Kate Chopin FAQs

General Questions and Answers

Most of the questions and answers on this page also appear at other places on this site. You can follow the links to those places, where you'll find related information. Scroll down for questions about The Awakening, "The Storm," or other Chopin works.

Q: How do you pronounce "Chopin"?

A: In the French way, like that of the composer, Frédéric Chopin--in English, something like SHOW-pan.

Q: When was Kate Chopin born? Some internet sites say 1851 and others 1850.

A: Her tombstone says 1851, but thirty years ago a French scholar revealed that the United States census and her baptismal certificate (no birth certificate exists) show that Chopin was born on February 8, 1850. The Library of Congress has recently (in September, 2009) accepted the corrected date, but some printed sources and web sites still give her birth date as 1851.

Q: Was Kate born a Chopin or is that her married name?

A: She was born Catherine O'Flaherty. You can read a brief description of her life.

Q: The Kate Chopin biography I'm reading spells Catherine with a "K." Why is there this difference?

A: There's not much of a difference. "Catherine" and "Katherine" would likely be pronounced the same in English, but "Kate" is what Chopin was called by her family and friends. It's common in the States and other English-speaking places for a woman named Catherine to be referred to with the one-syllable Kate rather than the three-syllable Catherine. Because "Cate" would be puzzling to most English readers, we have "Kate"--and therefore, in the longer form, "Katherine."

Q: Was Kate Chopin's husband related, however distantly, to Frédéric Chopin the composer?

A: Apparently not. Kate Chopin has had three biographers, but none of them has discovered a family connection, and a French scholar in Paris has not found a link.

Q: I was wondering where in Missouri Kate Chopin was born and where in Missouri she lived while she wrote her fiction.

A: According to Emily Toth in her biography Unveiling Kate Chopin, Catherine O'Flaherty was born in 1850 in St. Louis on Eight Street between Chouteau and Gratiot. The family in 1865 moved to 1118 St. Ange Avenue in St. Louis.

When Kate returned to St. Louis in 1884 after her years in Louisiana, she lived first at 1125 St. Ange Avenue and then at 1122 St. Ange Avenue. In 1886 she moved to 3317 Morgan Street, which in now Delmar. In 1903 she moved to 4232 McPherson Avenue (the house is still there), where she died in 1904.

Q: I understand that Chopin had several children. What are their names?

A: Between 1871 and 1879 Kate Chopin gave birth to five sons and a daughter--in order of birth, Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza).

Q: Did Kate Chopin speak French as well as English?

A: Yes. Her mother’s family was of French stock, and Kate grew up bilingual.

Q. My literature anthology says that Kate Chopin's mother was Creole. Does that mean that Chopin has African-American roots?

A. No. In American English, the word "Creole" (the noun form of the word) carries several different meanings. For Kate Chopin, the following definition applies (it's from the Merriam Webster online dictionary): "a white person descended from early French or Spanish settlers of the United States Gulf states and preserving their speech and culture."

Q: Was Kate Chopin’s work forgotten until her literary revival in the 1970s?

A: With a few exceptions here and there, The Awakening was. But some of Chopin's short stories were not forgotten. Several of those stories appeared in anthologies from the 1920s on, and several important scholars were writing about her fiction for decades before it caught fire with the appearance of her Complete Works in 1969.

Q: Was Kate Chopin involved in the women's suffrage movement, in the progressive movements for educational reform, health care reform, or sanitation improvement? Was she involved in any other historically significant happenings of her time?

A: Kate Chopin was an artist, a writer of fiction, and like many artists--in the nineteenth century and today--she considered that her primary responsibility to people was showing them the truth about life as she understood it.

So if you're asking if Kate Chopin was involved in social activism as political scientists today would understand that term, the answer is no. She was not a social reformer. Her goal was not to change the world but to describe it accurately, to show people the truth about the lives of women and men in the nineteenth-century America she knew.

If, however, you're asking if Chopin was involved in "historically significant happenings" as many artists would understand those words, then the answer is yes. She was among the first American authors to write truthfully about women's hidden lives, about women's sexuality, and about some of the complexities and contradictions in women's relationships with their husbands.

As the critic Per Seyersted phrases it, Kate Chopin "broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman’s submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce, and of woman’s urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom."

Artists like Kate Chopin see the truth and help others to see it. Once people are able to recognize the truth, then they can create social reform movements and set out to correct wrongs and injustices.

Q: So does that mean that what I read on a blog is true, that Kate Chopin "was an integral part of the evolution of feminism, providing early 20th century readers with feminist literature that is still highly respected and studied today"?

A: No, it's almost certainly not true, simply because, from everything we can tell, little of what many readers today consider Chopin's feminist literature was read in the early years of the twentieth century--The Awakening, for example, or "The Story of an Hour," or, certainly, "The Storm." You might argue that after the 1960s or 1970s Chopin became "an integral part of the evolution of feminism," but she probably had little or no influence on early 20th-century feminist readers.

Q: Why are there French expressions in Chopin's novels and stories?

A: Most of the characters in Kate Chopin's short stories and in her two novels, The Awakening, and At Fault, speak French, Spanish, Creole, or all three, in addition to English. Many people with French and Spanish roots lived in Louisiana, where most of Chopin's works are set, and some of them spoke more than one language. Like Mark Twain and other writers of her time, Chopin was determined to be accurate in the way she recorded the speech of the people she focused on in her fiction. Some editions of her works include translations of French expressions, and Chopin usually subtly glosses such expressions in the text. Missing the meaning of a French expression is not likely to lead to a mistake in understanding a story or novel.

Scroll down for more about this as it applies to The Awakening.

Q: I find it difficult to find the right terms for describing Kate Chopin's style, which I think has some romantic elements but also some realistic ones. In what ways was Chopin influenced by other writers, like Maupassant?

