Abstract
In December 1868, the 18-year-old Kate O’Flaherty attended a concert given by the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull in Saint Louis. The young artist wrote in her journal about the mesmerizing effects of his performance:
To describe the effect his music had upon me would be impossible. It seemed the very perfection of the art, and while listening to him, I for the first time longed to be blind, that I might drink it all in undisturbed and undistracted by surrounding objects. (Toth et al. 63–64)
She did not sing as we did—
It was a different tune—
Herself to her a music
As Bumble bee of June.
Emily Dickinson, 14
“One Sister have I in our house” (1858)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Beckson, Karl. London in the 1890s. A Cultural History. New York: London, 1992. Print.
Black, Martha Fodaski. “The Quintessence of Chopinism.” Kate Chopin Reconsidered. Beyond the Bayou. Eds. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 95–113. Print.
Boren, Lynda S. “Taming the Sirens: Self-Possession and the Strategies of Art in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” Kate Chopin Reconsidered. Beyond the Bayou. Eds. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UR 1999. 180–96. Print.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1985. Print.
——. “Wiser than a God.” Kate Chopin. Complete Novels and Stories. New York: The Library of America, 2002. Print.
Cytowic, Rchard E., and David Engleman. Wednesday is Indigo Blue. Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Print.
Cytowic, Richard. E. The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Print.
——. Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Print.
Davis, Doris. “The Enigma at the Keyboard: Chopin’s Mademoiselle Reisz.” The Mississippi Quarterly 58: 1–2 (Winter 2004–2005): 89–104. Print.
Dickinson, Emily. Poems by Emily Dickinson. Eds. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890. Print
Dyer, Joyce. “Symbolism in the Awakening.” Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s The Awakening. Ed. Bernard Koloski. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1988. 126–31. Print.
Ellis, Nancy S. “Insistent Refrains and Self-Discovery: Accompanied Awakenings in Three Stories by Kate Chopin.” Kate Chopin Reconsidered. Beyond the Bayou. Eds. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 216–29. Print.
Harrison, John E. Synaesthesia. The Strangest Thing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.
Harrison, John E., and Simon Baron-Cohen, eds. Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997. Print.
Helmholtz, Hermann. On the Sensations of Tone. New York: Dover Publications, 1954. Print.
Piñero Gil, Eulalia. “Introducción.” Kate Chopin. El despertar. Madrid: Cátedra, 2013. 9–12. Print.
Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. “Literature of Deliverance: Images of Nature in The Awakening.” Southern Studies 1.2 (1990): 127–47. Print.
Sagiv, Noam, R. T. Dean, and F. Bailes. “Algorithmic Synaesthesia.” The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music. Ed. R. T. Dean. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 294–311. Print.
Seaberg, Maureen. Tasting the Universe: People Who See Colors in Words and Rainbows in Symphonies. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books, 2011. Print.
Shaw, George Bernard. The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Ring of the Niblungs. London: Grant Rchards, 1898. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. “The Awakening: Tradition and the American Female Talent.” Sister’s Choice. Tradition and the Change in American Women’s Writings. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. 65–84. Print.
Thrailkill, Jane F. Affecting Fictions. Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.
——. “Chopin’s Lyrical Anodyne for the Modern Soul.” Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Approaches. Ed. Heather Ostman. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 33–52. Print.
Toth, Emily. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1999. Print.
Toth, Emily, Per Seyersted, and Cheyenne Bonnell, eds. Kate Chopin’s Private Papers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Print.
Wierzynski, Kazimierz. The Life and Death of Chopin. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949. Print.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Heather Ostman and Kate O’Donoghue
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gil, E.P. (2015). The Pleasures of Music: Kate Chopin’s Artistic and Sensorial Synesthesia. In: Ostman, H., O’Donoghue, K. (eds) Kate Chopin in Context. American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543967_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543967_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56456-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54396-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)