48
English Language Notes
simplicity. His choice of genres such as songs and ballads has been
interpreted as his intention of establishing standards of simplicity
(Jung, Poetic Form 203-10)^. Dealing with Flattery, he contextualizes his poetics as in contrast with the polish of French artificiality. Both manuscript poems, therefore (and the long poem on
Flattery in particular), are significant additions to the poetical
canon of Shenstone and help the scholar dealing with mid-century poetry to understand the diverse trends in poetics that are
only now receiving increasing scholarly attention.
Sandrojung
University of Wales, Lampeter
NOTES
ijung, Sandro. "William Shenstone and James Thomson: A New Poem."
Notes and Queries, 48:4 (2001): 411-13.
2
. "Some Additions to the Shenstone Canon." ANQ 28:1 (2003): 22-27.
NED (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901), IV.
3 The shelfmark is William Shenstone Papers, OSB MSS 62. Permission to
quote from the unpublished manuscript has heen granted by the Beinecke
Manuscripts and Rare Books Collections at Yale University.
•* The manuscript poem, with the shelfmark MS 25427, is reproduced with
kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
5 Burns, Francis. William Shenslone: A Critical Biography and an Edition of His
Poetical Works (University of Sheffield Doctoral Dissertation, 1970).
6 Shenstone, William. "Flattery." Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts
Collections, Yale University Library, OSB MSS 62.
^ Grant, Douglas. James Thomson: Poet of 'The Seasons' (London: The Cresset
Press, 1951).
sjung, Sandro. Poetic Meaning in the Eighteenth-Century Poems of Mark Akenside
and William Shenstone (London: Mellen, 2002).
THE AUTONOMOUS FEMALE SELF AND THE
DEATH OF LOUISE MALLARD IN KATE CHOPIN'S
STORY OF AN HOUR"
It is a critical commonplace that Louise Mallard's death at the
end of Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour" results from Louise's
shock at seeing her husband Brently, reported dead in a train
wreck, walk in the front door of the Mallard house. For instance,
Madonne M. Miner states that "Upon seeing her husband, Louise
suffers a heart attack and dies."i Barbara C. Ewell claims that
September 2004
49
when Louise's husband "suddenly reappears, the report of his
death a mistake, she drops dead at the sight of him."2 Even if critics do not explicitly claim that the sight of Brendy causes Louise's
death, they usually assume it. In her recent biography of Chopin,
Emily Toth writes that Brently "walks in, having been nowhere
near the crash. The wife's weak heart fails."^ Yet Chopin's wording
in the passage concerning Louise's death leaves it open to question whether Louise actually sees Brently's return. I believe that
Louise does not see him, and that the cause of her death lies elsewhere: in the joy, which turns out to be more "monstrous" than
Louise seems initially to think possible, and the resulting emotional strain brought about by her new understanding of her marriage and her supposed sudden freedom from that marriage.*
Such a view alters the current reading of the story. Specifically, it
makes the irony of the doctors' statement that Louise dies of "joy
that kills" resound in ways that are more complex than the common understanding of it grants (354). A fresh understanding of
just how ironic that statement is — and of how that irony applies
to Louise as well as to the other characters it is usually limited to
— shows that Chopin's story is much more radical than is usually
claimed. "The Story of an Hour" emerges not just as another story
building and experimenting with themes that reach their fullest
statement in The Awakening. Rather, the story portrays the position
of women in late nineteenth-century American society as so bleak
that the attempt to break from the life-denying limitations of
patriarchal society is itself self-destructive.5 It is Chopin's sharpest
criticism of American society, one that in her other fiction she
found no way to ameliorate.
The passage concerning Louise's death is brief. Coaxed from
her room by her sister, Louise and Josephine descend the steps.
Brently enters and
stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen
him from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease — of
joy that kills. (354)
Nowhere in the passage does Chopin state that Louise sees
Brently enter. Indeed, while Chopin describes the actions of
Josephine, Richards, and Brently, the reader learns only in the last
50
English Language Notes
sentence, after the events are over, that Louise has died. This is in
keeping with the thematic development of the story. Mary E.
