"...truth is trouble."
On banned books, censorship, and literary truths; Kate Chopin and Paula Modersohn-Becker enter the Cita Canon; more.
Of all the books in Cita’s catalog, it is perhaps Kate Chopin’s The Awakening that best captures the sort of finality one may associate with the end of summer. It’s not just that a summer holiday sets off the plot, or that the sensuality of long, hot days peppers its pages. As Edna Pontellier “awakens”—as she realizes that she cannot continue in her proscribed roles of wife and mother, nor can she escape them—there is a sense of coming darkness. Though she swims out to sea just before the start of spring, Edna’s fate evokes the inevitable approach of winter.
There is a less poetic kind of darkness that fall can bring, with various seasonal reminders of the precarity of any kind of peaceful existence. Threats to public access to knowledge and information are certainly not seasonal, but the danger feels especially heightened right now. This is underscored is by the sobering data shared by The American Library Association (ALA) for Banned Books Week, which took place last week. Many of the authors in our catalog and canon have historically been targets of censorship—and many of them still are, decades or centuries after they wrote and lived. In this month’s Bulletin, we’re digging into just one example: Chopin’s tale of the end of summer’s promise and our shared need for freedom.
Censorship & Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
Early challenges: “Too strong a drink for moral babes”
Kate Chopin was a rising literary star when The Awakening, her second novel, came out in 1899. Some of her earlier stories had raised eyebrows for their subject matter, but she had enjoyed general success before the new book gained something like infamy. The very boldness that led the text to eventually be considered a classic inspired Chopin’s contemporaries to label it “poison” and “too strong a drink for moral babes.” One slightly less dramatic outlet concluded that the book was well written, but “we cannot see where the literature or criticism of life is helped by the detailed history of and narration of the contemporary love affairs of a wife and mother.”
In September 1902, all copies of The Awakening were removed from the shelves of the St. Louis Mercantile Library and, as the Los Angeles Times bluntly reported, “burned in the furnace.” The Mercantile Library was a membership library, not a public one, but it had served as the primary library for the city from its establishment in 1846 until the public library opened in 1893.1 It was still a highly influential city institution when its director, Horace Kephart, acquiesced to complaints from members who “decided [The Awakening] was not the kind of book they wanted their children to read.”
“THOSE LIBRARY BOOKS”
The book burning in Chopin’s own hometown followed the removal of the novel and several other newly published titles from the public library in Evanston, Illinois (just outside Chicago, and home to Northwestern University). In a short blurb headlined “THOSE LIBRARY BOOKS,” Evanston’s local Index dismissed other papers’ coverage of the “condemned” books, praising the library as “one of the most useful institutions in the community” and suggesting it was made more so by the removal of books “good taste has dictated should be withdrawn from circulation.” But the two censorship decisions in the Midwest raised enough attention to generate news items in each coast.
Other headlines captured the larger conversation:
From the St. Louis Star:
MRS. CHOPIN’S NOVEL BURNED BY THE MERCANTILE LIBRARY.
“THE AWAKENING,” A NOVEL OF CREOLE LIFE, JUDGED IMMORAL BY LIBRARIAN KEPHART, AND COPIES OF THE BOOK ARE DESTROYED.
ST. LOUIS AUTHORESS AMUSED, NO COMPLAINTS AT PUBLIC LIBRARY.
From the Chicago Tribune:
SAVING EVANSTON FROM BAD BOOKS.
Library Authorities Say They Are Doing This with Their Black List.
PROFESSORS TAKE ISSUE.
University and Town Divide on Question and Barred Volumes Gain Popularity.
From The New York Times:
Western Town Has Literary Censors
The Evanston Public Library Makes Up a "Black List"--Works by Gertrude Atherton, Justin McCarthy, and Mrs. Burnett Withdrawn from Circulation--Why People Objected to "The Aristocrats."
Echoes across centuries:
Accusations of “objectionable” or “immoral” themes were merely yesterday’s version of today’s most frequently cited reason for censorship: “sexually explicit” content.2 (No one seems to be trying to ban books for aesthetic failures, then or now.) The challenges of 1902 and 2023 seem to share a basic ethos: the people banning a book place very little value in the act of actually reading it as part of their evaluation. Vague as they were from the start, however, the criteria for challenging certain books may even be eroding.
In Evanston in 1902, books that were “suspect” were allegedly “investigated” before being sentenced. In St. Louis a few months later, Kephart agreed to condemn The Awakening based on his council’s recommendation, despite the fact that, as one of his assistants explained, he “[had] never seen the inside of the book.” Over a century later in 2006, a school board member in Arlington Heights, Illinois led a challenge against the ~300-page novel based on excerpts she found on the internet. In 2011, a challenge in Oconee County, Georgia was motivated by the novel’s cover. The latest ban attempt in 2020 came from Florida Citizen’s Alliance, the organization that helped draft a 2017 bill that allows any state resident to formally challenge material being taught in public schools — on any grounds.