A: Chopin read widely and drew from many movements in nineteenth-century literature—romanticism (she had read Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson), realism (she reviewed a book by Hamlin Garland) and local color (she places her characters in a geographical and historical moment and details their sometimes exotic speech patterns and cultural dispositions). She mentions German philosopher and playwright Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in her work as well as other European writers from Aeschylus to Ibsen. She was deeply influenced by French writers Guy de Maupassant (she loved his economy of detail) and Émile Zola (she was impressed by his determination to tell the truth), both of whom she read in their original French. She understood that Maupassant and Zola rejected sentimental fiction, but she was drawn to the work of the French writer George Sand who at times used sentimental elements to describe a woman trying to balance the well-being of others with her own freedom and integrity.

Q: I understand some critics fault Kate Chopin for her attitudes toward race. Where could I find discussions of that subject?

A: There's been a good deal written about Chopin and race. You might start by reading articles by Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Helen Taylor, and Elizabeth Ammons in the Norton Critical Edition of The Awakening, and you might look at Bonnie James Shaker's Coloring Locals. For a defense of Chopin you might start by checking Emily Toth's Kate Chopin and Bernard Koloski's Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction, and on line you could read Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's comments on the Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening site. You can find information about these and other publications about Chopin and race at the bottom of the Awakening page and the Short Stories page of this site, as well as on pages devoted to individual stories, like "Désirée's Baby."

Q: How can I find out when Kate Choopin wrote her stories and novels and where those works were first published?

A: Composition dates and publication dates for Chopin's works appear on pages 1003 to 1032 of The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, 2006).

Q: Your site lists articles about Chopin's work written in languages besides English. Have people also written books about Kate Chopin in other languages?

A: Yes. Here's a book by a French scholar:

If you know of other books, would you email us?

Q: Can you help with the identity of Mrs. F. M. Estere of 4434 Laclede Avenue of St. Louis and her possible connection with Kate Chopin?

We don't have an answer for this. If you have any information about Mrs. F. M. Estere, would you please email us?

The Awakening

Q: Was The Awakening really banned from libraries in Chopin's hometown of St. Louis?

A: Not so far as we can tell. Emily Toth, Chopin's biographer, tried to verify that claim—one that has been repeated for decades—but could find no evidence to support it. But it is true that The New York Times on July 6, 1902, reported that the Evanston, Illinois, Public Library had removed from its open shelves The Awakening and other books that the library board found objectionable (the article is on p. 9 of the newspaper).

Q: Why are there so many French expressions in the novel? If I don't understand French, how do I know what those expressions mean?

A: There are a couple of ways to think about this.

It's simply a fact that many people with French and Spanish roots lived in Louisiana when Kate Chopin lived there, and some of them spoke more than one language. Most of the characters in The Awakening speak French, Spanish, Creole, or all three, in addition to English. Like Mark Twain and other writers of her time, Chopin was determined to be accurate in the way she recorded the speech of the people she focused on in her work.

But it may be helpful to recognize that Edna Pontellier herself understands French and French culture imperfectly. She has only, as the novel points out in Chapter 2, "a small infusion of French which seemed to have been lost in dilution." She is not a Creole; she is not from Louisiana and did not grow up a Roman Catholic; she is out of her Kentucky or Mississippi Presbyterian environment, out of her native element. So to some extent your puzzlement over those French expressions may be similar to hers. There are suggestions in the novel that at times Edna is not fully aware of what's going on around her.

A few editions of The Awakening include translations of French expressions, and Chopin usually subtly glosses such expressions in the text. Missing the meaning of a French phrase is not likely to lead to a mistake in understanding the novel.

Q: Does Edna Pontellier have sex with Alcée Arobin in Chapter 27 of the novel?

A: Yes. The language in Chapter 27 reflects literary conventions of the 1890s. Kate Chopin almost certainly would not have found a publisher for the novel if she had included more sexually explicit phrasing.

Q: What about the more explicit phrasing in “The Storm”?

A: Chopin did not try to publish that short story. It did not appear in print until long after her death.

Q: Was The Awakening forgotten until Kate Chopin's literary revival in the 1970s?

A: With a few exceptions here and there, it was. But her short stories were not forgotten. Several of the stories appeared in anthologies from the 1920s on, and several important scholars were writing about her fiction for decades before it caught fire with the appearance of her Complete Works in 1969.

Q: Have other writers focused works on women's experience, on a woman's awakening?

A; Yes, many have. Critic Susan Rosowski reminds us that fairy tales like "Snow White," "The Little Mermaid," and "Sleeping Beauty" are about female development, as are novels like Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy, and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle. Rosowski considers The Awakening a prototype of the novel of awakening.

Q: I am sure that when I was in college, my professor told me that in Chapter 13 when Edna is resting at Madame Antoine’s house (after leaving the church with Robert) that she masturbated. I cannot find this anywhere in research about the book. Can you confirm this? Isn't it true that this was one of the reasons The Awakening was not widely accepted in Chopin's time? That's the impression I have.

A: Second question first: So far as we can tell, all comments about The Awakening published in Chopin's lifetime are widely available, and all have been discussed by scholars, teachers, students, and others for decades. Nothing in any of those comments mentions the possibility of a masturbation incident in the book. It is clear that masturbation was not one of the reasons the book was attacked by critics in the 1890s.

About the first question, here is what two Chopin scholars have to say:

Emily Toth: A lot of people teach as fact that when Edna massages her arms and admires them at Madame Antoine's, she's masturbating. I don't see it that way. I think it's admiration, maybe narcissism. I've never seen anything about it in print, and personally I don't think it's a useful interpretation. As Freud allegedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." I'll add what I say: "Sometimes an arm is just--an arm."

