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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zesb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 75-26,555 CHAPIN, Helen Geracimos, 1929- MYTHOLOGY AND AMERICAN REALISM: STUDIES IN FICTION BY HENRY ADAMS, HENRY JAMES, AND KATE CHOPIN. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1975 Literature, general Xerox University Microfilmst Ann Arbor. Michigan 48108 © 1975 HELEN GERACIMOS CHAPIN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. PLEASE NOTE: Page 224 1s not available for photography. UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS MYTHOLOGY AND AMERICAN REALISM: STUDIES IN FICTION BY HENRY ADAMS, HENRY JAMES, I AND KATE CHOPIN Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Helen Chapin, B.A*, M,A. * A * * The Ohio State University 1975 Reading Committee Approved By Thomas Woodson Julian Markels Thomas Cooley Jl Adviser Department of English ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS t This study was made possible by the knowledge and guidance of my advisort Professor Thomas Woodson* by the encouragement of my colleagues at Wilmington College* and finally by the under­ standing and support of my family* I wish to thank them all very much* VITA Born— Honolulu , Hawaii' 1958* **•••• B.A*, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 1958-1959 < . « « Graduate Assistant, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 1959. ........ M.A., University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 1960-1962 . Teaching Assistant, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 1962-1963 . Instructor, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 1963-1965 . • Assistant Professor, Kentucky State College, Frankfort, Kentucky 1965-present* Assistant Professor, Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio PUBLICATIONS "Women's Liberations The New Awakening,1* The Link, 22 (Winter, 1971), 4-5. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Fields American Literature Restoration and Eighteenth Century British Literature Nineteenth Century British Literature Twentieth Century British and American Literature 111 i TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................... .......... 11 VITA ............. ill Chapter I. AMERICAN REALISM, MYTHOLOGY, AND NATURALISM: "THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS WOMAN"......... I Lonely Antigones 7 Toward a Natural History of Consciousness 24 II. HENRY ADAMS: THE AWAKENING OF MADELINE AND ESTHER........... ......................... 60 Henry Adams's Signature 61 Madeleine Lee and the Sexual Politics of * Democracy 92 Esther: a "Pallas Athene" 126 III. HENRY JAMES: "THE COLD MEDUSA-FACE OF LIFE" . 157 Henry James's Signature 160 The Princess Casamasalma: an "Angel of Devastation" 206 IV. KATE CHOPIN: "AESCHYLUS IS TRUE". ........ 256 Kate Chopin's Signature 257 Edna Fontelller: "Venus rising from the foam" 294 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................... ........... 336 CHAPTER I AMERICAN REALISM, MYTHOLOGY, AND NATURALISM: "THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS WOMAN" Henry Adams expressed a deep but often forgotten truth when he said, "The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement • * • it is the most complex and arduous."^ In the late nineteenth century three American writers came to artistic matur­ ity in a United States that had largely ignored women, as Adams said, and that needed to study and respect them if the culture were to be whole and healthy. Adams (1838-1918), Henry James (1843-1916), and Kate Chopin (1851-1904) all placed American women at the centers of their novels: Democracy: An American Novel (1880) and Esther: A Novel (1834) by Adams; The Princess CasamaBsiroa (1886) by James; and The Awakening (1899) by Chopin. 2 The women are struggling for freedom, enlightenment, and new roles. In one way they achieve success, for they affirm themselves. In another, they are doomed to failure, for a dangerously unbalanced *Henry Adams. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1905; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), p. 198; hereafter re­ ferred to in the text in shortened form. ^Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (New York: Far­ rar, Straus and Young, Inc., 1952); Henry Adams, Esther: A Novel (1884; rpt. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1938); Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (New York: Charles Scribner's 1 patriarchal society, which. Is in radical discontinuity with it­ self, cannot support their aspirations and so betrays than* The women, in turn, betray that society by withdrawing from it* Adams, James, and Chopin held e. view of women's roles which meshed with their vision of society and informed these four novels* Not only do these four writers concern themselves with women's roles, but their novels also share the following quali­ ties: first, they are in the post-Clvil War movement of literary realism, as so many critics have pointed out; second, the novels are all fundamentally mythological; and, third, they incorporate naturalism into what 1 have come to identify as mythic-realist structures* In the tradition of realism, these novels are con­ cerned with character— the central characters are American girls, natural and spontaneous, complex and rebellious, the new women of the age who act our their lives in contemporary, densely rendered societies of New York, Washington, D« C., London, and New Orleans* The women.attempt to find meaning in their lives within their societies and at the same time affirm their true selves. Because the societies are patriarchslly structured and basically hostile to their aspirations, the women learn that to assert themselves they must in the end reject society and men. Edwin Cady, Harold Sons, 1908), 2 vols*; Kate Chopin, The Awakening in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1969), II, 879-1000. Subsequent references to these editions are in the text in shortened form. Kolb, and other critics have pointed out that realism was founded on a culture of profound dualities and ambiguities and was a com­ plex literary standard* Lionel Trilling has described late nine­ teenth century society (and our society sincetthen) In 11 Reality In America" as a culture and not a flow, for "the form of Its exis­ tence Is struggle or at least debate— It la nothing If not a dialecticRealism In the four novels shows us a central debate of the age, that of the "woman question," or the problem of how a woman is to deal with the freedom she seeks. These novels contain several mythological qualities. Frist, they possess the mythos of the seasons. As Northrop Frye has shown us in Anatomy of Criticism . mythic irony is connected with winter.^ The all-encompassing vision of each of the four novels la Ironic, and each literary structure circles to a closure on a bleak wintry note of a woman's withdrawal into selfhood. The novels secondly include the mythological concept of an ancient great goddess or earth mother archetype, as Carl Jung and Erich Neumann have explained her. The earth mother contains in herself a complex double nature which in her positive phase gives ^Lionel Trilling. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: The Viking Press, 1950), p. 9. ^Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism! Four Essays (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1956). £ have Incorporated Into my thesis much of the critical apparatus from Frye's third essay, "Archetypal Criticism! Theory of Myths," pp. 131-239. c nourishing life, but in her negative phase brings death. Hero­ ines' quests in literature are archetypal movements of the great goddess from darkness into light, from ignorance into awareness. i Each realist woman In these hovels is ouch an earth mother or great goddess. Mythology in the novels has a third meaning and function, that of specific