Like the fair, which bore witness to the birth of modernity in the United States, Chopin’s life spanned a tumultuous period in the nation’s history. Born in 1850, when St. Louis was still largely a frontier city, Chopin lived to see it become a bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis. Living in a region divided by Union and Confederate sympathies, she experienced the Civil War firsthand. Raised in a family of slave owners and nurtured by a black mammy, she saw the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of African Americans. A devoted daughter, wife, and mother who typified the feminine virtues of the Victorian era, she also shared the strength and independence of the controversial New Woman who strode onto the American scene in the 1890s.
Kate Chopin, nee Catherine O‘Flaherty, was the second of three children born to Thomas and Eliza Faris O’Flaherty. Her parents’ disparate backgrounds are representative of the many intersecting histories that made up the population of nineteenth-century St. Louis. Thomas was an Irish immigrant, who rose from manual laborer to become a successful local businessman. Following the death of his first wife, the thirty-nine-year-old Thomas quickly became engaged to Eliza Faris, twenty-three years his junior, who came from a respectable but impoverished Creole family. If Thomas was living the American dream of new arrivals from Europe, Eliza belonged to the St. Louis establishment, such as it was. With roots that extended back well before the city was an American territory, she descended from the French-speaking Charlevilles, who had moved from Montreal to Louisiana in the 1700s. In this, she is a true Creole of the kind who frequently appear in Chopin’s fiction. Eleven years after the marriage of Thomas and Eliza, Thomas suffered a fatal accident, ironically brought about by the very success he had sought since his arrival on American soil. One of a group of important local figures invited to dedicate the new Gasconade Bridge to Jefferson City, he died when the structure collapsed as they crossed it by train.
Only five years old at the time of her father’s death, Kate was raised in a household dominated by women. She became a favorite of her great grandmother, Victoire Verdon Charleville, who taught her French, nurtured her musical talents, and entertained her with stories about her tough and resourceful female ancestors. Kate also found a lifelong friend in Kitty Garesché, her classmate at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. The close-knit female community that surrounded Chopin left its mark on her fiction, which often dwells on the struggles of women protagonists to reconcile the demands of marriage, family, and social obligations.
Kate’s early adolescence was punctuated by separation and death. The Civil War, which forced the closure of her school and divided the city, brought an end to a comfortable, sheltered childhood. Although St. Louis was officially allied with the Union, many of Kate’s family and friends sympathized with the Confederacy. Her half-brother, George O‘Flaherty, fought for the South and died of typhoid fever before the War’s end. She lost her best friend when the Garesché family was expelled from the city because of its patriarch’s aid to the Confederacy (they would be reunited upon Kitty’s return in 1868). And thirteen-year-old Kate was most directly touched by the conflict when she was arrested for tearing down a Union flag hung on the porch of the family home, a crime punishable by death. A Confederate partisan raised in an atmosphere where slavery was tolerated, Chopin’s racial politics remain ambiguous, and critics seeking resolution have found her fiction rife with contradictions. The same cannot be said of her husband, Oscar Chopin, an avowed racial supremacist and member of the Crescent City White League, a New Orleans group dedicated to preserving white Southern rule.
Oscar Chopin entered Kate’s life in 1869, another year of ironic coincidences. She wrote her first story, “Emancipation,” a fable about an animal who, having been raised in a cage, discovers the sublime joy of freedom. It is possible to read this story as an allegory for the author’s yearning to cast off all social bonds. But at the same time she found herself entangled in new relationships of her own, including her engagement to Oscar, whom she would marry in 1870. Of French descent, Oscar had been raised on the family plantation in Natchitoches (pronounced “nak-e-tosh”) Parish in northwestern Louisiana. After a honeymoon in Europe, the couple settled in the American quarter of New Orleans, where Oscar returned to work as a cotton factor, a potentially lucrative position as middleman between growers and traders. Intolerant of outsiders, Kate’s new relatives were scandalized by her frank manner and her habits of smoking cigarettes and strolling the city by herself. However, while Chopin would frequently depict fictional women who feel restricted by their husbands, there is little evidence that she was dissatisfied with her own marriage. The Chopins had six children, and they often left the oppressive heat of New Orleans in the summer to vacation in Grand Isle, the Creole resort that is the setting of the first half of The Awakening.
