[In the following essay, Thomas examines works in which Chopin satirized the life and career of the typical nineteenth-century American woman fiction writer.]

“I want the book to succeed,” Kate Chopin wrote in an 1894 diary entry about her short story collection, Bayou Folk. Five years later—despite disappointing reviews of her novel, The Awakening—she nonetheless queried her publisher, Herbert Stone, “What are the prospects for the book?”¹ Chopin's private and public writings confirm that she considered herself a professional writer. But her sense of herself as a woman writer, her comprehension of women's literary tradition, and her relationship with her literary foremothers—that “d_____d mob of scribbling women” Hawthorne lamented in the 1850s—are other, perhaps more interesting, questions.²

In Private Woman Public Stage, Mary Kelley documents the publishing travails of mid-nineteenth-century scribbling women, the “literary domestics” whose professional identities were upstaged by “their primary self-identification as private domestic women.”³ And in Doing Literary Business, Susan Coultrap-McQuin finds that Chopin's literary foremothers, despite formidable success and devout career commitment, “still had to contend with limiting stereotypes of women.”⁴ Thus it seems surprising that Chopin, who inherited these stereotypes when she began writing in the 1890s, would also propagate them. In three career-spanning works—“Miss Witherwell's Mistake,” The Awakening, and “Elizabeth Stock's One Story”—Chopin satirizes women writers in ways that strongly imply she wished to dissociate herself from the traditional female litterateur.”⁵ These caricatures provide insight not only into Chopin's own career but also into the status of the female professional writer in late nineteenth-century America.

Chopin specifically ridiculed women writers in only three works, but as Barbara Ewell notes, even her first novel At Fault (1890) managed to “manipulate effectively the techniques of romance [read women's popular fiction] to mock its conventions.”⁶ Elizabeth Ammons has proposed that Chopin belonged to a group of writers in the 1890s who desired to be “artists” as well as professionals. Breaking with the past, these women assailed “the territory of high art traditionally posted in Western culture as the exclusive property of privileged white men.”⁷

In light of this premise, Chopin seems less atypical in her censure of scribbling women. Willa Cather, for example, claimed she expected little of women writers until they could produce “a stout sea tale, a manly battle yam, anything without wine, women and love.”⁸ Ironically, Cather treated The Awakening to a similarly uncharitable review. Objecting to its “trite” retelling of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Cather (in a revealing trope) compares Chopin's narrative decisions to a man acquiring a mate: “An author's choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write.”⁹

Cather's criticism, however, might be considered poetic justice, since Chopin had herself dunned her sister scribblers. Her first parody of the literary woman, “Miss Witherwell's Mistake,” was completed in November 1889 at the beginning of her literary apprenticeship. Chopin's third published story, it appeared in February 1891 in the St. Louis magazine Fashion and Fancy.¹⁰ Echoing the spirit of Hawthorne's oftquoted remark, “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” derides scribbling women's “trash” and mocks their female readers. The story recounts the career of Miss Frances Witherwell, an unmarried journalist of a seasoned age who contributes fiction and women's articles to a small-town newspaper, the “Boredomville Battery.” Notwithstanding Chopin's gesture in christening her character “Wither-well,” she also derides the female journalist's hackneyed production: flagrantly Southern “tale[s] of passion” and self-important essays like “The Wintering of Canaries,” “Security Against the Moth” (The Complete Works of Kate Chopin [hereafter abbreviated as CW], p. 59), and “The Use and Abuse of the Corset,” the last title mockingly described as “an unusually strong thing … handled in that free, fearless, almost heroic style, permitted to so well established a veteran in journalism as Miss Witherwell” (CW, p. 63). The story also critiques Boredomville's matrons for their unconditional fidelity to the Woman's Page. These gullible readers are sheep naively “beholden to the spinster, Miss Witherwell” for her essay “A Word to Mothers” (CW, p. 59).

