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184 12 Feeling the Countercurrent bernard koloski The undertow in Kate Chopin’s fiction has absorbed me for thirty years. Chopin’s best-known stories speak of women’s struggles for better lives—for independence, fulfillment, integrity, intimacy, joy. But deep in some of those works and in much of her other fiction runs a countercurrent telling of other things—of economic, social, racial, and religious forces,of tension between freedom and security,of a deep-seated optimism about life, and of roots in the language and culture of France. The Awakening and stories like “Désirée’s Baby,”“The Story of an Hour,” or“A Pair of Silk Stockings”end in death, despair, or poverty. But At Fault and stories like “A No-Account Creole,”“Athénaïse,”or “The Storm”point toward growth, fulfillment, or happiness. In the 1970s I wrote not about feminist themes but about how Chopin’s characters—her men and her children as well as her women—search for freedom from a community as well as freedom within a community. I probed the place of the Swinburne passage in The Awakening and outlined the structure of At Fault. In the 1980s I sought to make the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s “The Awakening” all inclusive, inviting essays from experienced and beginning scholars on the full range of ideas they proposed, many of them feminist, many of them not. Later I wrote about Chopin’s short stories and edited paperback editions of Bayou Folk, A Night in Acadie, and At Fault. Over the years I’ve come to understand Chopin’s work in the context of the bilingualism and biculturalism that make her what she is: that rare nineteenth-century writer in the United States who sees beyond American values, who is post-Christian, at ease with true diversity of thought and ac- 185 Feeling the Countercurrent tion, comfortable with her sexuality, and shaped as much by European as by American influences—in the final analysis, not so much an American writer as a French-American writer. I certainly didn’t grasp all this when I first came across Kate Chopin in August 1970 as I was seeking a subject for a PhD dissertation. Per Seyersted ’s Complete Works and Critical Biography had just appeared on the shelves of the library where I spent my days, and I had been overwhelmed by the power of The Awakening and fascinated by some of Chopin’s short stories. I could not have articulated just what I was responding to, but no other American author spoke to me as Kate Chopin did. My adviser had not read Chopin and was not pleased with my proposing to write about her. “You’re making a bad choice,” he said. “If this woman isn’t known, it’s because she’s not very good, and you’ll be hurting your career working on her. You won’t find anyone to publish what you write.”We went back and forth on the subject for weeks—me insisting that I could do something with Kate Chopin, him countering that I should work on F. Scott Fitzgerald. In desperation, I approached him on a Friday afternoon and handed him George Arms’s little orange edition of The Awakening. “Look,” I pleaded,“would you please take this novel home with you over the weekend and read it? If you tell me on Monday morning that Chopin is not worth writing about, I’ll begin on Fitzgerald in the afternoon.” That Monday will stick in my mind forever. I found my adviser sitting in his chair behind a walnut desk that had only that orange paperback on its glossy surface. He looked up at me and held my gaze for what felt like minutes,as if he were struggling with his emotions—then leaned forward, slid the paperback across the table toward me, and said,“Do it.” “It’s a beautiful book,”he added.“I can’t understand how we missed it. It deserves to be known. You’re right. So get to work.” It was the ending of The Awakening that had caught my attention when I first read Kate Chopin, but it was the beginning of Chopin’s career that I focused on in the fall of 1970, and that focus established the direction I would follow for the decades afterward. It’s not easy today to read Kate Chopin as you could forty years ago. In twenty-first...

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