When Oscar’s business failed, the Chopins moved to the family plantation in Cloutierville (pronounced “cloochy-ville”). There, Kate gave birth to her only daughter, Lelia, and helped Oscar run a general store until his death. Despite Oscar’s popularity, his wife’s outspokenness and independence marked her as a city dweller, and she was never fully accepted into the provincial society of his hometown. After Oscar died of malaria in 1882, rumors of an affair with Albert Sampite, a married man, did nothing to improve matters. She would write about these experiences in her first novel, At Fault (1890), a tale of love between a divorced man and a widow. Out of respect for the marital bond, the widow urges him to return to his alcoholic wife, whose convenient death in a flood allows the two lovers to be united.
Chopin may have begun her serious efforts as a writer out of grief. As a young widow, she contended with the provincialism of Cloutierville for two more years before returning to St. Louis to live with her mother, Eliza. When Eliza died of cancer just one year later, Chopin was heart-broken. But she also began to participate in the intellectual life of the city and to make serious efforts to establish herself as a professional author. Although she moved in literary circles, she resisted alliance with any particular group. A brief membership in the Wednesday Club, a select coterie of women intellectuals who gathered for conversation and debate, only strengthened her distaste for such organized activities. More than once, her fiction depicts women reformers or intellectuals in unflattering terms. Concerned about his wife’s erratic behavior in The Awakening, Léonce consults the family doctor, who asks him if she has “been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women—super-spiritual superior beings” (p. 76). These words drip with a disdain that is unrelieved by authorial commentary.
Struggling to find venues for her work, Chopin wrote regularly and kept careful records of submissions and rejections. At first, she was most successful with regional publications, placing her poem “If It Might Be” in a Chicago magazine called America and short stories in the Philadelphia Music Journal and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It proved more difficult to access national periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Century. At a time when the social conservatism of the Victorian era still prevailed, Chopin’s treatment of such controversial topics as extramarital affairs, venereal disease, murder, and miscegenation often made her work unpalatable to the major literary magazines. Eventually she would break into this market by publishing stories in nationally circulating periodicals such as Vogue, Century, and Youth’s Companion.
Among Chopin’s literary influences was the French writer Guy de Maupassant, whose realism and formal sophistication she admired. Her respect for his frank treatment of taboo subjects inspired her to translate a number of his stories, but their controversial nature made publication difficult. A more conventional early model was the eminent realist author and magazine editor William Dean Howells, who sent her a brief note of praise for her short story “Boulot and Boulotte.” For the depiction of strong, independent female characters, Chopin looked to Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. She has frequently been grouped with these women as a writer of local color fiction, a genre unjustly dismiss
ed by several generations of critics. More recently, scholars have seen her use of local color techniques as a strategy to gain a foothold in the literary marketplace and to stake a claim in contemporary debates about gender, race, and region. From this perspective, her short story “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” in which an artist from the city attempts to exploit a humble fisherman for his “local color,” reads like an allegory for the regional writer’s confrontation with the literary establishment.
Reviewers of Chopin’s first collection, Bayou Folk (1894), failed to notice such instances of understated social commentary. While generally positive, contemporary responses hailed her depiction of charming local details, rather than her treatment of social issues. Reviewers found a more complicated outlook and maturity of authorial voice in her second collection, A Night in Acadie (1897). An essay in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch praising Chopin’s artistry and psychological insight urged readers to think beyond the associations with local color, to recognize “gifts ... that go deeper than mere patois and local description.” A second review demurred, describing Chopin as a specialist in the “childlike southern people who are the subject of her brief romances” and expressing regret that some of the stories were “marred by one or two slight and unnecessary coarseness [sic].”