The story's plot revolves around Witherwell's wealthy niece, whose outraged father has forbidden her to marry the man she loves. Seeking her aunt's advice in her love affair, the niece pretends she requires a story resolution. Exceedingly dense about real lovers (the “mistake” of the title), Witherwell is nonetheless delighted to suggest a fictional solution. Chopin provides a deft satire of nineteenth-century critical schools with Witherwell's recommendation that in problems of the heart the hero must “perform some act to ingratiate himself with the obdurate parent.” When the niece appropriately rejects her advice, Witherwell retorts: The poison of the realistic school has certainly tainted and withered your fancy in the bud. … Marry them, most certainly, or let them die” (CW, p. 65). Needless to say, the niece marries, but the story's conclusion authentically addresses the dilemma faced by women working in traditionally male fields. In a few years the new husband rises to editor-in-chief of the newspaper, although Witherwell herself held “a moneyed interest” (CW, p. 59). Witherwell's joy in her niece's happiness and her work on the paper seem sufficient reward. Flourishing her blue pencil and churning out her “brilliant articles for the Battery,” she grows “older in years, but not in reality” (CW, p. 66). Presumably she still keeps a spotless house.

The tale's disparagement of women writers and their readers anticipates statements Chopin made nearly a decade later about her own, by then, relatively successful literary career. In an autobiographical essay appearing November 26, 1899, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (six months after the publication of The Awakening), Chopin describes her writing as an occupation she pursues only when not inclined “to struggle with the intricacies of a pattern” or “if the temptation to try a new furniture polish on an old table leg is not too powerful to be denied” (CW, pp. 721-22). Chopin clearly satirizes the notion that a woman writer's scrupulous housekeeping enhances her literary credentials. The early story “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” likewise substantiates Mary Kelley's position that in mid-century the “‘female writer’ was considered a contradiction in terms, that such a being was seen as unnatural, such a woman as unfeminine.”¹¹ The proper sphere for a woman was the house. But since Boredomville can observe Miss Witherwell's “neat and pretty home,” her domesticity apparently tenders proof that she holds “nothing in common with that oft-cited Mrs. Jelleby [sic], who has served not a little to bring the female litterateur into disrepute” (CW, p. 59).

Miss Witherwell, in fact, adores tidying up, professing that her “most pungent conceptions” were conceived

whilst engaged in some such domestic occupation as sprinkling camphor in the folds of the winter curtains, or lining trunks with tarpaper, to prevent moths. And she herself tells of that poetic, enigmatic inspiration “Trust Not!” having flashed upon her, whilst she stood at the pantry-shelf washing with her own safe hands, her cut-glass goblets in warm soap-suds.

(CW, p. 59)

Chopin's lampoon of the Muse of Housekeeping parodies comparable representations in nineteenth-century women's fiction. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's novel The Other Girls (1873), for instance, describes a young servant girl who becomes a successful poet. Despite her new prosperity, the girl continues her employment because, as she informs her mistress, “The best and brightest things I've ever thought have come into my head over the ironing-board or the bread-making.”¹² As a widow attempting to write in a household of six children, Chopin had surely encountered this archetypal female conflict between a woman's work and her workmanship. An anonymous poem that appeared in St. Louis Life a few months before the publication of “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” probably more accurately depicts Chopin's boisterous household and composition habits. Since the magazine's editor Sue V. Moore, Chopin's close friend and another scribbling woman, probably wrote the poem, the professional ironies are manifest:

MRS. _____, OF ST. LOUIS.
The novelist sat at her desk at work,
Surrounded by scattered scraps of paper,
And her little son tossed them all about,
With merry skip and caper.
Now struck by a thought he stops his play,
“Mama,” he cries, and his bright eyes glitter,
“Do they call you literary because
You work in such a litter?”(13)

Interestingly, the story's mockery of Miss Witherwell's literary product—those heady Southern romances and essays on corsets and canaries—might display Chopin's self-consciousness over her own recent endeavors. Her meticulous log-book records confirm that she too exploited Southern settings in her early fiction but, more significantly, that she earned nothing from her writings in 1890, the same year she published At Fault at her own expense (a route Hawthorne also pursued with Fanshawe). By the time “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” appeared in February 1891, from January through April that year Chopin had been translating essays from the French to sell to local newspapers—pieces whose irrelevant titles resemble Miss Witherwell's but delineate a more masculine turf: “The Shape of the Head”; “A Trip to Portuguese Guinea”; “A Visit to the Planet Mars”; “A Transfusion of Goatsblood”; “Revival of Wrestling”; and “Cut-Papier Figures.”¹⁴ Reconsidered in light of Chopin's artistic quandary in the initial years of her literary apprenticeship, “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” documents Chopin's quarrel with her readers and her exasperation with her stymied career. It also proclaims her distaste for the constrictive range of subjects and genres—domestic fictions, housekeeping essays, children's literature—allotted to literary women. Chopin along with other “New Woman writers of the 1890s,” in Elaine Showalter's assessment, “had an ambivalent or even hostile relationship to women's culture, which they often saw as boring and restrictive.”¹⁵ If Chopin's early experience with editorial rejection taught her what kind of women's writings sold, this story appears to dramatize her doubts that she wanted success at any price.