Tom Bonner: This is a gross misreading by the letter writer's professor. Even if the professor is using the word "masturbating" metaphorically, it is still a distorted reading. I have run into no articles citing masturbation and Chopin. One of the real problems with many readers today is the imposition of twenty-first century sensibilities on a nineteenth-century author's work.

Q: I'm a teacher and would like help with the French pronunciation of names in The Awakening. Can you tell me how to pronounce the more common names?

A: French speakers would pronounce the French names in the novel as on this chart. The names not included here (like Highcamp or Reisz) are ones that come from other languages (English or German, perhaps) and so would probably have been pronounced as they would be in English.

The names are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you're not familiar with IPA transcription, you should be able to find a guide in a good American dictionary, like the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, or on line.

Q: Has The Awakening been translated into other languages?

A: Yes. It appeared in a French translation by Cyrille Arnavon in 1953.

That edition has illustrations by André Hubert. Here's Edna and Robert:

And here is the first page of the 1953 French translation:

The Awakening has also been translated again into French and into other languages, including Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, and Polish since 1953.

And it was Per Seyersted, a Norwegian scholar, who made Chopin’s complete works available to Americans in the 1960s. Kate Chopin has been an international figure for a long time.

Q: Has The Awakening been made into a film? I can't find such a film anywhere.

A: Yes, there are at least two versions. In 1991, Mary Lambert directed the made-for-cable Grand Isle, with Kelly McGillis playing Edna Pontellier. The film is available on VHS, but not, apparently, on DVD:

Also, earlier, in 1982, director Bob Graham did a feature-length version of the novel called The End of August. It's apparently no longer easily available, but you may be able to find a VHS copy:

There is, in addition, what many critics consider a fine novel by Robert Stone called Children of Light, about a production company making a film of The Awakening using a performer struggling with some of the same issues that Edna struggles with.

You can email us questions about The Awakening.

At Fault

Q: I love The Awakening, but I don't know Kate Chopin's other novel, At Fault. Should I read it? Is it any good?

A: Yes and yes, but with qualifications. If you fell in love with The Awakening at some point in your life and want to preserve that magic moment by remembering Kate Chopin as you knew her from Edna Pontellier's story or from Chopin short stories like "The Storm," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," "The Story of an Hour," or a few others, then perhaps you should read no further. If, though, you want to know Kate Chopin more fully, as a woman not only way ahead of the times but as a complex, sophisticated woman of the times, then reading some of her other stories and her early novel is a good idea.

There is now a Brazilian translation of the novel.

The following short stories are listed in the order they appear in the box at the top left of this page. The questions and answers are the same as those on the pages devoted to the stories.

"The Storm"

Q: The story's title says it is "A Sequel to 'The 'Cadian Ball.' " Does "The Storm"stand by itself or does it need to be read with the earlier story?

A: It stands by itself, but some scholars have argued that Chopin obviously intended for "The Storm" to be read with "At the 'Cadian Ball" and that resonance is lost when they are separated (see one of the questions below). The earlier story describes how Calixta came to marry Bobinôt and how Alcée came to marry his wife. Some anthologies print "The Storm" alone. Many print the two stories together.

Q: Isn't the phrasing of "The Storm" sexually explicit for something written in the 1890s?

A: Yes, the phrasing is way beyond what any respectable American magazine, even a comparatively advanced magazine like Vogue (in which Kate Chopin published nineteen stories), would have printed at the time. From everything we can tell, Chopin did not try to send "The Storm" out to editors. The story was not published until 1969, sixty-five years after Chopin's death.

Q: So readers at the time were uptight about explicit sex in short stories?

A: By the standards of most twenty-first-century American or European magazine readers, yes. But unlike today's countless magazines often selling to small, closely-focused segments of the population, American national magazines in the late nineteenth century usually appealed to broader, more heterogeneous audiences. Many, if not most, magazines of the time were viewed by children as well as adults, so editors needed to keep in mind the tastes and preferences of the people who bought their publications and, perhaps, shared them with their families.

Q: What kind of relationship exists between Calixta and Alcée? What can you infer from their past?

A: Much depends on whether you think of the two as characters who exist only in "The Storm" or if you see them as characters who exist also in "At The 'Cadian Ball." Assuming you are looking at both stories: as we explain on the page for the earlier story, Alcée and his wife Clarisse are Creoles, descendants of French settlers in Louisiana. Calixta and her husband Bobinôt are Acadians, descendants of French-American exiles from Acadia, Nova Scotia, who were driven from their homes by the British in 1755. Most of the Creoles in Kate Chopin's stories are comparatively wealthy, usually landowners or merchants. Most of the Acadians (or 'Cajuns) in the stories are much poorer, living off the land, farming or fishing or working for the Creoles.

So on the basis of the two stories together, you could describe Calixta as coming from a different social class than Alcée, and you could say that it's in good part because of that difference in class that Calixta and Alcée are married to other people. And you could add that, unlike anyone else in either story, Calixta comes in part also from a Spanish-speaking cultural background (her mother is Cuban) and so, as Kate Chopin presents her, she has different ways of behaving, more sensual ways of expressing her sexuality--which is partly why she is so attractive for both Alcée and Bobinôt. As everyone in the earlier story understands, she's not like the other Acadian girls.

In brief, Calixta is an Acadian influenced by Cuban culture who had been attracted to Alcée--and he to her--long before either of them was married (they had some passionate moments together one summer in Assumption Parish, moments that apparently scandalized some people). Calixta married Bobinôt, the earlier story suggests, because Alcée was not available as a marriage partner--at least partly because his Creole family, and certainly Clarisse, think of him as coming from a comparatively higher social class.

Q: I've read an article about "The Storm" that suggests Calixta has some African-American blood. Is that right?

