1. Nick D’silva’s
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening:
Creole, consciousness raising, Taboo
breaking?

2. Chopin’s Creole identity.
Mother: Eliza
Faris French
Creole
Father: Thomas
O’Flaherty
Irish Immigrant
O’Flahertys supporters
Confederacy in Civil War
despite living in Unionist
Missouri
Faris family had deep French
Creole roots & O’Flaherty
became successful Louisiana
based Merchant
Kate Chopin nee
O’Flaherty

3. Who is Kate Chopin?:
Roles and identities in the late 19th century
Number 1
Number 2

4. Cultural Contexts:
“Maternal Commonwealth” and Cult of True
Womanhood 1865-1890 approx.
According to historian Barbara Welter, the author of the influential essay on this topic, "The Cult of True
Womanhood: 1820–1860", True Women were to hold four cardinal virtues:[1]
1.Piety – Religion was valued because unlike intellectual pursuits it did not take a woman away from her
"proper sphere," the home, and because it controlled women's longings
2.Purity – Virginity was seen as a woman's greatest treasure which she had to preserve until her marriage
night
3.Submission – True Women were required to be as submissive and obedient "as little children" because
men were regarded as women's superiors "by God's appointment"
4.Domesticity – A woman's proper sphere was the home where a wife created a refuge for her husband and
children; Needlework, cooking, making beds, and tending flowers were considered proper feminine
activities whereas reading of anything other than religious biographies was discouraged
[1]Welter 1966, Full essay can be found online at http://k-12.pisd.edu/schools/pshs/soc_stu/apush/cult.pdf
as correct on 24/10/2012

5. Modernity 1890-1920
approx:
A changing of perceptions:
Here Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her 1898 essay Women and Economics [2] and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s
The Woman’s Bible provide a neat bench mark:
•
•
•
•
•
Wider scope for women in new professions such as Teaching and Social Work and Journalism
Birth Control brings though limited in use-age offers the potential for greater control over their
lives for women
New styles of dress and codes of behaviour give greater licensce for women to express their
sexuality and personalities
Improvements in technology and communication enable women to develop female support
networks outside of their kin and local areas leading to an upsurge in the grassroots women’s
movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke to a huge audience in New Orleans. Edna finds a
“female colony” or gynocentric space (Stanton) on Grand Isle foreshadowing Perkins Gilman’s
Herland yet it is based as Jarlath Kileen points out, on the Catholicconcept of ‘communal and
inter-community worhip’ (Mother and Child…158) subverting “second wave” feminist claims on
The Awakening
More opportunities for women to congregate freely among themselves outside of the home
[2] Can be found at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/economics/economics.html correct as
of 24/10/2012

6. The Southern Belle and the French
Creole context:
• Southern Belle when allied to French Creole Catholic ideal
positions woman as paragon of virtue and respectability but also
something to be owned- “You are burnt beyond recognition,’ he
added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of
property which has suffered some damage” (Chopin 44)
• French Creole Catholic concept of virtue comes into conflict with
the sexual liberality associated with New Orleanais women and
the two operate in polarity in the novel. Catholic edicts impose a
sexual stratification which subjugates women. “The Ratingnolles
understood each other perfectly. If the fusion of two human
beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was
surely in their union” (Chopin 106-107)
• Catholicism comes into conflict with the Darwinian version of
nature which Edna inverts. Nature becomes a destructive as well
as creative force yet its viciousness as portrayed by Edna is more
concentrated in the female, a viciousness Edna must counter:
Adele Ratignolle’s childbirth -“With an inward agony, with a flaming
, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, [Edna] witnessed the
scene of torture”(Chopin 170) Edna also commits the Cardinal
Catholicsin of suicide as perhaps a final act against both nature and
religion.

7. The Awakening’s literary antecedents’
and its literary backdrop:
1. Harriet Beecher Stowe,Uncle Tom’s Cabin
2. Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary
3. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
4. George Eliot,Middlemarch
5. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
6. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami
8. The Woman’s Bible, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
9. Oscar Wilde, Salome
10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics
Nora: A Doll’s House
Getrude Stein’s Three lives not written until 1909
Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own not written until 1929
Female writer
Male writer
Emma Bovary:
Madame Bovary

8. Extract from The Awakening:
‘A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside
the door, kept repeating over and over:
“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en!Sapristi! That’s all right!”
He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language
which nobody understood, unless it was the mockingbird
that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty
notes upon the breeze with maddening persistence’
p1.
Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en!Sapristi! = Get out! Get out! Damnation!
• Symbol
• Motif
• Theme

9. Critical reception:
‘Miss Kate Chopin is another clever woman, but she has put her
cleverness to a very bad use in writing The Awakening. The
purport of the story can hardly be described in language fit for
publication. We are fain to believe that Miss Chopin did not
herself realise what she was doing when she wrote it…The worst
of such stories [of actual or implied marital infidelity,
abandonment of family and explicit expressions of female
sexuality] is that they will fall into the hands of youth…promoting
unholy imaginations and unclean desires. It is nauseating to
remember that those who object to the bluntness of our older
writers will excuse and justify the gilded dirt of these latter days’
Providence Sunday Journal, 4th June 1899, ed., The Awakening, New York: W.W. Norton &
Co,1994,p.166

10. Conclusions:
1. The Awakening can be incorporated into the feminist canon from a “second
wave” feminist perspective but is so much more
2. Layer of ‘local colour’ and the taboos these invoke adds a new layer of
feminism unique to New Orleans at the time of writing
3. As a novel its themes build on a solid foundation, though mainly wrought by
men writing about women rather then as Chopin has done by writing as a
woman for women
4. Although badly received at the time of publication it cleared a path for
women writers, critical thinkers and women themselves
5. Chopin is distinctly Creole author writing a distinctly Creole text

11. Group questions:
1. Why can The Awakening be considered more than a work of
merely local colour? Do works of local colour hold any value to
literary and history scholars, especially in regards to New
Orleans?
2. Why should any discussion of The Awakening take into
account The Plessy v Fergusson case specifically and other
contemporaneous cultural and historical factors?
3. Why did male, European or European based writers
tackling the same subjects often in the same manner as
Chopin NOT come in for the same critical and public ire as
Chopin?
4. From your own critical reading and interpretations can
Edna Pontellier be held up as a Feminist heroine and is
suicide, figurative or literal her only option at the end of the
novel even though as a Catholic it would be a mortal sin?

12. Fin.