Papke has noted that the reader learns Louise's first name only
after Louise accepts her "new consciousness" of freedom; before
that, Louise is "Mrs. Mallard.''^ One can extend this line of analysis further: as long as Louise is "Mrs. Mallard" or as long as she
remains in her room after hearing of Brently's death, the reader
has access to Louise's thoughts. However, once Louise leaves her
room, once she re-enters society as an independent individual,
her thoughts are her own. Neither the other characters nor the
reader has access to them. As Louise descends the stairs, other
characters and the reader can only surmise what Louise feels by
noting the "feverish triumph in her eyes" and the way she carries
herself "unwittingly like a goddess of Victory" (354). With
Brently's return, with the reconstitution of her marriage and previous social position, Louise once again vanishes among her husband and relatives. She disappears even from the description of
her own death.
The crux of the passage concerning Louise's death is the
ambiguous phrase describing Richards moving in front of Brendy
to "screen him from the view of his wife" (354). As I've shown,
most critics believe this indicates that Richards moves to screen
Louise from seeing Brently's return. The wording also carries the
not-very-hidden undertone that Richards moves to screen Brently
from seeing Louise's collapse.' Yet Chopin does not clarify the
action further. The reader cannot be certain that Louise sees
Brently's return. Any interpretation that puts the disappointment
and shock brought on by his return as the cause of Louise's death
is as much a projection onto the events as the doctors' belief that
the joy and shock caused by Brently's appearance are to blame.
Yet Chopin's tangled wording invites unraveling. Its very awkardness is unusual. The other key ambiguous or ironic statements in
the story — that Louise is "afflicted with a heart trouble" and that
the doctors believe she died "ofjoy that kills" — are far more natural in their phrasing (352, 354). One could argue that the writing's awkwardness embodies the awkwardness of the scene it
describes, but that gtiide does not apply to Chopin's writing as a
whole. The reader doesn't fiounder in weighty prose when Edna
Pontellier drowns herself. Besides, the phrase is not confused —
there is no evidence that Chopin has gotten sloppy and garbled
September 2004
51
what she meant to communicate. Rather, she has used a phrase
that will not settle into a single referent, that refers to both Louise
and Brently at once. Richards is trying to screen each from the
other; he is trying to block recognition. However, in one of the
ironies that the other characters cannot know, Loiuse has already
recognized what her life with Brently was like; there's no blocking
that now.
Chopin leaves many clues as to the probable cause of Louise's
death. The reader learns immediately that Louise is "afflicted with
a heart trouble" (352). Her first response to the news of Brently's
death is to weep with "sudden, wild abandonment" (352). She
then retires to her room, where she feels "pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into
her soul" (352). In her room, Louise senses "something coming
to her," which she awaits "fearfully," struggling to "beat it back
with her will" as her "bosom rose and fell tumultuously" (353).
What comes to her is the realization that she is now "'free, free,
free!'" (353). Her imagination excitedly considers the days ahead
of her, days in which "she would live for herself' with "no powerful will bending hers in that blind powerful persistence with which
men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will
upon a fellow-creature" (353). As she descends the stairs before
her collapse, there is the "feverish triumph" in her eyes as she carries herself "unwittingly like a goddess of Victory" (354). After
that, the reader learns only that Louise cries out and collapses,
apparently at the same time Brently returns.
Chopin pays a great deal of attention to two areas of Louise's
experience: the strain placed upon her physical system by the various shocks — the surprise of her husband's death, the grief that
this news brings, the realization that her life is now utterly
changed, and the understanding that this change is quite possibly
for the better — that sweep over her, and the strain upon her spiritual outlook as she struggles to understand the apparent freedom
opened to her. As Chopin makes clear, both sap Louise's strength
to the limits of what she can bear. And beyond. The evidence of
the story indicates that Louise dies not from grief at Brently's
return, but from the emotional and spiritual strain that the news
of his death occasions. That this happens as Brently enters is interpreted in a melodramatic way both by the story's characters (who
believe she has died from joy at seeing Brently return) and the
52
English Language Notes
story's critics (who believe she dies from shock and disappointment at seeing him return). In each case, the interpretations confirm what that group of witnesses would like to believe happened,
according to their views of patriarchal marriage. However, Chopin
rejects various purely melodramatic moments of death for Louise.
Louise does not collapse immediately upon hearing of Brently's
death, nor immediately upon realizing the freedom open to her.
Louise collapses only after what we could call the adrenaline rush
of her shock has worn off and her already-weak heart can no
longer bear the strain placed on it. That this happens at the very
moment of Brently's return is more ironic than melodramatic.
