Kate Chopin's Scribbling Women and the American Literary Marketplace
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Notes
1. For Chopin's May 4, 1894, diary entry and her June 7, 1899, letter to Herbert S. Stone, see Per Seyersted, ed., A Kate Chopin Miscellany (Natchitoches: Northwestern State Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 89 and 137. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CM. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the American Literature II Section, "Doing a 'Man's' Job: Women and the Professions in American Realism" at the MMLA conference, November 1991; my thanks to Tom Quirk for suggestions for revision.
2. Hawthorne's complete remark was "America is now wholly given over to a d___d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed." For his January 19, 1855, letter from Liverpool to William Ticknor, see The Letters, 1853-1856, ed. Thomas Woodson, James A. Rubino, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. 17 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1987), p. 304.
3. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 189.
4. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 198.
5. Of the two short stories, only "Miss Witherwell's Mistake" appeared during Chopin's lifetime; it was not included in either of her story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) or A Night in Acadie (1897). For the bulk of Chopin's fiction, essays, and poetry, see The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984), hereafter cited parenthetically as CW.
6. Barbara Ewell, Kate Chopin (New York: Ungar, 1986), p. 47.
7. Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 4-5. See also Dieter Schulz, "Notes Toward a fin-de-siècle Reading of Kate Chopin's The Awakening," ALR, 25 (Spring 1993), 69-76.
8. Bernice Slote, ed., The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 409.
9. Signed "Sibert" [Cather], "Books and Magazines," Pittsburgh Leader, July 8, 1899, p. 6; reprinted in Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 153.
10. According to Chopin's records, the story was rejected by five other publishers before its appearance in Fashion and Fancy; hence Chopin might have revised the story along the way. Her two log books (1888-1902), which date her literary compositions, submissions, rejections, acceptances, and earnings, are at the Missouri Historical Society Archives in St. Louis.
11. Kelley, p. 190.
12. Reprinted in Ann Douglas Wood, "The 'Scribbling Women' and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote," Hidden Hands: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1790-1870, ed. Lucy M. Freibert and Barbara A. White, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988), p. 363.
13. Anonymous, "To Mrs. - - - - - -, of St. Louis," St. Louis Life, 2 (November 22, 1890), 9.
14. Of the six translations recorded in Chopin's log books, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed "The Shape of the Head," January 25, 1891; "Revival of Wrestling," March 8, 1891, signed "C"; and "How to Make Manikins" ("Cut-Papier Figures"), April 5, 1891. If the other three were published, they have not been located. See CM, p. 204.
15. Elaine Showalter, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 68.
16. Barbara Solomon, "Characters as Foils to Edna," in Approaches to Teaching Chopin's The Awakening, ed. Bernard Koloski (New York: Modern Language Association, 1988), pp. 114-19.
17. Chopin had published two stories herself under the pseudonym "La Tour": "Miss McEnders," completed March 7, 1892, and published March 6, 1897, in the St. Louis Criterion (CW, p. 1011) and "Fedora," completed November 19, 1895, and published February 20, 1897, also in the Criterion (CW, p. 1026...
