Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

11. Chopin's Twenty-Ninth Bather

II · Chopin's Twenty-Ninth Bather t almost goes without saying that Henry James could never have written The Awakening (1899). The nearest he probably came to creating a character as corporeal as Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier is Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove (1902), and this sexy lady (an oxymoron in nineteenth-century America, ifnot at the turn of the century) is motivated as much by money as by sex or infatuation. His women, if not relatively docile, are more or less sexless, some almost helpless as in the case of the other jeunefille in that novel, Milly Theale. Isabel Archer of The Portrait ofa Lady, James's predecessor in the working out of his fanciful dreams about his lost cousin Minnie Temple, is powerfully beautiful but also passionately intellectual and-if her nervous reactions to Caspar Goodwood are any indicationdownright fearful of sex. This lack of a body in James's women may stem from his personal reluctance about matters of sex.1 Yet the question has to be asked as to whether any American male writer could have created the character of Edna. Even a casual survey of Chopin 's short fiction and work previous to The Awakening shows that (1) her main idea comes out of the sentimental plots ofthe 1850S that Hawthorne complained about, and (2) her central theme is the romantic and often thwarted quest for love. Of Chopin's male precursors in the depiction of such a questing female (or male, for that matter), Whitman was' the most success- [ 1 7 7 ] Chopin's Twenty-Ninth Bather ful, not James. In section 11 of "Song of Myself," he identifies and empathizes with a sexually frustrated "lady": Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.2 In this rare departure from the "I" in "Song of Myself," Whitman identifies with the American woman in hiding as a "lady"-he empathizes with her as an actively sexual (and thus frustrated) human being. Yet Whitman, as I have argued in chapter 7, was otherwise as fantastic in his depiction of women as his "twenty-ninth bather" is vicarious in her participation in group sex. The woman "aft the blinds" never literally takes the plunge but stays "stock still" in her room. She nevertheless entertains the possibility of expressing her sexual feelings and thus advances the cause of woman's emancipation beyond James's''portrait" of Isabel.3 Indeed, Isabel is portrayed by her author instead of being "photographed" the way Whitman's lady is-that is, caught in action or on its threshold. In a word, Whitman's lady thinks to act (however vicariously), whereas James's lady in The Portrait, being much more Emersonian and hence scholarly, mainly reflects (however fitfully). Though constrained from overt action, the "twenty-ninth bather" thinks about what could happen-not (like Isabel ) about what has happened and its devastating significance. Because she is a transcendentalist, or one for whom action is subservient to thought, Isabel must remain a lady. Whitman's "lady," on the other hand, is less ladylike-at least in her daydreams. Edna differs from both because she wakes up neither to the "slumbering [ 1 78] Chopin's Twenty-Ninth Bather giant" of Transcendentalism nor from the slumber of a sexual fantasy exactly, but to the problem of not being able to either accept or transcend the social constraints of her gender. Chopin's generic theme of an awakening was established in her earliest recorded fiction, "Emancipation: A Life Fable" (1869-70). It tells the story of a caged animal: "Awaking one day from his slothful rest."4 Like Whitman's animals who "do not sweat and whine about their condition," 5 Chopin 's caged beast rushes into the "Unknown." The fable sets the pattern...