A more focused understanding of the probable cause of
Louise's death thus alters the reader's understanding of the irony
of the story's close, in which doctors claim that Louise died of'joy
that kills" (354). The tone and quality of this final irony has divided critics. George Arms flady states that it is "too neat if not too
cheap."^ Emily Toth, however, finds the doctors' claim "an occasion for deep irony directed at patriarchal blindness about
women's thoughts.''^ Yet Toth also detects in Louise's death a giving-in to that blindess on Chopin's part. Toth argues that Louise
must die at the end of "The Story of an Hour" because the idea
that she could live on as a widow glad of her husband's death
would have been "much too radical, far too threatening" for editors and readers in the 189Os.io
Perhaps. However, the end of "The Story of an Hour" is more
radical still than Chopin's critics are willing to allow. As Peggy
Skaggs notes, Chopin in her fiction associates three qualities with
the "full life": "love, place, autonomy."! i None of these qualities
provides a very good description of Louise's situation in the
moments before her death. Love? The point is mooted by
Louise's sudden death, but the reader is given no clues to indicate
that Louise has had a lover while married (as had the deceased
wife in "Her Letters" or, probably and however briefly, as has the
living wife in "The Storm"). While Louise may gain some autonomy from Brently's death, that autonomy is so limited as to perhaps
be nothing more than further isolation, for now her position
would be defined as that of a widow, so that any current freedom
is based on her relation to the past (a dead husband) more than
the future. And, in a further irony, the conditions of her future
freedom would have been largerly shaped by her husband's will
September 2004
53
— his vmtten wishes to be carried out after his death. More fundamentally, though, once Louise discovers — or begins to formulate — an autonomous self, once she decides that she will no
longer tolerate her will being bent, that she will control her life
fully, there is no place for her in a patriarchal society. Her
increased autonomy results in a loss of any place for her in maledominated society. Since there is no other society in which she
may find a place, when Louise ceases to exist in relation to the
patriarchal society around her, she ceases to exist at all.
In a more sudden fashion, then, Louise meets the same end
as Edna Pontellier: death. And for the same reason. There is no
way for her to live, no support for her life. (Edna drowns and
Louise dies of heart failure: both deaths involve, literally and
metaphorically, the loss of some foundation necessary to live).
Martha J. Cutter, writing about The Awakening, points out that
Chopin "dramatizes, but finally rejects, the dream of a maternal,
feminine, poetic discourse that is not already inscribed within
hegemonic language."^^ According to Cutter, Edna learns that
"there is no feminine voice 'out there' that can be used to disrupt
the voice of patriarchy."i3 Cutter does note, however, the possibility of Chopin's characters to develop a "covert voice" that forms at
least a partially successful "hollowing out" of patriarchal language
from within — though she points out that such voices are usuEilly
"erased by madness or suicide."i^ Yet even if Louise begins to
develop a covert voice, it leads her to refuse to compromise with
the prevailing social structure. Louise cannot, could not, hollow
out partriarchal language from within, because she refuses to
remain within. Even this speculation takes us too far from the
actual story. For if Louise does gain any autonomy from reports of
her husband's death, she herself dies too soon to act upon it.
Chopin's irony at the end of "The Story of an Hour" is directed, then, at more than men's blindness. It also presents a sharp
portrait of what a woman will find should she make a strong claim
for autonomous selfhood. Should she break free of patriarchal
definitions (wife, widow, lover) in her own mind, she will find no
other social system to accept her: women have been unable to create a system of their own. The female self will have gained autonomy only to find that she has no life to lead.
Mark Cunningham
Independent Scholar
54
English Language Notes
NOTES
' Madonne M. Miner, "Veiled Hints: An Affective Stylist's Reading of Kate
Chopin's'Story of an Hour,'" The Markham Review II (1982) 29.
2 Barbara C. Ewell, Kate Chopin (NewYork: Greenwood, 1988) 89.
3 Emily Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1999) 10.
Other critics who believe that Louise sees Brendy's return include George
Arms, who states that Louise "dies of a heart attack when she finds her husband
is still alive." George Arms, "Kate Chopin's The Awakening in the Perspective of
Her Literary Career," Essays in Honor of Jay B. Hvbbell, ed. Clarence Gohdes
(Durham: Duke UP, 1967) 225. Per Seyested writes that Brently's appearance
"proved fatal" to Louise. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969) 58. Thomas Bonner, Jr., writes that when
Brently arrives home, Louise "sees him and collapses." Thomas Bonner, Jr., The
Kate Chopin Companion (New York: Greenwood, 1988) 144. Angelyn Mitchell
argues that "denied self-assertion causes Mrs. Mallard's demise," the self-assertion denied by Louise's seeing Brently. Angelyn Mitchell, "Feminine Double
Consciousness and Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour,'" CREAMACazine: A
Journal of the College English Association, Middle Atlantic Croup 5.1 (1992) 63.
