Introduction: Gulf Souths, Gulf Streams, and their Dispersions

Alma de Veracruzalma de criolloque cantas con la música del marque bailas con el ritmo de las olas

Soul of Veracruz Creole soul you sing with the music of the sea you dance with the rhythm of the waves

—Toña la Negra singing Agustín Lara’s “Alma de Veracruz”

In a novel that offers perhaps the most memorable literary depiction of the Gulf of Mexico to North American readers, Kentucky born-and-raised Edna Pontellier faces the Gulf from Grand Isle and New Orleans, drawn to it by a jealousy coupled with attraction for what lies on the other side —across the expanse of waters. From the novel’s opening, readers are told that Robert Lebrun, the Creole spark (along with the Gulf itself) of Edna’s erotic awakening from her marriage and domestic scripting, “was always intending to go to Mexico” (4); and he eventually makes the Gulf crossing, returning home with a tobacco pouch embroidered by a “very generous” “Vera Cruz girl” (101). Soon enough, we realize that Kate Chopin’s The Awakening bears witness to an intimately foreign, integral Mexican presence in Creole Louisiana with its tamale-vendors and chocolate servers. Both the novel and Edna are obsessed with Creole Veracruz, and haunted (or called) by “a transcendently seductive vision of a Mexican girl” (103). While on a daytrip to one of Louisiana’s Gulf islands, Edna and Robert find themselves in the same boat as “a young barefooted Spanish girl,” Mariequita, described as “sly, piquant,” and “saucy” (33). Edna perceives Mariequita’s body as a site of fascination; she looks at Mariequita’s feet and notices “sand and slime between her brown toes,” and notes, too, the “shrimps in her bamboo basket . . . covered with Spanish moss” (33–34). Mariequita, Mexico, and Creole quadroons mark an undercurrent of the text filled with the goods of the Gulf ’s southern shores: coffee, chocolate, vanilla, liqueurs, cigars —an economy buttressed by the pervasive “help” of black women, “darkies,” quadroons, griffes, mulattos in a linguistic space where Spanish, French, English, and “patois” intermix.

Drawn to and into this “Gulf spirit” (35) or genius (génie, genio, djinn), Edna becomes consumed by a quest for “misty spirit forms” (39), consummated desire, and new combinations of consciousness. From Edna’s first dip in the Gulf waters with her Creole companions who take to it like a “native element,” she starts to move as if some previously lacking “power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul” (27). She awakens to this native element absent from her Presbyterian Kentucky upbringing, and “[a]s she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (28). It is easy enough —and necessary —to critique the final suicide scene and the entire novel as a whole (for its bourgeois protofeminist narcissism, its immersion in a scaffolding of white supremacist privilege, and more), but the novel’s final scene ultimately moves beyond realism in its engulfment of a sublime awakening. Something about the Gulf can be mapped, defined by certain limits and boundaries —even as something else tugs and pulls one under into a buzzing vortex, or a lacuna —a misty and mysteriously decaying space where there is nevertheless a fossil energy source to be tapped.

Edna’s position as she faces the Gulf offers only one of many sites where we might begin to peer into its literary waters. As the essays gathered in this special issue of The Southern Literary Journal show, Gulf space —extending from its bays and basin to its deep belly and horizons —occupies at once a very specific geography and an extensive imaginative sweep. We began many drafts of this Introduction by trying to choose a place to position ourselves in thinking about the Gulf of Mexico —a place, like Grand Isle or Veracruz, where we might start to ponder the many geographies of the Gulf as they extend into its myriad waterways, sculpted bays, its great river mouths and historic ports...