Chopin's next female journalist, Miss Mayblunt, appears nearly a decade later in The Awakening. Even less than a ficelle, Mayblunt does not figure in Barbara Solomon's extensive compilation of the novel's major and minor “foils” to Edna Pontellier.¹⁶ In fact, Mayblunt's function in the narrative has remained something of a puzzle. The journalist's ironic characterization, however, suggests that Chopin might have intended Mayblunt as another avatar of The Awakening's effaced narrator, the novelist herself If so, Mayblunt might personify Chopin's decade-long experience as the token “literary woman” at Louisiana and St. Louis soirees. Chopin's writings yield interesting precedents for this interpretation. Her review of the writer Ruth McEnery Stuart in the February 27, 1897, St. Louis Criterion is undoubtedly modeled after Chopin's own reception on her return visits to provincial Natchitoches parish, Louisiana. Chopin sarcastically quips that Stuart's literary genius has been “recognized throughout the length and breadth of these United States—everywhere, except in one small parish in Louisiana” (CW, p. 712). Chopin's 1899 autobiographical essay for the Post-Dispatch also expressed her exasperation with being treated as a dilettante: “How hard it is for one's acquaintances and friends to realize that one's books are to be taken seriously, and that they are subject to the same laws which govern the existence of others' books!” (CW, p. 722).

If the germ for Miss Mayblunt's characterization was Chopin's experience as St. Louis's or Natchitoches' token woman writer, then the mean-spirited passage introducing the journalist, a guest at Edna's bacchanalian banquet, becomes doubly ironic: Mayblunt is a woman “no longer in her teens, who looked at the world through lorgnettes and with the keenest interest. It was thought and said that she was intellectual; it was suspected of her that she wrote under a nom de gueree” (CW, p. 970).¹⁷ Monsieur Gouvernail, a journalist “connected with one of the daily papers” (CW, p. 970), escorts Mayblunt to Edna's dinner; his accompaniment might even authenticate his female colleague's credentials.¹⁸ At least when the banquet commences, the guests concede Mayblunt a modicum of expertise. Edna asks Mayblunt directly if the term “composed” might be used to describe a garnet-hued drink that her father concocted (CW, p. 971). Although asked a usage question, however, Mayblunt is not allowed to respond. Edna's lover Alcee Arobin interrupts, insisting that since Edna's father composed the cocktail, it should be drunk in honor of “the daughter whom he invented” (CW, p. 971). During the ensuing hilarity, Mayblunt fails to taste her drink, begging instead to contemplate its exquisite color. But Chopin makes the point in the exchange that it matters little whether Mayblunt was embarrassed by Arobin's earthy quip about Edna's conception, irritated by his implication that men “invented” women, or merely posturing as an artiste; a female journalist's opinions are superfluous. While Mrs. Merriman is “talking ‘books’ with Mr. Gouvernail and trying to draw from him his opinion upon current literary topics” (CW, p. 972), no one solicits Mayblunt's judgments. Universally ignored, she pretends to enjoy Mr. Merriman's boring business stories, so “lame and lacking point” (CW, pp. 971-72) that even his wife rarely allows their conclusion.

Like Miss Witherwell, Miss Mayblunt never rises above stereotype; even her name, “May-blunt,” appears designedly allegorical, connoting subservience and tactlessness. Chopin further parodies the female journalist's insecurity when the guests, in a rare instance, include her in the conversation, and she obsequiously panders to her hostess. Celebrating Edna's amateur artistic talent over her own rhetorical skills, she gushes: “Oh! to be able to paint in color rather than in words!” (CW, p. 973).