Bernard Koloski claims that when "Louise sees her husband come in the door,"
she "dies of heart failure." Bernard Koloski, Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short
Fiction (NewYork: Twayne, 1996) 4. Even Lawrence L Berkove, who concentrates more closely than other critics on the destructive and delusive nature of
Louise's joy, writes of Louise that "her husband's unexpected return ends
[Louise's] delusion," implying that Louise sees Brently's return. Lawrence I.
Berkove, "Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour," American Literary Realism 32.2 (2000) 157.
* Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour," The Complete Works ofKate Chopin, ed.
Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969) 353. Cited parenthetically hereafter.
5 Berkove, too, argues that what Louise desires would involve a "radical loneliness" and concludes that her goal of fully independed selfhood is "not obtainable in this life" (155, 158). However, as I will show, he reaches his conclusions
following a line of thought quite different from mine.
6 Mary E. Papke, Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith
Wharton, Contributions in Women's Studies 119 (NewYork: Greenwood, 1990)
63.
' A view held by Berkove, also: "Richards attempts vainly to screen Bendy
from the view of his wife" (156).
8 Arms 225.
9 Emily Toth, "Kate Chopin Thinks Back Through Her Mothers: Three
Stories by Kate Chopin," Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, ed. Lynda S.
Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992) 24.
10 Toth, UnveilinglO.
11 Peggy Skaggs, Kate Chopin (Boston: Twayne, 1985) 53.
•2 Martha J. Cutter, Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's
Writing 1850-1930 (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1990) 89.
13 Cutter 109.
September 2004
55
I"* Cutter 101. Cutter also notes that the "Resistant feminine voices of radicalized characters . . . go unheard" (101). And, should even a whisper get
through, madness or suicide allows whatever threat such a covert language
might form to be discounted — among critics as well as other characters.
Berkove states that his essay was written to counter the "strong, and at times
extreme, feminist bent" underlying recent discussions of the story (152). Yet he
seriously misreads Louise's belief that following Brently's death there will be no
will bending hers, as well as her idea that "a kind or a cruel intention" makes
such a bending "no less a crime" ("Story" 353). Berkove states that Louise has
a "distorted" view of love, and he claims that Louise thinks love itself is a crime,
rather than the bending of another's will for which love can act as a mask or
motive: "Believing love a 'crime' cannot be considered a normal attitude,"
Berkove writes with the passive voice certainty of the morally assured (155).
This allows him to declare that Louise or her beliefs are "abnormal," "unreasoning," and "aberrant," and to conclude that "In truth, Louise is sick, emotionally as well as physically" (152, 154, 155, 156).
THE ZEN ARCHERY OF HOLDEN CAULFIELD
Many have considered the deep influence of Zen Buddhism
on J. D. Salinger,! but the perspective afforded on Salinger by
Eugen Herrigel — the German philosopher who wrote on Zen
and his experience ofJapanese archery — has somehow escaped
the attention of critics. Yet Herrigel's account of what he calls the
"Great Doctrine" of Japanese archery offers substantial insight
into The' Catcher in the Rye, for the novel is intimately concerned
with both Zen and hunting, two themes that converge in the
Japanese art of the bow. The mystical "shooting" technique of the
master Japanese archer illuminates the Zen-informed way in
which Holden Gaulfield is at once the catcher in the rye and the
children he protects, the "shooter" of phonies and a phony himself, and finally a figure in whom binary oppositions merge in a
state of transcendent aimlessness.
Salinger's short story "Seymour: An Introduction" evinces the
author's direct engagement with Japanese archery. In this story,
Seymour Glass's younger brother Buddy is "playing curb marbles"
on the street. Seymour offers Buddy advice that is seemingly contrary to the goal of marble throwing, suggesting that he not target
his opponent's marble: "Gould you try not aiming so much?"2 But
Seymour's counter-intuitive advice is to be understood in light of
the technique of a Japanese master archer: