Kate Chopin: Beyond Local Color to Feminism

Abstract

The aim of this study is to give a portrayal of the late nineteenth century American author Kate Chopin from her early local color stories to her more daring feminist stories. Kate Chopin became known to the American reading public of the early 1890’s through her Louisiana tales in Vogue, the Century, and the Atlantic. With her two collections of short stories Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) she gained national recognition as an outstanding short story writer of the local color school. Her stories do indeed effectively evoke the atmosphere of her enchanting Southern localities. Yet her interest was not so much idyllic localism as what she termed in one of her essays “human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with witch ethical and conventional standards have draped it.” Soon editors started turning down a number of her stories because the women in her stories were becoming more passionate and emancipated. When her masterpiece The Awakening appeared in 1899, she thoroughly shocked her readers. In St. Louis, the author’s own city, the book was banned and she herself ostracized. The bad reviews silenced her as a writer and after her death five years later she was quickly forgotten, but today she is considered as a prophet of the 20th century feminism. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n2p310