Despite considerable appreciation by her contemporaries, Chopin would have remained neglected by literary history if it were not for the recovery of The Awakening in the 1960s. Its renewed popularity also brought attention to the whole corpus of her work, which includes numerous poems, essays, and short stories, as well as her first novel, At Fault. These texts illuminate many of the concerns of The Awakening but are also of considerable interest in their own right. Read in its entirety, Chopin’s fiction introduces a broad swath of personalities, from impoverished blacks and Acadians of the Bayou to plantation elites and urban intellectuals. Whereas some stories turn seemingly trivial events—the shopping spree of an abstemious middle-aged woman, a country girl’s visit to the circus—into dramatic interior conflicts, others deal with more overtly controversial issues such as miscegenation, venereal disease, murder, and extramarital sex. The relatively circumscribed geographical parameters of Chopin’s fiction extend from lively, cosmopolitan New Orleans to the insular, rural byways of nineteenth-century Louisiana. Unlike the minutely detailed, inclusive catalogues of realist fiction, her preference is for the sketch, which conveys an impression rather than a sharply delineated picture. Frequently, Chopin writes as an insider whose intimacy with her subjects is conveyed through the use of local dialect and allusions. As a result, whereas the human dramas are readily accessible, contemporary readers may struggle to gain a precise understanding of character and locale.
Chopin’s first story, “Emancipation: A Life Fable,” is an exception to this rule since it is set in no particular time or place. It is significant largely because it anticipates Edna Pontellier’s metamorphosis in The Awakening. A male creature is raised in a cage where his physical needs are satisfied by an invisible provider. When the cage is left open one day, he escapes and learns that freedom is far better than comfort. In later stories, the issue of awakening more often centers on female desire, which is sometimes at odds with marriage and social obligations. Chopin’s female characters often seem motivated by the same creaturely drives that stirred the animal protagonist of “Emancipation.” For married women, husbands are like the invisible master whose care made the beast passive and complacent. Often wives find sexual interest or satisfaction in illicit affairs, which are closely associated with the freedom to choose the objects of their desire. In “A Respectable Woman,” Mrs. Baroda is attracted, against her will, to her husband’s close friend, Gouvernail. By the story’s end, without ceasing to love her husband, she has come to terms with her desires and plans to consummate the affair upon her next meeting with Gouvernail. This theme is carried one step further in “The Storm,” a sequel to “At the ’Cadian Ball,” an earlier story in which the dashing Alcée Laballière gives up Calxita, the woman he desires, in exchange for a respectable marriage. Years later, when the former lovers are thrown together by bad weather, the violence of the natural world is echoed in their illicit passion. The description emphasizes the deep, irrational needs that drive them against their good intentions: “The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached” (p. 220). When the sun comes out, so do prudence and social responsibility; they each return, satisfied, to their respective familial obligations. A somewhat different take on the pleasures of escaping one’s commitments is found in “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” where a middle-aged widow, who has persistently denied her own material needs in order to provide for others, uses a windfall to indulge in a few hours of shopping, eating, and entertainment. Overcome with the sensual feel of expensive department store clothing, the taste of fine food and wine, and the luxuriant pleasures of a matinee, she briefly allows desire to prevail over her reason or sense of responsibility.
From plantation elites to slaves and humble laborers, Chopin’s characters cross the spectrum of economic class and social standing. In some cases, her focus on middle- or upper-class white women relegates others to the background. For example, many have observed that Edna Pontellier’s freedom of mobility is enabled by numerous servants, nannies, cooks, and workmen who lurk at the periphery of The Awakening without ever being given full realization. Chopin’s characteristic understatement makes it difficult to determine whether this is her own perception of an underclass or a criticism of her protagonist’s insensitivity. Stories such as “Désirée’s Baby,”“Athénaïse,” and “A Respectable Woman” concern the problems of economically privileged characters. But at times she deals more explicitly with interactions among members of different classes. Set on a farm, “A Shameful Affair” is about a young woman visiting from the city whose lust is inflamed after she is kissed by a particularly handsome field hand. Consumed by desirous but condescending thoughts, she is deeply ashamed to learn that he is a man of her own social status who is masquerading as a laborer for the sake of adventure. Although her desire has not transgressed the lines of class, as it initially appeared, the story suggests that proximity to the land and the rugged bodies that work it is an ideal setting for a woman to discover her own sexuality. “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” is about an artist from the city who learns a hard lesson about the need to respect rural dwellers. When Mr. Sublet visits a plantation, he persuades Evariste, a humble Acadian fisherman, to pose for a portrait in his work clothes, despite the man’s desire to be pictured in his finest. Having compromised Evariste’s dignity, Sublet must reevaluate his behavior when Evariste saves his son from drowning. In this story, the lowly Acadians are endowed with more courage and self-respect than the refined urban tourists.
