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

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.