A: No. Her mother is Cuban. Everyone in the community thinks of her as Acadian with some Spanish blood.

Q: Would you describe what looks to me like an odd sort of connection between Chopin's short story "A Shameful Affair" and her stories "At The 'Cadian Ball" and "The Storm"?

A: Perhaps it's not so odd a connection. "A Shameful Affair" is an earlier Chopin story, is set in Missouri rather than in Louisiana, and does not involve Creole or Acadian society. But in some ways it's similar to Chopin's two more famous works in its focus on a man and woman attracted to each other but restrained by the sexual norms of the times.

Mildred and Fred are wealthy, educated people who, because of late nineteenth-century norms, keep their sexual feelings towards others, especially others of their own class, under very tight control. It was, however, common for an upper-class man to have a "fling," as Chopin calls it in "At the 'Cadian Ball," with a woman of a lower social class. An upper-class woman would not likely have a fling with a lower-class man.

But Chopin in this story reverses those male/female roles. Until Mildred gets the letter from her friend (after she and Fred kiss) she does not realize that Fred is from her own class. But he's a handsome, sexually powerful guy, and it's nice--and, she thinks, safe--for her to flirt a little with him.

Fred understands who Mildred is (it's not clear if he realizes that she does not know who he is), but he's on the farm precisely to get away from the norms of his class. He likes being a working-class guy at times, and he avoids contact with Mildred. But when she seeks him out him at the river, he passionately kisses her. Then, remembering himself, he flees, like Alcée Laballière flees from Calixta in Assumption.

The articles by Joyce Dyer and Martin Simpson (in the list at the bottom of this page) may be helpful for you.

Q: What have critics said about "The Storm"?

A: Until 1969, when the Norwegian scholar Per Seyersted first published the story, critics had not heard of its existence (Daniel Rankin did not discuss it in his 1932 Chopin biography). Seyersted praises the story for its "daring," its "happy" and "healthy" treatment of sex. In the story, he says, sex "is a force as strong, inevitable, and natural as the Louisiana storm which ignites it." The work has, he adds, the "unreserved directness and supreme authenticity of truth." Later critics follow Seyersted's lead, and, although some focus on themes like isolation, gender, ethnicity, or autonomy, and a few see the story as immoral and the two lovers as sinners, others consider it one of America's great short stories. One writes that Calixta and Alcée reach out impulsively "for what they want, what they need, what for them is life itself, their 'birthright'--not selfishly, not unaware of the risks and costs, not with the intention of hurting anybody, but with a lust for life itself, with an ecstatic acceptance of what the moment is offering them, with trust and peace and hope."

"At the 'Cadian Ball"

Q: Did this story become known because it is a prequel to "The Storm"?

A: It certainly became better known after readers discovered "The Storm," and from what we can tell, it was not much read before "The Storm" was published in the late 1960s. But it was, in fact, the first of Kate Chopin's short stories to be reprinted after her death. It appeared in 1921 as one of sixteen local color stories in Short Stories of America edited by Robert L. Ramsay and published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin.

Q: Why doesn't Clarisse go to the 'Cadian Ball? And why is she upset that Alcée does?

A: It's a partly matter of social class. Clarisse and Alcée are Creoles, descendants of French or Spanish settlers in Louisiana. Calixta and Bobinôt are Acadians, descendants of French-American exiles from Acadia, Nova Scotia, who were driven from their homes by the British in 1755. Most of the Creoles in Chopin's stories are comparatively wealthy, usually landowners or merchants. Most of the Acadians (or 'Cajuns) in the stories are much poorer, living off the land, farming or fishing or working for the Creoles. Clarisse takes her higher social status as a Creole seriously and thinks Alcée has no business at a 'Cadian ball. "Nice conduc' for a Laballière," she says. She understands, though, that it is common for a Creole man to appear at such get togethers, perhaps in search of a liaison with a 'Cadian woman. It would be unusual for a Creole woman to attend a 'Cadian ball.

Q: I've read an article about "The Storm" that suggests Calixta has some African-American blood. Is that right?

A: No. Her mother is Cuban. Everyone in the community thinks of her as Acadian with some Spanish blood.

"The Story of an Hour"

Q: Is it true that this is Kate Chopin's most popular story?

A: It may be true. The story certainly appears in a great many anthologies these days. From 1929 to about 1970, "Désirée's Baby" was the best known of Chopin's works, praised by critics and often reprinted. When the Complete Works of Kate Chopin was published in 1969, "The Storm"—unknown until that time—became famous almost over night, as did "The Story of an Hour." Today "Désirée's Baby," "The Story of an Hour," and "The Storm" are heavily discussed by scholars and regularly read in college classes, although a few other stories—"A Respectable Woman," "Lilacs," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," "Athénaïse," and "At the 'Cadian Ball," among them—are also frequently read.

Q: Why is the story so powerful? What do readers find in it?

A: In 1975 Susan Cahill called the story "one of feminism's sacred texts," and many readers have since concluded that Kate Chopin's sensitivity to what it sometimes feels like to be a woman is on prominent display in this work—as it is in The Awakening. Chopin's often-celebrated yearning for freedom is also on display here—as is her sense of ambiguity and her complex way of seeing life. It's typical of her to note that it is both "men and women" who "believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature."

Q:You say that the story was first published under the title, "The Dream of an Hour." Who changed that title and why?

A: We don't know. It's true that the story appeared in Vogue in 1894 as "The Dream of an Hour." As late as 1962 critic Edmund Wilson continued to refer to it under that title. But in 1969 it was called "The Story of an Hour" in the Complete Works of Kate Chopin. We have discovered no explanation for the change.

Q: So what does the present title mean?

A: The action of the story seems to play out in about an hour's time.

Q: I've read on a website that readers were scandalized by the story when it was published. Why?