It is equally difficult to pin Chopin down on matters of race, since her fiction often appears to express contradictory views. Whereas some have argued that her advocacy of women’s autonomy is compromised by formulaic and sometimes condescending representations of nonwhite characters, others point to stories in which African Americans play important and sympathetic roles. Black characters are entirely marginal in The Awakening, seemingly existing only to do the work of cooking, cleaning, and childcare. But why mention them at all? Does Chopin do so as a subtle condemnation of her protagonist’s self-absorption? Or is their purpose to provide simple background detail? Evidence for both theories can be found in her writing. The protagonist of “A Country Girl” is taunted by a thoughtless black girl after her grandparents forbid her to go to the circus. Unredeemed during the course of the story, Black Gal’s meanness simply adds to the child’s sense of tragedy at being left behind. Tante Elodie, the protagonist of “The Godmother” “consider[ed] the emancipation of slaves a great mistake” (p. 224). At the same time, Tante Elodie herself is a woman of questionable morality, whose efforts to conceal a murder c
ommitted by her godson ruins their relationship and her own health. There is little evidence that Chopin shares the views of such a character.
There are also instances in which she writes with sensitivity about racial conflict. Her most well-known story, “Désirée’s Baby,” deals unblinkingly with the problem of miscegenation. Désirée, a woman of unknown parentage, gives birth to a dark-skinned child. After her husband’s cruelty drives her to commit suicide, the story ends with the revelation that he is the source of the baby’s black blood, a secret he knowingly concealed from his wife. Its conclusion, which implies that miscegenation is a dirty secret at the heart of the most elite Southern families, underscores the tragic consequences of insistence on racial purity.
However, the unexpected revelation at the close of “Désirée’s Baby” turns it into the story of a white woman’s abuse by a black man, making it less racially progressive than it may seem on first reading. If its position on race remains unresolved, its concern with a woman’s victimization is indisputable. Indeed, “Désirée’s Baby” represents Chopin’s most pessimistic view of marriage as an arrangement that often begins to the mutual satisfaction of both parties but later dissolves into conflict and unhappiness. Although she is aware that marriage can be constraining for both husbands and wives, she returns repeatedly to the particular frustrations of married women, who have far less freedom to escape into work and travel than their spouses. As Edna frets and paces around her home in New Orleans, Léonce retreats to his club and disappears on business trips to New York. But it is rare for Chopin to depict a husband as unforgivably cruel as Armand Aubigny, whose abuse and hypocrisy drives Désirée to suicide.
More commonly, husbands are mildly boring and insensitive, flaws that become increasingly intolerable when their wives encounter more desirable romantic prospects. In both “A Respectable Woman” and “The Storm,” functional marriages are temporarily disrupted by sexual desire. The end of “The Storm” sees order restored without harm to any of the parties involved, whereas “A Respectable Woman” concludes with the awakening of a wife’s desire for another man. In “The Story of an Hour,” a happily married woman with a weak heart is devastated by the news of her husband’s death. In a cruel twist of fate, just as she recognizes the potential of her newfound freedom, he walks in the door, having been nowhere near the accident reported to have killed him. The shock of his sudden reappearance causes her to collapse and die of cardiac arrest. Laden with irony, the story’s final line—“When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills” (p. 173)—pairs extreme happiness with fatal affliction.