Kate Chopin

Who Was Kate Chopin?

Kate Chopin was a Louisiana writer whose novel The Awakening (1899) was so far ahead of its time that it was effectively suppressed for fifty years before being recovered by feminist literary criticism in the 1960s. Born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis in 1850 to an Irish-born father and a French Creole mother, she grew up in a household shaped by strong women and absorbed from her Louisiana life the Creole culture that would give her fiction its distinctive texture.

After the death of her husband in 1882, she supported herself and her six children by writing, producing the Louisiana stories collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) before The Awakening brought her career to an abrupt end. The novel’s frank treatment of a married woman’s desire for autonomy and sensual fulfillment was received as a moral scandal, and Chopin effectively stopped publishing fiction afterward.

Chopin is significant for TLA because The Awakening raises, with unusual precision, the question of what human beings are made for. Edna Pontellier’s longing for a self that the conventions of her world will not permit is genuine — her desire for autonomy, beauty, and authentic experience is not a moral failure but a testimony to the image of God in the human person. What the novel cannot provide is a framework in which that longing finds genuine satisfaction rather than dissolution.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Bayou Folk — 1894 — short stories
• A Night in Acadie — 1897 — short stories
• The Awakening — 1899
• The Storm — 1898 — short story, unpublished in her lifetime