Abstract
In Elizabeth Stoddard’s odd novel The Morgesons (1862), the sea stirs young Cassandra Morgeson, pulling to the surface a dormant sexuality, “murmuring softly, creeping along the shore, licking the rocks and sand as if recognizing a master. And I saw and felt its steady, resistless heaving, insidious and terrible” (63). Another, more famous, fin de siècle novel echoes this inner disturbance within its heroine in much the same terms, engaging the sea as a powerful symbol for sexuality and freedom. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Edna Pontellier’s love affair with the ocean is similarly characterized by an unleashing, first felt as a calm drifting and later as a violent storm. Edna is a boat unmoored, “borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening—had snapped the night before” (81). The sea, however, is only one representative element of the two closely related novels. While there is no evidence that Chopin read Stoddard’s work, the two novels are thematic sisters, employing identical symbols, like those of water, food, music, and sleeping/waking, to probe common feminist themes. As patchwork of nineteenth-century fictional styles, and as early iteration of regional, realistic, and even naturalistic writing, The Morgesons stands firmly as a precursor to The Awakening. This chapter reads Stoddard and Chopin in tandem in order to model an enriching pedagogical approach to Chopin’s canonical novel.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
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
Avallone, Charlene. “What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse.” PMLA 112.5 (Oct. 1997): 1102–20. Print.
Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction. 2nd ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. Print.
Boyd, Anne E. Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2004. Print.
Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print.
Buell, Lawrence, and Sandra A. Zagarell. “Introduction to The Morgesons.” The Morgesons, Ed. Elizabeth Stoddard. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. ix–xxi. Print.
Campbell, Donna M. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915. Athens: Ohio UP, 1997. Print.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Print.
Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo American World. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. Print.
Harris, Jennifer. “A Renaissance for Elizabeth Stoddard.” Canadian Review of American Studies. 37.2 (2007): 283–92. Print.
Harris, Susan K. “Anomalies and Anxieties: The Story of Avis, A Country Doctor, The Awakening, and O Pioneers!” Nineteenth Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretative Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 199–210. Print.
——. “Projecting the ‘I’/conoclast: First-person narration in The Morgesons.” Nineteenth Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretative Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 152–70. Print.
Lathrop, George Parsons. “Audacity in Women Novelists.” The North American Review 150.402 (May 1890): 609–17. Print.
Leder, Priscilla. “Land’s End: The Awakening and Nineteenth Century Literary Tradition.” Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. 237–50. Print.
Mahoney, Lynn. “Near the Edge: Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Victorian Culture.” Diss. Rutgers University, 1999.
Matlack, James H. “Hawthorne and Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard.” New England Quarterly 50.2 (June 1977): 278–302. Print.
Opfermann, Susanne, and Yvonne Roth, ed. “Introduction to Stories: Elizabeth Stoddard.” Stories: Elizabeth Stoddard. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2003. ix–xxxi. Print.
Petry, Alice Hall, ed. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. Print.
Putzi, Jennifer. “‘Tattooed Still’: The Inscription of Female Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons.” Legacy 17.2 (2000): 165–73. Print.
Radinovsky, Lisa M. “Gender Norms and Genre Forms: Elizabeth Stoddard’s Challenges to Convention.” Diss. Duke University, 1999.
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1988. Print.
Ryan, Susanna. “‘Perversions ofVolition’: Self-Starvation and Self-Possession in Dickinson and Stoddard.” American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Ed. Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2003. 128–48. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Print.
Stange, Margit. Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. 22–36. Print.
Stoddard, Elizabeth. The Morgesons. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Print.
Stern, Julia. “‘I Am Cruel Hungry’: Dramas of Twisted Appetite and Rejected Identification in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons.” American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Ed. Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2003. 107–27. Print.
Weir, Sybil. “A Neglected Feminist Bildungsroman.” The New England Quarterly 49.3 (Sep. 1976): 427–39. Print.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Heather Ostman and Kate O’Donoghue
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Epelbaum, D. (2015). Pioneering Kate Chopin’s Feminism: Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons as Patchwork Precursor to The Awakening. 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_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543967_9
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)