‘The perfume of the past’: Kate Chopin and post-colonial New Orleans

Abstract

Like many other 'regional' - that is, not Boston or New York - writers of the late nineteenth century, Kate Chopin participated in an ambitious post-Civil War publication project designed to open up the diverse richness of the USA to a growing reading public. The 'Local Color' movement involved making strange or exotic the particular and parochial - in terms of landscape, character, dialect and so on - and expanding the range and scope of the 'national' literature. One of many who took Louisiana as her subject, Chopin is recognised as having captured brilliantly the state's atmosphere, fine detail, ethnic and racial mixtures, fleshing out as she does the nature of this post-colonial society in a bruised post-bellum world. Chopin takes pains to emphasise the specific linguistic and social differences between French-speaking regions of Louisiana and the rest of the USA. Quotation marks are frequently appended to phrases, sayings and aspects of Louisiana life and artefacts, and her use of dialects - mainly Negro and French Acadian, though also French Creole - is authoritative. Writing at a distance in St Louis, Missouri, following the deaths of her husband and mother, she was involved in interpretation and explication, not only to portray for readers the essence of a state that fascinated her but also to record a world that was disappearing fast into the maw of 'Americanness'. Much of her fiction records what a newly post-colonial state felt like within a larger homogenising nation, particularly in terms of the impact on its French Creole and French Acadian peoples. Kate Chopin had a complex relationship with Louisiana's French culture, offering multiple perspectives on fin-de-siecle issues of gender, ethnicity and language. Her work has rightly been celebrated for its subtle treatment of the changing face of southern life, and especially of southern women. In all her work, female characters embody the tensions and transformations within post-bellum life.