Precis

Winn, Harbour. “Echoes of Literary Sisterhood: Louisa May Alcott and Kate Chopin.” Studies in American Fiction 20.2 (1992): 205-208.

In “Echoes of Literary Sisterhood: Louisa May Alcott and Kate Chopin,” Harbour Winn outlines the various similarities between Alcott and Chopin both in the subjects they write about and in their literary careers. Winn begins by acknowledging the large amount of attention given to Alcott’s impact on her female readers, stating that she wishes to extend the conversation to the ways in which Alcott’s writing impacted other female writers. While Winn sees similarities between Alcott’s Little Women and Chopin’s most well-known novel, The Awakening, she asserts that the parallels between Little Women and one of Chopin’s late stories, “Charlie,” are much more straightforward and intentional. Both Jo and Charlie have masculine nicknames, dress in an “unorthodox manner,” cut their hair, have sisters who parallel each other, must help care for their wounded fathers, and fall in love with older men. However, while the characters are incredibly similar, Winn sees “Charlie” as a more progressive rendition of Little Women in which Chopin’s time (30 years later) and her audience (adults rather than children) proved less restraining than those of Alcott. Winn also sees a similar “uncertainty towards patriarchal culture” in both Alcott and Chopin, reflected in their use of pseudonyms for “stories that dealt with adultery and seduction” and in their publishers’ recommendations to write children’s books (Winn 207). Thus, with so many similarities between the two authors, Winn concludes that Alcott undoubtedly had a “nurturing” impact on Chopin’s writing career, making the two women “literary sisters” who both sought to “unmask the forms of conventional female identity” (Winn 205).
The strongest aspects of the article are the long lists of parallels between Jo and Edna and between Jo and Charlie, which are especially insightful. The connections Winn makes between the sets of characters are both clear and extensive, leaving little room for doubt in the reader’s mind. She describes similarities both on a basic level (personality characteristics and storylines) and on a more complex level (similes and metaphors used, themes, and morals). However, Winn’s argument also has some weaknesses. While the article is supposed to be about the ways in which Alcott impacted Chopin, Winn focuses more on Chopin’s writing than on Alcott’s; most of the quotes used to support Winn’s argument come from “Charlie” rather than from Little Women. Additionally, Winn seems to contradict herself by initially stating that Chopin “did not include children in her audience…and was thus not restrained by this taboo,” but then later stating that both Alcott’s and Chopin’s “larger audience[s] [were] created in children’s magazines” (Winn 206-207). While Winn likely means that Chopin gained her initial popularity by writing for children and later moved to a strictly adult audience, we nonetheless experience a lack of clarity regarding this matter. Essentially, Winn fails to acknowledge why Chopin’s fan base of children did not have an impact the content of her later writing. However, despite its minor shortcomings, the article nonetheless proves useful in understanding the extent of the feminist connections between Louisa May Alcott and Kate Chopin. Overall, Winn effectively demonstrates the ways in which Chopin took Alcott’s characters and storylines and pushed them a few steps further, deepening the “impact…on the imagination of female readers” (Winn 205).

Charles Chesnutt

First off...I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Chesnutt's practice of putting a twist at the end of his stories. He totally caught me off-guard every single time, constantly surprising me. You would think that I would catch on to his tactics by the fourth story, but his lack of foreshadowing or set-up for the narratives constantly left me blindsided, shocked, and thoroughly amused.

These twists reminded me a lot of the Southwestern humor we talked about earlier in class -- both in the elements of the trickster being tricked and in the use of dialect. The "trickster tricked" part is especially interesting. In Chesnutt's stories, it's always the supposedly smart white man being outsmarted by the black man. While Dick's father thinks he is being so smart and "tricky" by convincing Grandison how evil the abolitionists were and how much better off he would be at the plantation down South. However, his efforts only end up aiding the ploys of Grandison, who parrots his master's ridiculous statements in order to sound like a good slave.

True, the stories all seem to fall into the same formulaic pattern and preach the same anti-racist, anti-slavery message at the end. It seems that the stories would become predictable and uninteresting to readers. However, I think that the particular stories we read were so well-received partially because of this pattern. For the general population (which is not necessarily made up of literary scholars!) such a pattern probably helped them feel comfortable with Chesnutt's writing, giving them the feeling that they were acquainted with an author. Also, having an element of surprise to look forward to at the end was probably somewhat addicting, especially because the endings are so unpredictable!