Salt Taste of the Sea: The Multisensorial Beach in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charles Simmons’s Salt Water

Richter, Virginia (2023). Salt Taste of the Sea: The Multisensorial Beach in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charles Simmons’s Salt Water. In: Kern-Stähler, Annette; Robertson, Elisabeth (eds.) Literature and the Senses. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (493-C26S5). Oxford University Press 10.1093/oso/9780192843777.003.0027

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The beach intensifies multisensorial bodily perception, as it touches, stimulates, and invades the human body through various material channels. Literary texts record a ‘thick description’ of the sensory and emotional experience of, for example, swimming; and they explore the ambivalence of the beach, the persistence of conflicting patterns such as sensuous liberation and a dread of the deep. The two novels this chapter examines—Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charles Simmons’s Salt Water—although separated by a century, address similar issues. Both are set at moments of social change, have liminal protagonists, and use littoral activities as conduits to sexual awakening, liberation, and self-knowledge. However, they also show that these positive developments are not viable outside the heterotopia of the beach. Drawing on littoral/oceanic studies and new materialism, this chapter focuses on the interplay between the material environment, the senses, and the emotional development of the novels’ protagonists.

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