In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin
  • Donna Decker
The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Edited by Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii + 184 pp. $29.99.

Kate Chopin aficionados will find this volume refreshing in its breadth. While The Awakening is given due treatment, Chopin's novel At Fault and many of her lesser-known short stories are given primacy. "Athenaise," for example, is discussed in more than half of the essays. Readers who are drawn to Chopin through her undermining of the conventional in The Awakening and in her oft-anthologized stories will relish this probing excavation of her rich remaining oeuvre in the dozen essays collected here. Noteworthy in Janet Beer's introduction is her discussion of Chopin's Santien brothers, men of ill repute who serve as "agents of change in women's lives" across several of the fictions (3). Male characters, as Beer points out, are seldom the objects of critical analysis in Chopin studies; thus, the editor throws down the gauntlet, provoking readers to consider new and important scholarship in the field.

Among the most useful essays in advancing Chopin scholarship with new research and formidable argumentation are those by Avril Horner, Ann Heil-mann, Emily Toth, and Bernard Koloski. Horner combines astute observation with nuanced analysis. If Chopin's narratives are often "intellectually inconclusive," Horner argues, it is because Chopin "foregrounds an ethics of choice," offering characters competing narratives between which they must choose (143, 134). In doing so, Chopin urges readers to "think beyond the ending" when [End Page 223] the modernist centre cannot hold (142). Heilmann positions Chopin among New Woman writers who questioned the ethics of compulsory marriage and motherhood and underscores Chopin's "implicit warning" to male readers to awaken to an understanding of their wives' sexual needs (91). Diverging from Chopin biographers who focus on the men in the author's life, Toth argues that Chopin's intellectual mentors were, in fact, female relatives and friends and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. In turn, she asserts, Chopin's allegiances were with her fictional women, particularly women without men. Required reading for every newcomer or seasoned visitor to Chopin is Koloski's essay rendering a century-long snapshot of the criticism and highlighting the contributions of a trinity of scholars: Daniel Rankin, biographer and Roman Catholic priest; Per Seyersted, who resurrected Chopin for the canon of women's literature; and Toth, the "most influential Chopin scholar active today" (168). Koloski extracts the pith and proffers the expanse of Chopin's literary journey.

Three of the essays interrogate race and ethnicity. Donna Campbell discusses At Fault as a social problem novel that raises central questions about black loyalty to white masters and the submerged violence born of systemic racism. Undergraduates new to the concept that race is a social construct rather than a fixed classification will find Susan Castillo's essay a pragmatic landscaping of real-time conditions of existence in Chopin's multicultural Louisiana and a thorough reckoning of Chopin's complication of racial categories. Helen Taylor examines Louisiana as the "American Paris," challenging easy assumptions "about a hierarchy of Louisiana character types" and local-color parochialism (148, 150). In one of several genre studies, Elizabeth Nolan maintains Chopin borrowed and revised Maupassant, co-opting both realism and naturalism to her own "woman-centered" ends. Katherine Joslin considers dress as an expression of literary naturalism. Pamela Knights is most compelling in her discussion of The Awakening as carefully tracking "Raoul and Etienne's passage into white masculine dominance" (51).

If there is a weakness in the collection, it is in Michael Worton's "Reading Kate Chopin through Contemporary French Feminist Theory." The author argues that "'relationality' is even more important than the independence, sexuality or even authenticity of women"; that Simone de Beauvoir is "blinkered" when she argues that domestic work is a form of exploitation and oppression; and that home is "a real and symbolic place of safety"—Chopin's host of unsafe fictional homes to the contrary (106, 107). The essay deems questing after female community a "fantasy of sorority" that "is essentially one of regression to childhood" (109). At odds with...

pdf

Share