Deborah E. Barker interprets Mayblunt as Chopin's version of the woman writer whose fiction “lacks color” or who fears “to enter fully the public sphere and use her own name for her writing.”¹⁹ But Mayblunt's demeanor remarkably resembles Chopin's in her 1899 autobiographical essay, in which she initially dismisses her writing as an ancillary whim but later asks to be taken seriously. If the successful Chopin hesitated to expose the scope of her ambitions to her St. Louis readers, Mayblunt's characterization suggests that Chopin acknowledged her own reticence and was able good-naturedly to mock her literary self as public persona. In fact, her private writings manifest a tenuous relationship with the public throughout her professional life. In a May 4, 1894, diary entry, for example, she deplores missing her weekly euchre club to promote her new collection Bayou Folk:

I fear it was the commercial instinct which decided me. I want the book to succeed. But how immensely uninteresting some “society” people are! That class which we know as Philistines. Their refined voices, and refined speech which says nothing—or worse, says something which offends me.

(CM [A Kate Chopin Miscellany], p. 89)

Despite Chopin's discomfort, her commercial instinct apparently drove her to give countless readings at local guilds, clubs, and private soirees. Five years after this diary entry, an 1899 Atlantic essay, “In the Confidence of a Story-Writer,” reiterates her uneasiness among the Philistines: “And very much out of place did I feel in these intellectual gatherings. I escaped by some pretext, and regained my corner, where no ‘questions’ and no fine language can reach me” (CW, p. 704).²⁰ Like Edna Pontellier, Mademoiselle Reisz, and Miss Mayblunt—The Awakening's three alienated female artist-figures-chopin obviously knew the loneliness of the outsider.

Chopin's third woman writer appears in “Elizabeth Stock's One Story,” completed in March 1898, a few months after the publisher Way & Williams had accepted The Awakening.²¹ The sketch's anonymous narrator, a summer sojourner in the Missouri village of Stonelift, sifts through the papers of the lately deceased Elizabeth Stock. Formerly the village postmistress, Stock also enjoyed a local reputation as one “much given over to scribbling” (CW, p. 586). When the visitor—perhaps herself a successful literary woman in the manner of Jewett's narrator in The Country of the Pointed Firs—scrutinizes Stock's writings, she encounters only “scraps and bits of writing in bad prose and impossible verse” (CW, p. 586).” The single autobiographical manuscript she judges “a connected or consecutive narration” (CW, p. 586) discloses the creative confinement, paltry self-esteem, and general indigence of would-be scribbling women.

Stock's manuscript confesses that her lifelong dream is “to write stories.” But when she asks her uncle (a man for whom she otherwise holds scant respect) to read her account of a local villager, he retorts, “I reckon you better stick to your dress making: this here ain't no story; everybody knows about old Si' Shepard” (CW, p. 586). Taking her uncle's criticism to heart, Stock fails to enter a short story contest because she fears that “the story had to be original, entertaining, full of action and Goodness knows what all. It was no use. I gave it up” (CW, p. 587). The one story she feels competent to relate is the angst-ridden story of her fall: “I feel as I'd like to tell how I lost my position [as postmistress], mostly through my own negligence, I'll admit that” (CW, p. 587). Stock's self-disparaging tale reveals her fierce dedication to her work, despite her dream of a literary life. But in an ironic twist of fate, she undermines her health after reading a postcard's urgent message and delivering it during an ice storm, and she loses her employment after resulting accusations that she reads people's mail. With this final calamity, she relinquishes all hopes of a writing career. Realizing that “the truth is, I got no more money, or so little it don't count” (CW, p. 591), she can no longer afford to dream²².

According to Elizabeth Ammons, turn-of-the-century American women writers exposed in their fiction the link between institutional and sexual exploitation of women and “female muteness.”²³ Chopin's story records Stock's analogous powerlessness and muteness when she loses her government position to the son of a wealthy St. Louisian. The resulting loss of income—far greater than that enjoyed by Freeman's starving New Englanders—signifies the literal end of Stock's independence. Chopin herself experienced financial instability both during her marriage to Oscar Chopin, a struggling Louisiana cotton factor, and afterward as a widow with six children. But Stock's unemployment silences her authorial voice.

Barbara Ewell finds that Stock represents “one of Chopin's strongest, most self-possessed females,”²⁴ but the story delivers a dismaying portrait of the rural woman with literary aspirations. Perhaps Chopin used the surname “Stock” to evoke the countless anonymous women who hoped their writing might pay the bills—isolated women awaiting acceptance from distant editors and eminent Eastern publishers.²⁵ The story attempts a rustic Missouri vernacular and includes a comic segment on Stock's difficulties with plot-making, but it is not a funny sketch.²⁶ Its initial paragraph divulges the protagonist's fate and voices, in the manner of a Greek chorus, her final tragic silencing:

Elizabeth Stock, an unmarried woman of thirty-eight, died of consumption during the past winter. … The physicians say she showed hope of rallying till placed in the incurable ward, when all courage seemed to leave her, and she relapsed into a silence that remained unbroken till the end.

(CW, p. 586)

Chopin's prologue echoes a newspaper obituary's stoicism but also marks, in a metafictional sense, the suppression of a culturally defeated female writer, one of the “Judith Shakespeares” later memorialized by Virginia Woolf. Despite the narrator's cynicism about Stock's literary potential, as an example of the scores of scribbling women who failed to reach an audience, this portrait stands as Chopin's most realistic and consequently compassionate depiction of the would-be female litterateur. Ten years earlier, Chopin had portrayed Miss Witherwell as a hopeless romantic but as an editor/writer fortunate enough to publish. By contrast, Stock's later and more darkly ironic characterization delineates an impoverished and lonely woman who fails as a writer because she is such a good reader”²⁷.

Chopin's three scribblers contribute meaningfully to our sense of her artistic development within her brief career. Miss Witherwell, Chopin's first female journalist, produces romantic fiction and didactic housekeeping articles devoured by loyal female fans. If Witherwell's characterization never rises above stereotype, it does record Chopin's aversion to the traditionally sentimental “schools” as well as to the genres commonly open to, even reserved for, scribbling women. Chopin also burlesques the female reader's interest in and expectations for the woman writer's private domestic life and exhibits a narrative confidence that an ideal reader would decipher her irony and share her disdain. In mocking Witherwell, Chopin manifests what she, as female “artist,” is not. At the same time, her censure of scribbling women distances her from the previous mainstream of women professionals (in Nina Baym's characterization of that wave) and confirms she sought to identify with the realists whose membership, except for Easterners like Wharton, Jewett, or Freeman, was typically male.²⁸

Created a decade after Witherwell, the fawning Miss Mayblunt serves as comic relief at Edna's banquet. An obsequious, nearly invisible literary woman, she is universally ignored by the other guests and never mentioned again after the gala. If she serves no obvious narrative function, perhaps she registers Chopin's own social experience as a public persona, perhaps a mocking admission (like Flaubert's): “Miss Mayblunt, c'est moi!” The novelist reinscribes her own name in the novel in selecting Frederic Chopin's music for Mademoiselle Reisz, the only artist who “dares and defies.” A wry wink at the public's perception of female writers would be characteristic of Chopin's self-reflexive irony.

Chopin completed her third portrait, Elizabeth Stock, while awaiting publication of The Awakening. She undoubtedly suspected that the novel might become her magnum opus, capable of confirming or destroying her literary standing. “The Haunted Chamber,” a poem composed in February 1899 while awaiting or reading proofs of the novel, strongly suggests she anticipated mixed reviews:

Of course t'was an excellent story to tell
Of a fair, frail, passionate woman who fell.
So now I must listen the whole night through
To the torment with which I had nothing to do—

Whatever her suspicions about the novel, Chopin's confidence in its artistry tempered with the knowledge that its themes would outrage some reviewers might have furnished the germ for “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” and elicited its strong statement about female silence and professional disappointment.

“Kate Chopin's literary evolution,” Showalter observes, “took her progressively through the three phases of nineteenth-century American women's culture and women's writing”; Chopin's career hinged on “the legacy of domestic fiction to work against, and the models of the local colorists and New Women writers with which to experiment.”²⁹ In this light, Stock personifies Chopin's departure from the earlier literary domestics' sentimentalized depictions of rural life and female avocation. In their hands, Stock would have married the new postmaster or her longtime suitor, Vance Wallace, and sold stories to augment their livelihood. Her portrait also moves Chopin beyond the archetypal local colorist who would have returned Stock to her dressmaking and vegetable garden. Stock rejects marriage to Wallace (calling him “a fool”), accepts the new postmaster, and welcomes death: “I'd like to sit right on here,” she concludes, “and forget every thing and go to sleep and never wake up” (CW, p. 591). Of Chopin's three scribbling women, only Stock's characterization anticipates modernist angst.

By contrast to Chopin's fictional portraits, her other writings accord her female colleagues more respect. She praised the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, Octave Thanet (Alice French), and Ruth McEnery Stuart, and considered Mary E. Wilkins Freeman “a genius.”³⁰ Like other professional writers of her era, she also mentored would-be literary women, among them a neighbor, Mrs. Hull, who asked her advice about some manuscript stories. Unfortunately, Chopin found Hull's stories in “the conventional groove” (CM, p. 90), and she valued originality even more than she derided sentimentalism, perhaps an over-reaction since she also wrote romantic fiction herself.³¹

Chopin assiduously promoted her own literary career and could be tough on the competition. More fortunate in her career than Elizabeth Stock, Chopin nonetheless battled hard to win readers and establish her reputation as a woman of letters. Her professional ambitions were early and constant. She sent a copy of her first novel, At Fault, to William Dean Howells, gave numerous readings at clubs and guilds, and at her own expense travelled to New York, Boston, and Chicago in search of publishers.³² Considering Chopin's own sacrifices, it is curious that she was so hard on female writers in her fiction. We might predict some sororal charity from the creator of the passionate Calixta in “The Storm,” the mysterious Mrs. Baroda in “A Respectable Woman,” and the joyously if only briefly emancipated Mrs. Mallard in “The Story of an Hour.” In Reinventing Womanhood, however, Carolyn Heilbrun argues that some women who have successfully challenged male bastions act like “honorary males.”³³ Once admitted to traditionally masculine spheres, they defend their territory from others of their sex, particularly from those they consider dilettantes. Chopin's desire to distance herself from traditional women's writing—conceivably her impulse in creating these three disparaging portraits—appears to link her to the ranks of these “honorary males.” But whatever her design, her career-long practice suggests an ambivalence about her ambitions to be a serious writer. If Chopin's sense of the women's literary marketplace was bleak, she must have occasionally questioned the quality of her work when it sold. Recollecting Hawthorne's response to the triumph of women's “trash,” her three characterizations also imply that she might have been uneasy when she did succeed. “Polly,” Chopin's last published story before her untimely death in 1904, returns the female protagonist (who initially worked in a real estate office) to the kitchen, a more appropriate sphere for the literary domestics, and concludes with the nursery-rhyme cliche, “Polly, put the kettle on!” (CW, p. 684). Chopin no doubt tailored the story for the audience of The Youth's Companion, which had proved a reliable outlet for her local color and didactic fiction since the early 1890s.³⁴ But Miss Witherwell could have written “Polly” for the Battery.³⁵

Viewed together within Chopin's extensive corpus, her three scribbling women chart the development of her literary life. Miss Witherwell represents a genre that Chopin obviously abhorred but still produced throughout the decade, either out of financial need or in order to keep her career alive; Miss Mayblunt symbolizes the writer as public personality, the commercial aspect of the marketplace that the serious artist instinctively resents; finally, Elizabeth Stock's portrayal immortalizes the failed literary woman who questions her talent, loses her reputation and health, and dies alone in “unbroken silence.” Serving as negative foils for Chopin, these caricatures imply she experienced a distinctive and prolonged ambivalence about her career. They also suggest that other nineteenth-century literary women harbored significant doubts about their profession, which undoubtedly contributed to their competition within the marketplace.

In that sense, our reconsideration of Chopin's fiction is more meaningful than any final certitude vis-a-vis the impetus for these three portraits. In our rush to (re)judgment of nineteenth-century women writers, we must address their inadequacies along with their strengths. Chopin's fiction commonly effaces women of color. Her marked aversion to the women responsible for the enormous body of sentimental/popular literature functions as a comparable literary silencing. Chopin craved her own moment on the public stage, but cast as “artist” rather than as female scribbler. In her 1894 diary, with her career on the rise, she confessed her amusement when she met a woman who “hasnt the slightest idea that I write. Its delicious” (CM, p. 94).³⁶ But in “A Reflection,” composed six months after the publication of The Awakening, Chopin laments “being left by the wayside; left with the grass and the clouds and a few dumb animals” (CW, p. 622). “The Artist” in her clearly expects some recognition in the aftermath of her literary rebellion; for whatever reason, she never wrote as daringly again. If she resented being left behind, seemingly forgotten by the literary world, she might have pondered the scribbling women her own fiction endeavored to suppress. For these women's staunch conventionalism not only elicited her break with the past but also, as these three portraits imply, shaped her aesthetic future.

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-siecle 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” [Catherl, “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).

18. Gouvernail, to whom Chopin gives the famous Swinburne lines at Edna's banquet, also appears in “A Respectable Woman” and “Athenaise.”