A: It's a mystery to us how the authors of that website know that readers in the 1890s were, in fact, scandalized by the story. Book reviewers were certainly upset by Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening in 1899. We have published reviews showing that. There is, however--so far as we can tell--no printed evidence that the "The Story of an Hour" set off a scandal among readers.

Nevertheless, it is true that, as Emily Toth says in her 1999 book Unveiling Kate Chopin, "Kate Chopin had to disguise reality. She had to have her heroine die. A story in which an unhappy wife is suddenly widowed, becomes rich, and lives happily ever after . . . would have been much too radical, far too threatening in the 1890s. There were limits to what editors would publish, and what audiences would accept."

"Désirée's Baby"

Q: This is an amazing story. Do other people know about it?

A: Yes. It's been reprinted countless times since 1929 and was Chopin's best-known work before The Awakening was revived in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1936, critic Arthur Hobson Quinn called it "one of the greatest short stories in the language," and many readers over the decades have shared his opinion.

Q: I was totally unprepared for the ending. It stunned me! Is this typical of Kate Chopin?

A: Chopin handles closings as well as any writer. "The Storm," "The Story of an Hour," "Fedora," and "A Respectable Woman," among other short stories, also have brilliant last sentences.

Q: Should I have seen that ending coming?

A: There are some suggestions that point to it. The story notes in paragraph six that Armand Aubigny's mother was French. She and her "easy-going and indulgent" husband raised Armand in Paris, where an interracial marriage was, it seems, socially possible in the first half of the nineteenth century, in part because slavery as it was known in rural Louisiana did not exist in mainland France. And the description of L'Abri, Armand's house, in the sixth paragraph carries overtones of trouble to come.

Q: If Armand was eight when his mother died why doesn't he remember her?

A: Perhaps he does remember her. If by your question you mean why doesn't he remember his mother as having dark skin, it may be that she had light skin.

Q: Are there clues in the story to show Armand might have known he was of African American descent?

A: He is of mixed race, but he is not African American, if by that you mean someone who is a descendant of Africans brought to America as slaves. His mother was French. So he is American (on his father's side) and French (on his mother's side), although his mother evidently had roots in Africa. The question of what he knows about his race is not dealt with in the story. Is this the first time he is seeing that letter? The story does not tell us, so we cannot know.

Q: Why is Armand burning things at the end of the story?

A: Apparently he is trying to destroy memories of his wife and child to remove what he thinks of as the taint of their race.

Q: Would it be accurate to say that Désirée and the baby are victims of racism?

A: Readers often see this as a story about racism--defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race." But many readers understand that racism damages both those who are judged and those who are judging. You might argue that racism victimizes everybody in the story, although not, of course, with equivalent consequences.

Q: Is Armand's father dead?

A: Yes.

Q: I'm wondering if you might offer some insight into the importance of La Blanche in the story. The fact that Armand had been at the cabin of La Blanche and the comment by Armand that Désirée's hands were the color of La Blanche's led me to question the relationship between Armand and La Blanche.

A: The story is set before the Civil War, at a time when a white slave owner often considered that because his female slaves were his property, he had a right to have sex with them. Kate Chopin would certainly have been aware of that.

Because of this passage in the story--"And the way he cries," went on Desiree, "is deafening. Armand heard him the other day as far away as La Blanche's cabin"--you might ask why Armand is around La Blanche's cabin.

And you might consider this passage:

"She [Désirée] sat in her room, one hot afternoon, in her peignoir, listlessly drawing through her fingers the strands of her long, silky brown hair that hung about her shoulders. The baby, half naked, lay asleep upon her own great mahogany bed, that was like a sumptuous throne, with its satin-lined half-canopy. One of La Blanche's little quadroon boys--half naked too--stood fanning the child slowly with a fan of peacock feathers. Désirée's eyes had been fixed absently and sadly upon the baby, while she was striving to penetrate the threatening mist that she felt closing about her. She looked from her child to the boy who stood beside him, and back again; over and over. 'Ah!' It was a cry that she could not help; which she was not conscious of having uttered. The blood turned like ice in her veins, and a clammy moisture gathered upon her face."

We don't know what Désirée is thinking, but you might wonder if she sees a resemblance between her own baby and La Blanche's little boy, and--if that's what she sees--if it suggests to her that Armand had been having sex with La Blanche before their marriage. And if you want to look at this long passage in the context of the shorter one, you might want to ask if Désirée wonders if her husband continues to have sex with La Blanche.

Q: How did Kate Chopin know about slavery? Did she grow up with slaves in the house?

A: Yes. Her family in St. Louis, like many families in the city, held slaves in the 1850s.

Q. My literature anthology says that Kate Chopin's mother was Creole. Does that mean that Chopin herself has African roots?

A. No. In American English, the word "Creole" (the noun form of the word) carries several different meanings. For Kate Chopin, the following definition applies (it's from the Merriam Webster online dictionary): "a white person descended from early French or Spanish settlers of the United States Gulf states and preserving their speech and culture."

"A Pair of Silk Stockings"

Q: Something about Mrs. Sommers reminds me of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. But what is it? Edna is certainly not poor. An additional fifteen dollars would not seem like "a very large amount of money" for her as it does for Mrs. Sommers.

A: There may be many resemblances between Mrs. Sommers and Edna Pontellier, but one is especially noticeable. Kate Chopin writes that "impulse" is guiding Mrs. Sommers, and in Chapter XII of The Awakening she describes Edna as "blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility," a passage that calls to mind the sentences from "A Pair of Silk Stockings" at the top of this page.

Q: Mrs. Sommers also reminds me of people I know, people struggling to pay their bills but tempted by clever marketing to spend the little money they have on things they can't afford. Was today's consumer society already in place in Kate Chopin's time?

A: It was emerging, and it included what Robert Arner in the essay collection Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival calls "the appropriation and manipulation of female desire by an increasingly aggressive and male-managed capitalist culture in an attempt to create and sustain an inexhaustible market for services and goods, especially for luxury goods." It included also, Arner argues, "a new sense of self based upon lower- and middle-class imitation of the wealthy through the agencies of fashion and taste."

What happens to Mrs. Sommers, Arner adds, "is exactly what the male managerial system had intended should happen, not particularly to her as an individual but to her as a member of an invented class of people, female shoppers, within the world that May and Macy and Wannamaker [department store owners] were in the process of creating."

Q: People seem to assume that Mrs. Sommers is a widow or a single mother. But could she be a woman married to a man who has lost his fortune and fallen on hard times?

A: There's no evidence in the story to rule out the possibility that Mrs. Sommers' husband is alive but that the couple is poor.

In many of the stories that Kate Chopin included in her two books of short stories, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, we can tell a good deal about some characters because they live at a specific place in rural Louisiana, or they appear in several stories, or characters in other stories talk about them. But Mrs. Sommers does not appear in any other Chopin story and nobody in any other story speaks of her. We do not even know what city or state her story takes place in. All we can tell about her is what we have in those words in "A Pair of Silk Stockings."

Apparently Chopin did not consider Mrs. Sommers' marital status of importance to the story. She keeps her focus on Mrs. Sommers' actions in a center city over a period of several hours, and she does not show us this character's life at home--with or without a husband.

"A Respectable Woman"

Q: In "A Respectable Woman," are the lines of poetry that Gouvernail recites his own or is he quoting someone else?

A: He is quoting Walt Whitman—from section 21 of "Song of Myself" in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. The remaining lines of the apostrophe to the night read:

"Press close bare-bosomed night—press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night—mad naked summer night."

Q: So did Kate Chopin assume that her readers were familiar with Walt Whitman? Did she assume they would find these remaining lines and understand what Gouvernail is thinking?

A: We don't know what she assumed, but she sent this story to Vogue, which was edited at the time by Josephine Redding for people, Kate Chopin would say, of "advanced opinions," a phrase Chopin uses in "Athénaïse" to describe Gouvernail. Chopin's circle of friends in St. Louis in the 1890s certainly included people who would have known Whitman.

"Athénaïse"

Q: How do you pronounce "Athénaïse"?

A: Probably Ah-TEN-ah-ease. But, like the names of some other characters in Chopin's work, it's complicated, perhaps impossible, to know how Chopin herself would have pronounced it or how she would have wanted her readers to pronounce it--or whether she would have cared how it's pronounced. Two Chopin scholars discuss the matter.

Q: This story seems really out of character with Kate Chopin's other works—with The Awakening and stories like "The Storm," "The Story of an Hour," "A Respectable Woman," or "A Pair of Silk Stockings." What do critics think of it?

A: They fall into two camps. Some ignore the story, in part because, like Athénaïse's brother Montéclin, they are unhappy when the life of this independent, daring woman takes—as Chopin phrases it—"a very disappointing, an ordinary, a most commonplace turn, after all." Others find the story one of Chopin's richest, a dress rehearsal for The Awakening in its treatment of a dissatisfied woman following her instincts, and in its setting that moves from a rural area to New Orleans and back to the rural area again. Susan Lohafer considers it a nineteenth-century classic.

Q: Just what is going on near the end of Section II, as Cazeau rides past the old live-oak?

A: Cazeau remembers a moment when as a little boy he was riding on horseback with his father past that tree. His father was bringing back home a slave who had escaped from the plantation, and they stopped by the tree so the slave could take a breath. Cazeau is now on horseback bringing back his wife who had run away from the plantation, and he sees a parallel between the situation of the slave and that of his wife. He finds the thought "hideous."

Q: Isn't Gouvernail an unusual man for a Kate Chopin story?

A: Yes. Most of Chopin's sensitive, intelligent, insightful characters are women. But there are a few exceptions, and Gouvernail is one of them.

"Beyond the Bayou"

Q: I've not heard of this story. Do people know about it? Do critics like it?

A: Yes, and yes--at least some critics do. It appears in several anthologies and college textbooks. And a collection of articles about Chopin's work is titled Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou.

Q: Is Youth's Companion, the magazine where this story was first published, the same magazine that also first printed the American "Pledge of Allegiance"?

A: Yes. Youth's Companion printed the pledge in 1892, the year before publishing Chopin's "Beyond the Bayou." The pledge later became a tradition in American public life.

Q: What do you mean when you say that "Beyond the Bayou" is a children's story?

A: About a third of the short stories Kate Chopin wrote are ones she sent to magazines intended for children--magazines like Youth's Companion or Harper's Young People--or ones with subjects and themes similar to those. Today we know Chopin mostly through her works about intelligent, sensitive, adult women seeking integrity, independence, and fulfillment, struggling with social and cultural constraints. But Chopin had other subjects for her work, and some of those subjects appealed to children.

Several of her children's stories deal with traumatized adults (critic Thomas Bonner speaks of La Folle's "self-imposed isolation") being healed by the power of love.

And critic Barbara Ewell says that the bayou in the story is "a psychological as well as a physical barrier, and crossing it marks La Folle's transition from solitude to the communal life of the plantation."

Q: Did other nineteenth-century American authors whom we think of as classic writers of works for adults also write for children?

A: Yes, among them Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sara Orne Jewett. Some authors began by writing for children and then turned their attention to adults. But Kate Chopin, perhaps because she was raising six children herself, wrote for both adults and children throughout her career.

"A No-Account Creole"

Q: This is an upbeat story. Isn't that unusual for Kate Chopin? I think of her works as pessimistic.

A: Some of Chopin's works-- The Awakening, "The Story of an Hour," and "Désirée's Baby," among them--have dark closings. But some--At Fault, "Athénaïse," "The Storm,"and others--are, in ways, hopeful, suggesting that in spite of social, economic, and other pressures, people have a chance to find happiness.

Q: Aren't Kate Chopin's women usually more courageous? Euphrasie Manton knows what she wants but isn't strong enough to reach for it.

A: Critics often see Euphrasie that way. She is, however, as critic Helen Taylor points out in the recent Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, "a confused and inexperienced woman." And she's not entirely without resources. Like Thérèse Lafirme in Chopin's At Fault (written soon after "A No-Account Creole"), she herself creates the situation that leads to the resolution of the story. Through her letters, she is, albeit unknowingly, responsible for the appearance of Offdean on the plantation and, therefore, in her life.

You might say that early Chopin characters like Euphrasie and Thérèse morph into later characters like Athénaïse, Mrs. Baroda in "A Respectable Woman," Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, or Calixta in "The Storm."

Q: Chopin's description of Wallace Offdean is insightful: "He meant to use his faculties intelligently. . . . Above all, he would keep clear of the maelstroms of sordid work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man may be said alternately to exist, and which reduce him, naturally, to a rather ragged condition of soul." Are there other men like him in Chopin's fiction?

A: A few--perhaps David Hosmer in At Fault or Gouvernail in "A Respectable Woman," "Athénaïse," and, briefly, The Awakening.

Q: I had no idea that so many Kate Chopin characters appear in more than one story. These Santien brothers are all over the place. How would I find out about such characters? And is it common for writers to use the same characters over and over?

A: You can track Chopin's characters in Thomas Bonner, Jr., The Kate Chopin Companion New York: Greenwood, 1988.

It's not unusual for other writers to do what Chopin does. William Faulkner, for one, is fond of repeating characters.

Q: I was upset seeing words like "negroes" and "darkies"in this story. Why did Chopin include them?

A: Chopin’s language here is a picture of the way people in her time spoke to one another. Words like “darkey” and “Negro,” offensive for us in the twenty-first century, were used familiarly by people of color and white people in Chopin’s Louisiana, usually without intended rancor. Kate Chopin reproduced such language in her characters’ speech, as she reproduced people’s dialectal patterns. For her, as for Mark Twain and others of her generation, recording accurately the way people spoke was an important part of being a good writer.

Louisiana at the time was just a decade or so away from slavery. Chopin does not pretend that the color line is gone, that African Americans enjoy complete freedom and equality, or that everyone lives in racial harmony with everyone else. There are racial tensions in several of her stories.

Chopin was, of course, a nineteenth-century, white, Southern woman, but she was also deeply steeped in French culture, being bilingual and bi-cultural from birth. She shares both American and European attitudes toward race, and she always sees more than her characters do.

As we note on other pages of this site, there's been a good deal written about Chopin and race. If you want to explore the subject you might start by reading articles by Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Helen Taylor, and Elizabeth Ammons in the Norton Critical Edition of The Awakening, and you might look at Bonnie James Shaker's Coloring Locals. For a defense of Chopin you might start by checking Emily Toth's Kate Chopin and Bernard Koloski's Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction, and on line you could read Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's comments on the Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening site. You can find information about these and other publications about Chopin and race at the bottom of the Awakening page and the Short Stories page of this site, as well as on pages devoted to individual stories, like "Désirée's Baby."

"Lilacs"

Q: It's strange to read a Kate Chopin story set in France, rather than in Louisiana. What prompted Chopin to turn to France and nuns and a performer rather than stay focused on the Creoles and Acadians she usually writes about?

A: Kate Chopin spoke French throughout her life and visited Paris on her honeymoon. She studied with the sisters of the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart when she was a child. Her lifelong friend Kitty Garesché entered the Sacred Heart Convent. And Chopin loved the theatre and opera. Bernard Koloski argues that she had in mind the great French player Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) as she wrote this story. Bernhardt made many tours of the United States and liked to perform for French-speaking audiences in St. Louis and New Orleans.

Sarah Bernhardt, photographed by Nadar when she was about twenty.

Q: I don't understand: Why is Adrienne banned from the convent?

A: There are other elements in the story, but one straightforward explanation is that she is denied entrance to the convent because someone has revealed that Adrienne lives a wild, scandalous life, a life of "picturesque disorder," as a singer and dancer in Paris. She is not the "older and wiser" widowed woman with "household duties" that the nuns had thought she is. It is hinted in the last paragraphs of the story that Adrienne will try to find out who told the nuns this, who is responsible for "this treacherous turn."

Some critics, however, have argued that Adrienne is banned from the convent because the mother superior is unhappy with Sister Agathe's affection for her. For an article on the subject, check this question on the "Lilacs" page.

Q: It seems to me there are lesbian motifs in this story and other Chopin works. Do critics write about that?

A: Some critics do. Some look at the relationship between Adrienne Farival and Sister Agathe. Christina G. Bucher has discussed at length Chopin's short story "Fedora." Other critics have discussed "Charlie" in the story of that name and Mademoiselle Reisz in The Awakening as lesbian characters.

Q: Did Kate Chopin not include "Lilacs" in her short story collection A Night in Acadie, even though she wrote it at about the same time as the stories in that collection, because it's not set in Louisiana or because it didn't fit thematically with the other stories?

A: Probably because it's not set in Louisiana. Some of the story's themes and motifs are similar to those in Chopin's Louisiana works—a woman being pulled in different directions, yearning for both individual freedom and the comfort of community, feeling tension between living "in the world," as Sister Agathe in the story (and Lucilla Worthington in Chopin's novel At Fault) phrases it, and retreating from the world. Chopin had planned to include "Lilacs" in A Vocation and a Voice, her third collection of stories, but the publisher cancelled the contract for the book, and it did not appear as a separate volume until 1991, long after Chopin's death.

