Kate Chopin

Katherine O’Flaherty, who wrote as Kate Chopin, was born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prosperous Irish-American father and a Creole mother of French descent. Her father died in a train accident when she was five, and she was raised largely by women — her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother — who were widows, a matriarchal domestic world that shaped her early imagination. She was educated by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at the St. Louis Academy, where she read widely in English and French literature and developed a particular affection for the writers of the French realist tradition — Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola — who would prove crucial influences on her mature work. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader, and moved with him to New Orleans and then to his family’s plantation in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana.

After her husband died of swamp fever in 1882, Chopin managed the plantation for a year before returning to St. Louis, where she began writing fiction in her early thirties. Her short stories, drawing on her knowledge of Creole and Cajun Louisiana, were published in leading magazines including Vogue and The Atlantic Monthly, and two collections — Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) — established her as a skilled regionalist writer of the Louisiana local color tradition. These stories, however, already showed the interest in female psychology, sexual desire, and social convention that would make her major novel so controversial.

The Awakening, published in 1899, is Chopin’s masterpiece and one of the most important American novels of the nineteenth century. It follows Edna Pontellier, a Kentucky-born woman married to a prosperous New Orleans Creole businessman, who during a summer holiday on Grand Isle begins to awaken to her own desires — for painting, for the sea, for a pianist named Mademoiselle Reisz, and for a young man named Robert Lebrun. Returning to New Orleans, she gradually refuses the social roles assigned to her as wife and mother, taking her own studio, having an affair, and ultimately swimming out to sea in an ending that has been read as both suicide and liberation. The novel was condemned on publication as morbid, unwholesome, and morally dangerous, and Chopin’s literary career effectively ended: a third collection and a second novel were rejected by publishers alarmed by the controversy.

Chopin’s prose is supple, sensuous, and deeply attentive to the interior life — to the movements of consciousness, desire, and self-discovery. She brought to American fiction the influence of the French realists and naturalists: a clinical clarity about the body and its needs, a willingness to follow female consciousness wherever it led, and an absence of the moralizing resolution that American fiction of the period typically required. The Creole world she depicted — its particular codes of femininity, its tropical sensory richness, its structures of racial and social hierarchy — provides both the ground and the atmosphere for Edna’s awakening.

Kate Chopin died on August 22, 1904, in St. Louis, largely forgotten. The rediscovery of The Awakening in the 1960s and 1970s — driven by the feminist literary scholarship of Per Seyersted and others — transformed her posthumous reputation. The novel is now recognized as a founding text of American feminist literature, a precursor of the modernist novel, and one of the essential works in the American canon. It is taught in virtually every American high school and university, and Chopin is recognized as one of the most significant American writers of the nineteenth century.