Kate Chopin and Anna Julia Cooper: Critiquing Kentucky and the South

Abstract

Kate Chopin has been difficult for scholars to fix as a southern writer, beyond an earlier view of her as an exceptional local colorist whose work—especially her second novel The Awakening—looked forward to the modernist literature produced by many southern writers in the twentieth century. Having stopped writing as the twentieth century was dawning, she could not qualify as a Southern Renascence writer, at least according to the paradigm directing southern literary studies that held sway into the 1980s. And she seemed not wholly to identify herself in her life or through her work as a southerner, as Anne Goodwyn Jones notes in her 1981 study, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South. Yet, as Jones also observes, "the symbols [Chopin] chose to invest her subject with imaginative power come from her Southern experience" (149). Since Jones' book was published, a number of scholars have also identified Chopin as being both a part of and apart from the South—with the apartness indicating not the kind of ambivalence about region born of an engagement with southern concerns so often associated with (white male) Renascence writers, but rather indicating just plain disengagement with the South and its concerns. Noteworthy among the critics who have seen Chopin in this light is Helen Taylor, who in 1989 argued that Chopin used southern themes and characters to enter a predominantly European discourse about "sexuality, bourgeois marriage, [End Page 123] and woman's role" (157). Yet, according to Taylor, Chopin took "a thoroughly orthodox [white] southern line on race" (155), rendering The Awakening, her fictional masterpiece, "a feminist regionalist work that . . . lapses into unexamined racism" (201).