"Fedora"

Q: What does Fedora's kiss at the end of the story mean? I'm really very confused.

A: You can read this story in several ways, and critics have been doing that for decades. Barbara Ewell refers to Fedora's kissing Miss Malthers as an expression of her infatuation for Malthers himself, Peggy Skaggs offers a similar reading, and Joyce Dyer in "The Restive Brute: The Symbolic Presentation of Repression and Sublimation in Kate Chopin's 'Fedora,' " speaks of Fedora as a "bewildered, overwhelmingly repressed woman" who kisses young Malthers' sister out of frustration over her passion for Malthers.

As early as 1972, Robert Arner, in the first modern PhD dissertation on Kate Chopin, wrote of homosexual suggestions in the story, and Christina G. Bucher discusses lesbian connotations in "Perversely reading Kate Chopin's 'Fedora.' "

At the end of the story, Bucher asks, "Of what or whom is [Fedora] thinking? Young Malthers? The young woman and the long, penetrating kiss she just delivered in the lush setting of the country road? Both? Is she contemplating the difficulty of her situation, what to do with this new-found desire, whatever its nature? Is she feeling free after having kissed Miss Malthers? A perverse reading invites us to see this closing image of Fedora as one that is just as ambiguous as the kiss itself; it also allows for a more hopeful, less 'pathological' ending to the story. Perhaps Fedora will find a way to be who she is and to fulfill her desires."

Karen Day suggests that the story presents "a continuum of sexuality and desire, not bound by social constructions."

In brief, some critics tend to see the kiss as embodying, in Dyer's words, "the desperate and pathetic nature of Fedora's conflict." Some offer a lesbian reading. And some argue for multiple possibilities.

Q: Do other Kate Chopin works contain lesbian undercurrents?

A: Thomas Bonner and Jacqueline Olson Padgett have written about the relationship between Adrienne Farival and Sister Agathe in "Lilacs." Other critics have discussed "Charlie" in the story of that name and Mademoiselle Reisz in The Awakening as lesbian characters.

Christina Bucher concludes her "Fedora" article by arguing that a perverse reading "can add richness to our interpretation of texts. It is not meant to replace other readings, or assert its superiority over other readings; it can, however, along with those other readings, give us a fuller, more complete view of the whole."

Q: "Fedora" could be set in almost any wooded farmland area. Isn't it unusual for a Kate Chopin work to have such a vague setting?

A: "The Story of an Hour," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," and some other Chopin stories offer us little detail about when and where they take place. Apparently Chopin did not consider such information important.

Q: Why didn't Chopin publish this story under her own name? Was she afraid of readers' reactions? Also, did she choose "La Tour" as a pen name or did her editor? And what did she or her editor mean by "La Tour"?

A: We don't know.

"A Point at Issue!"

Q: I've read The Awakening and At Fault and have been reading Chopin's short stories in the order you have them listed on the left bar of this site. I thought I was getting a sense for what to expect. But "A Point at Issue!" feels so different from the Chopin I know. How is this story related to everything else she wrote?

A: This is an early story. The difference in feeling you're responding to may be partly a difference in the characters and the setting and, therefore, the language of "A Point at Issue!" Most of Chopin's better-known characters are Creoles or Acadians, many of her famous stories are set in Louisiana, and much of the fiction we associate with her includes Creole and French dialectal expressions.

But Chopin sometimes offers us characters who are not Creole or Acadian (David Hosmer in At Fault), she sometimes sets her stories in other American places ("The Story of an Hour") or in Paris ("Lilacs"), and she sometimes avoids regional dialects ("A Pair of Silk Stockings").

Yet, different as it may feel, "A Point at Issue!" may be helpful in understanding what Chopin was thinking about as she began her writing career. Like several works she included in Bayou Folk, her first collection of short stories, this piece focuses on characters seeking to build a marriage that lets them find balance in their lives, that lets them bond with a partner while maintaining their individuality.

As the story reads, Eleanor and Charles were each "to remain a free integral of humanity, responsible to no dominating exactions of so-called marriage laws." It is achieving exactly such a life that characters--women especially--struggle with in many of Chopin's later works.

Q: Is the point of this story that Eleanor is not strong enough to get what she wants? Is that why she goes running back to her husband?

A: Eleanor and Charles are both fearful that their spouses have been unfaithful. Eleanor admits to the fact. Charles, as Chopin tells us, in "man's usual inconsistency," has "quite forgotten" his own jealousy.

"The element that was to make possible" the union between Eleanor and Charles, Chopin writes, "was trust in each other's love, honor, courtesy, tempered by the reserving clause of readiness to meet the consequences of reciprocal liberty." In a way, then, both partners have been less than fully ready to "meet the consequences of reciprocal liberty." If Eleanor is, as you phrase it, "not strong enough to get what she wants," then neither is Charles.

To be sure, Eleanor has other reasons for returning to the States. She has, after all, accomplished what she set out to do in Paris.

"Madame Célestin's Divorce"

Q: Isn't divorce an unusual subject for Kate Chopin?

A: No. The subject of divorce is central to Chopin's first novel, At Fault. Divorce was a matter of much discussion in Kate Chopin's time--in both America and Europe. In the 1880s the divorce rate in the United States was increasing more than twice as fast as was the rate of population growth.

Q: Am I wrong to find sexual symbolism in Chopin's treatment of a broom in this story, especially in the last paragraph?

A: Kate Chopin is clever in her use of imagery--and in framing her closing paragraphs, witness "The Storm," "The Story of an Hour," "Désirée's Baby," and "A Respectable Woman."

You can email us other questions about Kate Chopin works.

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