Reading women’s short stories: Kate Chopin and Willa Cather

As the libraries are closed, I don’t buy books, and didn’t borrow enough before the lockdown, reading becomes a bit of an issue. I still want to read more works by women this year, so now the option seems to be reading short stories in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (my copy is the shorter edition). 
(This probably shows how extreme my view is regarding print books vs e-books—I’d rather hold the Norton Anthology than read an e-book from Gutenberg on the laptop or on the phone). 
Some brief thoughts: 
- Kate Chopin:  
I read at least one of her short stories at UiO, and read The Awakening in 2017—badly. There is nothing interesting I can say about The Awakening, except that I remember thinking the prose was good and she didn’t pass judgment. 
The 3 stories in the anthology are “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (1892), its sequel “The Storm” (1898), and “Désirée’s Baby” (1895). They’re all good, interesting. “The Storm”, which wasn’t published in her lifetime, is particularly interesting, because it deals with sexuality and depicts a passionate affair between 2 ex-lovers, who are now both married—it is erotic, and there is no judgment. 
Look at this sentence: 

“Alcée clasped her shoulders and looked into her face. The contact of her warm, palpitating body when he had unthinkingly drawn her into his arms, had aroused all the old-time infatuation and desire for her flesh.” 

And this sentence about Calixta: 

“As she glanced up at him the fear in her liquid blue eyes had given place to a drowsy gleam that unconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire.” 

If these 2 sentences don’t make you want to check out the story, I don’t know what will. 
“The Storm” can stand on its own, but it doesn’t hurt to read “At the ‘Cadian Ball” first to get to know the background and the characters, as well as the people Alcée and Calixta marry (Clarisse and Bobinôt respectively). 
“Désirée’s Baby” is about racism and miscegenation. I’m going to “spoil” the plot by saying that it’s about a racist man who kicks his wife (Désirée) out because their baby is part black, which suggests that Désirée, who is of unknown origins, is mixed race, but it’s revealed in the end that the racist man himself is part black. 
I don’t think that’s a spoiler, because the twist isn’t much of a twist—the key is how it’s done, how the story unfolds. 
Overall: good stuff. I should read more from Kate Chopin. 

- Willa Cather: 
I’ve not read anything by Willa Cather.  
Whilst Kate Chopin’s stories are quite short, the selected stories by Willa Cather in the Anthology are much longer. “Neighbour Rosicky” (1930) is a long short story, comprising of 6 parts, about Anton Rosicky, an old Czech farmer who resides in Nebraska with his wife and 6 children. 
She writes shorter, simpler sentences than I usually read. For instance:  

“But as the years passed, all alike, he began to get a little restless.  When spring came round, he would begin to feel fretted, and he got to drinking.  He was likely to drink too much of a Saturday night.  On Sunday he was languid and heavy, getting over his spree.  On Monday he plunged into work again.  So he never had time to figure out what ailed him, though he knew something did. When the grass turned green in Park Place, and the lilac hedge at the back of Trinity churchyard put out its blossoms, he was tormented by a longing to run away.  That was why he drank too much; to get a temporary illusion of freedom and wide horizons.” (P.3)

I like the flow and rhythm of her sentences. Willa Cather captures well the voices of her characters, but I can also hear the narrator’s voice. It’s hard to explain, but most of the time whilst reading a book, I see the words on the page and they stay on the page, so to speak, but once in a while, the narrator has such a strong voice that I can hear their voice speaking in my ears whilst I’m reading. An example is The Catcher in the Rye, but that’s an obvious one because Holden Caulfield uses colloquial language and slang, but I get the same effect with “Neighbour Rosicky”—I can hear the voice talking, like narration in a film.    
Take a look at this passage: 

“Rosicky, the old Rosicky, could remember as if it were yesterday the day when the young Rosicky found out what was the matter with him. It was on a Fourth of July afternoon, and he was sitting in Park Place in the sun. The lower part of New York was empty. Wall Street, Liberty Street, Broadway, all empty. So much stone and asphalt with nothing going on, so many empty windows. The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops and the belts and bands cease running. It was too great a change, it took all the strength out of one. Those blank buildings, without the stream of life pouring through them, were like empty jails. It struck young Rosicky that this was the trouble with big cities; they built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground. You lived in an unnatural world, like the fish in an aquarium, who were probably much more comfortable than they ever were in the sea.” (ibid.) 

Does that not sound like the narration in Golden Hollywood films? That’s a good passage, though. 
“Neighbour Rosicky” has warmth—there’s some element of idealism, but it has warmth, and the characters appear very real.  
“The Sculptor’s Funeral” (1905) is a shorter story. The sculptor in the title is Marvey Merrick, who returns to his hometown in Kansas when he dies—the story mostly focuses on the perspective and impressions of his pupil Steavens, as he watches the Merrick family and other town people at the funeral. 
Compared to “Neighbour Rosicky”, the story is much shorter, and the prose is different—I don’t hear the narrating voice. 
The writing is good, like this one about the mother’s insincere display of grief: 

“… wailed the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully, almost beseechingly, into her face, red and swollen under its masses of strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about her face—a kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed by violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her teeth were large and square, and set far apart—teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.” 

It is overall a good story, with some fine moments such as when Steavens and the lawyer, Jim Laird, overhear the mother cruelly abusing a servant for a small mistake (soon after her performance as a grieving mother), or when Steavens hear the town people speaking disrespectfully of Merrick. However, I think Laird’s passionate speech at the end feels a bit forced and clumsy, almost like a device to express the author’s own rage at the narrow-mindedness and bitterness of the town people.  
The stories do make me want to read more Willa Cather though. 

After this, I’m not quite sure what to read next. These days my concentration is rubbish.