Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 247other American texts. Immersing herself in the sea, Edna realizes now the full import
of what she meant when she said she would give up the unessential, her money and
life, but not herself, for her children. She recognizes, also, that, despite her love for
Robert Lebrun, the day would have come eventually when “the thought of him
would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone.” Her momentary fear, as she looks
“into the distance” of sky and water, is overwhelmed by a deeper impulse that is
simultaneously erotic and visionary, expressing the needs of her self both as a body
and a spirit; and she expresses that impulse, and meets those needs, by striking out
into the sea. Reading The Awakening, it is not hard to see why it provoked such hos-
tility among contemporaries: it is, after all, a story of female liberation that grounds
existence in the right, the need to be oneself. Its radical character is measured by the
fact that Edna’s eventual suicide is depicted, not as a sacrifice, a surrender, but as a
moment of self-affirmation. That character is also very American, since what the fate
of Edna Pontellier ends by telling us is that the ultimate price of liberty – and a price
worth paying – is death.
Like Chopin, George Washington Cable (1844–1925) devoted much of his fiction
to his home town of New Orleans. His earlier stories were published in periodicals
between 1873 and 1879 and then gathered together in Old Creole Days (1879). Cable
is not reluctant to portray the romance and glamour of Louisiana life in these tales:
there are coquettish or courageous women, the proud or cunning men of old
Spanish-French Creole society, and there are incidents of smuggling and adventure.
But he is also careful to register, as accurately as he can, the eccentric characteristics
of the Creole dialect. And he explores the shifting character and sinister depths of
old Creole society in a way that makes clear his intention of exploring the larger
society of the South of his own time too. The conflicts between a harsh racial code
and a history of miscegenation, between traditional customs and new laws and hab-
its, between the pursuit of aristocratic ease and the economic imperatives of work:
all these had relevance, not only for the Creole characters Cable described, trying to
cope with their new American masters after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but for
all Southerners after the Civil War. And to explore these, and similar, issues, Cable
deployed a range of techniques. “It is not sight the storyteller needs,” he once wrote,
“but second sight. ... Not actual experience, not actual observation, but the haunted
heart: that is what makes the true artist of every sort.” As it happens, Cable was very
good at “sight’: seeing and hearing the detail, the minute particulars of everyday
social exchange, But he was also extremely good at “second sight”: exploring the
haunted margins of society and exposing its weaknesses and secrets. This made him
both a political novelist and a poetic one – or, rather, a writer in the great Southern
tradition of using the romantic, the Gothic, even the surreal to reveal the history,
and the repressed story, of the region.
In one tale in Old Creole Days, for instance, “Belles Demoiselles Plantation,” Cable
describes the efforts of one Colonel De Charleau to provide for his daughters by
trading his beloved but heavily mortgaged property. Unfortunately, the property is
not only saddled with debt but also situated on an eroding bank of the Mississippi.
The bank eventually caves in, and the house then sinks into the river. “BellesGGray_c03.indd 247ray_c 03 .indd 247 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM