1899

 

The U.S. must now try to govern the Philippine Islands.

Jill Lepore writes,

 

For a while, starting in the eighteen-nineties, the bicycle seemed likely to finally beat out the horse. Aside from not needing to be fed and not dying, bicycles are also quieter and cleaner than horses, something I thought a lot about as a kid, because I had a job mucking out stables. But then along came the automobile. “There are some who claim the automobile will replace the bicycle, but this is rank nonsense,” a Maine magazine reported in 1899. “Those who have become attached to their bicycles—there are several millions of bicycle riders—will not easily give up the pleasure of skimming along the country like a bird . . . for the more doubtful delight of riding in the cumbersome, ill-smelling automobile.”

 

In 1899, 1.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States. Henry Ford’s Model T made its début in 1908. The next year, only a hundred and sixty thousand bicycles were sold in the U.S.

*

____________________ 

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.” 

Kate Chopin

____________________

 

In an essay by Claire Vaye Watkins, she offers up an assessment of Kate Chopin, and her novel, The Awakening. According to Watkins, it may be one of the first feminist stories. Her review begins with an incident where Edna, the protagonist, and her husband Léonce Pontellier have argued. 

It’s the middle of the night and Edna goes out on the balcony and weeps. “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness,” Chopin writes of Edna, “filled her whole being with a vague anguish.” 

Watkins compares Chopin’s tale to the “Woke” movement today. 

“#StayWoke,” the millennial iteration of an adage that has bolstered the black community’s freedom fight since the black labor movement of the 1940s, as Kashana Cauley explored in The Believer. Historically, the phrase stay woke, Cauley wrote, “acknowledged that being black meant navigating the gaps between the accepted narrative of normality in America and our own lives.”

 

She mentions a poem by Juliana Gray, which even takes off from Chopin’s writing, “The Awokening.” 

Watkins explains: 

In June 1899, a review of The Awakening in The Morning Times of Washington, D.C., concluded that “the agency of the ‘awakening’ is a man, Robert Le Brun.” In fact, as generations of readers have observed, the agent of Edna’s awakening is Edna herself: her body, her friends, her art, her time in nature. Edna’s awakening begins outdoors, an escape from the structures of patriarchy into the unbuilt landscapes of the sensual, sublime and the supernatural. Edna swims in the gulf, languishes in a hammock, escapes to the balcony, where “there was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea.”

 

The heroine “finds her own voice” among female friends, Watkins explains. At one point, sitting with a friend, Edna admits something which might have shocked Victorian women. She does not find motherhood entirely fulfilling. “She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way,” she admits. “She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she would sometimes forget them.” Edna knows, in other words, that “she is ‘not a mother-woman’ like her radiant and ever-pregnant friend, not ‘some sensuous Madonna.’” Soon after, Edna begins “a breathless flirtation with Robert.” 

One day, during a trip to the shore, 

Edna “walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence” into the gulf, where swimming alone is “as if some power of significant import had been given to control the working of her body and soul.” Solitude is essential to Edna’s realization that she has never truly had control of her body and soul. (The novel’s original title was “A Solitary Soul.”) Among Edna’s more defiant moments is when she refuses to budge from her hammock, despite paternalistic reprimand from both Robert and Léonce, who each insist on chaperoning, as if in shifts. Edna’s will blazes up even in this tiny, hanging room of her own, as Virginia Woolf would famously phrase it nearly 30 years later. 

 

Edna and her husband return to New Orleans, but she exchanges the normal rounds, what Watkins says is 

…expected of upper-crust Victorian white women—receiving callers and returning their calls—for painting, walking, gambling, dinner parties, brandy, anger, aloneness and sex. She shucks off tradition and patriarchal expectations in favor of art, music, nature and her bosom friends. These open her up, invite her to consider her self, her desires. One friend offers the tattoo-worthy wisdom that “the bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.” 

 

Chopin also shocked in her day because she refuses to condemn her heroine. 

Many readers were scandalized in 1899. Edna refuses to live with children as the center of her world. Edna knows, and Watkins agrees, a woman must find “free space” in her own mind, space, like the heroine does, “for yourself, for painting, stories, ideas or orgasm. To forget your children and remember yourself was a revolutionary act and still is.” 

“Edna Pontellier does what she wants with her body –she has good sex at least three times in the book,” Watkins adds.  

Like Edna, Kate Chopin did what she wanted with her mind, whatever the cost, and it cost her almost everything. In 1899 “The Awakening” earned her a piddling $102 in royalties, about $3,000 in today’s money. Shortly after its publication the now unequivocally classic novel fell out of print. Chopin’s next book contract was canceled. Chopin died at age 54 from a brain hemorrhage after a long, hot day spent at the St. Louis World’s Fair with her son. Her publishing career lasted about 14 years. 

 

What was a woman's proper place?