A last word from the author:
While we have no idea how she felt privately, Kate Chopin was given many opportunities to respond to the controversy surrounding her novel—which she did with a bemused tone.
When the St. Louis Star contacted her about the Mercantile Library’s destruction of its copies, she responded that “it concerned me so little that I never thought to make any inquiries as to what the objection to it might be.” Later she reiterated: “I am sorry that the book should be though[t] immoral, but I haven’t had time to worry about what a few persons may think about my books.”
Despite her claimed indifference, Chopin did sneak in a theory about what it was that scared people so much about The Awakening:
“The characters are natural, I think…persons [are] seldom offended by immorality, but when the natural characters of persons [are] portrayed there [is] frequently complaint of the book not being exactly proper.”
In other words, perhaps what is “dangerous” about artworks that challenge institutions and accepted norms is the truths they can reveal about human nature and the diversity of human experience.
Further Reading & Resources
Cita’s edition of The Awakening: foreword by Kate Chopin International Society president Heather Ostman and cover by Jiwon Park.
“‘The Awakening’ and American Libraries: An Update.” By Charles Johanningsmeier for Studies in American Naturalism 8, no. 2 (2013): 236–48. (Free to read on JSTOR.)
Find the original news articles quoted here, along with other resources, on our “Banned Books” Are.na channel. (Thank you to the St. Louis Public Library and the Chicago Public Library for sharing scans from the Star and the Tribune!)
A brief roundup of the censorship history of some Cita Press authors.
Toni Morrison talks about historical parallels to contemporary censorship at 1982’s “An Evening of Forbidden Books.” (Full unedited interview here.)
Cita Canon Spotlight
We formally add Chopin to the canon this month, alongside a visual artist whose work, produced around the same time as the publication of The Awakening, was also censored and destroyed. As always, track the canon as it grows here.
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) began and ended her life in St. Louis, but most of her writing centered around Creole communities in Louisiana, where Chopin lived from 1870 until 1884. After her husband died in 1882, Chopin ran his plantation business and general store before moving back to St. Louis at the urging of her mother, who died shortly afterward. Chopin began writing at the urging of her doctor, and was publishing short fiction in major magazines and periodicals by 1890. Her work explored the tensions between what women wanted from their lives and societal expectations for them. Chopin died at age 54 after a brain hemorrhage, just a few years after the publication of The Awakening. The book fell out of print for decades before Chopin’s work became the subject of a significant literary revival starting in the late 1960s. Today, it is the fifth most-often-assigned American novel according to Columbia University’s Open Syllabus Project. [Read about Chopin and her work via The Kate Chopin International Society.]
German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) sold very few paintings in her lifetime, but her work was so impactful that it was targeted for purges by the Nazis by 1937. Her first brush with censorship came when her paintings were removed from a group exhibition after a critic vehemently objected to the fact that works by three women were included in the show at all. Becker was affiliated with the artists’ colony in Worspwede near where she grew up, but her sensibility transcended the group’s more traditional style and subject matter. She is considered the first woman to paint a nude self-portrait, the first woman to paint herself pregnant, and the first woman to depict herself nude and pregnant. Becker moved to Paris twice in pursuit of her ambition; the second time, she aimed to permanently leave her marriage and all trappings of conventional domesticity, but economic reality led her to return to her husband. She died of a postpartum embolism shortly after giving birth to her first child, and the loss inspired Rilke’s astonishing poem “Requiem for a Friend.” The Paula Modersohn-Becker Haus—the first museum devoted exclusively to a woman artist—opened in 1927. [Explore Becker’s work from the recent exhibition ICH BIN ICH / I AM ME at Neue Galerie. Offline, check out Being Here is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie Darrieussecq/translated by Penny Hueston from Semiotexte.]
What else?
The next Cita book will be out before you know it! In just a few weeks, we’ll launch Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings by Zitkála-Šá.
Watch this space—and our Instagram—for exciting news and events related to our new title.
An update and open letter related to the big publisher lawsuit against Internet Archive. The decision has major implications for Cita and everyone else in search of knowledge online. (Our brief explainer here.)
Please share our newsletter with a friend who loves free books, literary history, and/or feminist art!
“We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble… Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself.”
-Toni Morrison, “Peril,” 2008
The public library in St. Louis did not, as some have claimed, ban The Awakening when it was first published. The leader of the library, Fredrik Crunden, told the St. Louis Star that “there has been no suggestion of having it taken out of the Library, and I have no reason to think that there will be.”
Every book on the ALA’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023 list is challenged for “claimed to be sexually explicit.”