in advance. To conceive of literature as a mode of symbolic action is to draw attention to the part human communication plays in acting on, and in, the world. Making sense of the world is an act with serious consequences and literature (with its own specific possibilities) is one of the forms available for such sense-making processes. To act "symbolically," then, is not a second-hand, substitute action; rather the whole point of the concept is to assign literature the status of a different and independent, though not autonomous, mode of action. To call this act "tentative," consequently, is not to imply that the writer is timidly resorting to a kind of Ersatz-action. The term is used here not in the sense of a hesitant commitment to "real" action but in the sense of an experimental mode of action. It is not that the writer does not dare to act, but that he is not yet quite sure how. In drawing on the resources of fiction, the writer tries to come to terms with a situation the nature of which is still uncertain, a situation which therefore has to be clarified and "tested" in the process of articulating it and investing it with meaning. As fiction, however, the text presents just an experimental commitment to this meaning; it is tentative in the sense of an as if statement. This is also the reason, to address a last possible misunderstanding, why the following discussion should not be misread as psychological speculation about Chopin. The essay wants to draw attention to a recurrent theme or fantasy in Chopin's writing, not to use it for psychological inference. (The term "fantasy," therefore, does not denote a mere day-dream but the freedom fiction provides in constructing one's own world.) Undoubtedly, all of Chopin's fiction (as any other writer's) must be related, in complex ways, to aspects of herself. Yet the literary text does not simply reflect these aspects, it uses fiction's freedom to tentatively extend emotions and impulses in certain directions so that an altogether new dimension can be created in writing. It is this addition to and extension of reality by means of fiction which suggests and justifies the term symbolic action.
4. See Joseph N. Riddel on Foucault in "Re-Doubling the Commentary," ConL, 20 (1979), 240.
5. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 2 Vols., ed. Per Seyerstedt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969), II, 893. All further references to Kate Chopin's fiction, both in the text and in the footnotes, will be to this edition.
6. To be sure, the subversion of the Victorian cult of true womanhood is not entirely confined to these aspects of individual self-assertion in her work. One of her stories, for example, "Miss McEnders," is a brief scenario about social reasons why this role does not seem tenable any longer and points to the economic underside that underlies the theory of female moral guardianship. In a concise way, it catches central paradoxes of the age: It is only because her father and fiancee have acquired their wealth without moral scruples that Miss McEnders' existence as a symbol of moral perfection becomes possible, even necessary.
7. Per Seyerstedt, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton...
