“Discovery of a Treasury”: Orrick Johns and the Influence of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening on Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds

During the recovery process for The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s critics frequently expressed their disappointment that this novel, which had been mischaracterized as trivial and/or obscene by many reviewers, ostensibly did not command much attention in naturalist or modernist literary circles in 1899 and after the turn of the twentieth century, and thus it did not immediately become an important literary milestone to novelists then coming of age. For instance, Elaine Showalter laments that The Awakening not only failed to garner the attention it deserved, it also “dropped out of sight and remained unsung by literary historians and unread by several generations of American writers” in the wake of censuring reviews (65). She asserts that its disappearance constituted “a very severe setback” for the development of sexually complex depictions of female protagonists in naturalist and modernist fiction by women writers (83). Among the writers in the next generation, only the young Willa Cather, who reviewed The Awakening for the Pittsburgh Leader, is today definitively cited by Chopin scholars as a writer who had been possibly influenced by Chopin. Cather claimed in her review, however, that she was (oddly indeed it seems to Chopin’s devotees today) rather unimpressed with The Awakening.¹ This allegedly wholesale contemporaneous neglect made the recovery and reassessment of the novel that began in the late 1960s particularly triumphant for those Chopin scholars who led an unusually successful effort in claiming a place for it in both the canon of American fiction and, more specifically, the canon of feminist naturalist fiction.²

Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate, the actual pathway of The Awakening’s direct literary influence on the next generation of American women novelists was not as dead-ended in the early decades of the twentieth century as it has been considered in Chopin studies and in American naturalism studies. A small path was opened by which her influence traveled, for Cather was not the only prominent writer of the next generation to weigh in on the merits of The Awakening and to take a position on its potential significance to the history of American fiction, especially fiction written by women. Orrick Johns (1887–1946), an influential modernist poet and progressive journalist originally from St. Louis and who was a popular figure in New York City’s Greenwich Village literary circles during the 1910s (and later during the 1920s in U.S. expatriate literary circles in France and Italy), also published a response to The Awakening and Chopin’s other writings in which he expressed a more accurate appraisal of this masterpiece and Chopin’s literary artistry. As I will show, credible evidence exists that Johns shared his positive views of Chopin with his modernist literary peers, a tight-knit group that included feminist writers Susan Glaspell and Edith Summers Kelley, among others.

Johns was not just an admirer of Chopin’s fiction but also knew her personally as a family friend. His father, George Johns, the long-serving editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (known today as one of Joseph Pulitzer’s “fighting editors”), was a member of Chopin’s social circle during the 1890s when Orrick was a school-aged child living with his parents in St. Louis. As Emily Toth details in her definitive biography of Chopin, the elder Johns was a frequent guest at Chopin’s “Thursdays” literary salon (261–63), and he apparently encouraged his newspaper’s book reviewer, C. L. Deyo, to step forward to defend The Awakening when it was condemned by other reviewers in the St. Louis press in the weeks following its publication.

As Orrick Johns documents in his 1937 autobiography, Time of Our Lives, he was influenced by the discerning literary appreciation for Chopin within his father’s intellectual circle and was generally drawn to feminist and other progressive political thought. Recognizing the radical feminist significance of Chopin’s depictions of women characters and female sexuality, he thereby became a voice promoting Chopin’s work to his peers, and I contend that he opened the pathway...