Chopin, Kate - Elaine Showalter (essay date 1988)

Elaine Showalter (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book.” In New Essays on The Awakening, edited by Wendy Martin, pp. 33-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Showalter examines the ways in which Chopin defied the female literary tradition with The Awakening.]

“Whatever we may do or attempt, despite the embrace and transports of love, the hunger of the lips, we are always alone. I have dragged you out into the night in the vain hope of a moment's escape from the horrible solitude which overpowers me. But what is the use! I speak and you answer me, and still each of us is alone; side by side but alone.”1 In 1895, these words, from a story by Guy de Maupassant called “Solitude,” which she had translated for a St. Louis magazine, expressed an urbane and melancholy wisdom that Kate Chopin found...

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