19. Deborah E. Barker, “The Awakening of Female Artistry,” in Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, ed. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1992), p. 70.

20. Since Chopin revised this essay several times between 1896 and the version published in the January 1899 Atlantic, presumably her dislike of society functions remained acute.

21. The story was not published during Chopin's lifetime, but her log book indicates it was to be included in a proposed collection, “A Vocation and a Voice,” which likewise never found a publisher. In November 1898, The Awakening was transferred to Herbert S. Stone & Company, Chicago and New York, and published by them on April 22, 1899.

22. I read the narrator as female, although Chopin's description is ambivalent. By contrast, Elaine Showalter sees a “male editor, who may be either her nephew or her longtime suitor,” Sister's Choice, p. 158.

23. Ammons, p. 5.

24. Ewell, p. 167.

25. For a superb treatment of the economic distress of nineteenth-century American women writers, see Virginia L. Blum, “Mary Wilkins Freeman and the Taste of Necessity,” AL, 65 (1993), 69-94.

26. See Ewell, P. 166, who notes that Chopin shared Stock's problems with plot. For Chopin's literary impediments, see her October 1896 essay (published 1899), “In the Confidence of a Story-Writer”, (CW, p. 704), and her November 26, 1899, essay, “On Certain Brisk, Bright Days” CW, p. 722).

27. I am indebted to an anonymous source for suggesting this nuance in Chopin's story.

28. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), on women's didacticism and sentimental fiction; see also Kelley and Coultrap-McQuin.

29. Showalter, pp. 69, 67.

30. In a May 12, 1894, diary entry, Chopin mentions both Jewett and Freeman: “I know of no one better than Miss Jewett to study for technique and nicety of construction. I don't mention Mary E. Wilkins for she is a great genius and genius is not to be studied. We are unfortunately being afflicted with imitations of Miss Wilkins ad nauseum” (CM, p. 90). Chopin also admired Ruth McEnery Stuart's stories, which sound a “wholesome, human note,” and especially her humor because it has “nothing finical or feminine about it” (CW, p. 711). Chopin credited Mary Halleck Foote with “excellent work” of a “fine literary quality, damaged somewhat by a too conventional romanticism,” but a writer who, nonetheless, “knows her territory.” Chopin also acknowledged the talents of Octave Thanet (Alice French), whose “heart is essentially with the plain, everyday people.” For Chopin's remarks on Foote and Thanet, see Heather Kirk Thomas, “‘Development of the Literary West’: An Undiscovered Kate Chopin Essay,” ALR, 22 (Winter 1990), 71-72.

31. Some examples of Chopin's more romantic fiction are the stories “Love on the Bon-Dieu” and “A Sentimental Soul”; the one-act play, “An Embarrassing Position”; and her first novel, At Fault. Most critics find her poetry, in general, egregiously sentimental.

32. For Chopin's trips to New York and Boston in May 1893, see CM, pp. 107-08. For a March 1898 trip to Chicago, see Per Seyersted, “Kate Chopin's Wound: Two New Letters,” ALR, 20 (Fall 1987), 72, and Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 305-06. In addition, a clipping from an unidentified newspaper of December 25, 1898 (describing Chopin's recent visit to Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana) claims she planned to spend “the rest of the winter [or the early months of 1899] in New York.” For unknown reasons, Chopin never made this New York excursion. Clipping is in Melrose Scrapbook No. 69, Louisiana Room Archives, Eugene Watson Library, Northwestern Louisiana State University, Natchitoches.

33. Carolyn Hedbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 43.

34. Completed in January 1902, “Polly” appeared on July 3, 1902, in The Youth's Companion (CW, p. 1029). Chopin's first sale to this magazine was “For Marse Chouchoute,” published on August 20, 1891; she sold at least eleven stories in total (see CW, pp. 1004-29).

35. Citing the commonly-held belief that “Chopin did not write much after The Awakening because the hostile reviews of the novel devastated her,” Elizabeth Ammons concludes that she is “sure that is true” (p. 75). I argue elsewhere, however, that illness, rather than authorial depression after mixed reviews of her novel, caused Chopin to alter her impressionistic style and thematic focus in the declining years of her life. See Heather Kirk Thomas, “‘What Are the Prospects for the Book?’: Rewriting a Woman's Life,” in Beyond the Bayou, pp. 36-57.

36. Reproduced from Chopin's May 28, 1894, diary entry, including punctuation errors.