The literary development of Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening (1899), took her through several phases of nineteenth-century women’s fiction.
Topic
Kate Chopin's literary development through several phases of nineteenth-century women's fiction — from sentimental novels to local color to New Women writing.
Framework
Highlight Noteworthy. The author traces Chopin's evolution across literary phases.
Main Point
Chopin's literary development moved her through several phases of nineteenth-century women's fiction — adopting and adapting each in turn — culminating in The Awakening's impressionistic exploration of female consciousness modeled on the New Women writers.
P1: Chopin's starting context
Chopin grew up reading sentimental novels (mid-19th-century, romantic language, female characters whose sole concern was social positioning through marriage). When she began writing, she modeled her work on the local colorists.
P2: The local colorists and "women's culture"
After 1865, "women's culture" — the traditional realm of female domestic experience — began to dissolve as women entered higher education and professions. Local colorists wrote regional stories with anthropologist-like detachment, but as women's culture continued to disappear, they began to mourn its demise by investing its images (gardens, houses, domestic artifacts) with mythic significance.
P3: Chopin's use of local color
Unlike the local colorists, Chopin told stories of loneliness, isolation, and frustration. She used local color's conventions to solve a narrative problem: how to deal with extreme psychological states without resorting to the excesses of sentimental novels. By reporting events as part of a region's "local color," she could tell shocking or melodramatic tales in an uninflected manner.