The literary development of Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening (1899), took her through several phases of nineteenth-century women’s fiction. Born in 1850, Chopin grew up with the sentimental novels that formed the bulk of the fiction of the mid–nineteenth century. In these works, authors employed elevated, romantic language to portray female models the works of a group of women writers known as the local colorists.
After 1865, what had traditionally been regarded as “women’s culture” began to dissolve as women entered higher education, the professions, and the political world in greater numbers. The local colorists, who published stories about regional life in the 1870s and 1880s, were attracted to the new worlds opening up to women, and house became an emblem of female nurturing; and the artifacts of domesticity became virtual totemic objects.
Unlike the local colorists, Chopin devoted herself to telling stories of loneliness, isolation, and frustration. But she used the conventions of the local colorists to solve a specific narrative problem: how to deal with extreme psychological states without resorting to the excesses of the sentimental novels she read as a youth. By could tell rather shocking or even melodramatic tales in an uninflected manner.
Chopin did not share the local colorists’ growing nostalgia for the past, however, and by the 1890s she was looking beyond them to the more ambitious models offered by a movement known as the New Women. In the form as well as the content of their work, the New Women writers pursued or content than by their sustained focus on faithfully rendering the workings of the protagonist’s mind.
What this question is testing
Topic
The author is tracing the development of the writer Kate Chopin — showing how she moved through three different kinds of women's fiction in the 19th century.
Framework
Highlight Noteworthy.
Main Point
The simpler version: Chopin grew up reading sentimental novels (where women just want to get married well), but she didn't want to write like that. She started by imitating "local colorists" — writers who described regional life with detachment and increasingly mourned a dying domestic women's culture. She borrowed their detached style as a way to tell darker stories without going melodramatic. By the 1890s she was looking past them at the "New Women" writers, who experimented with form and explored women's minds. The Awakening shows her absorbing that approach.
P1: Where she started
Sentimental novels formed the bulk of her childhood reading. As a writer, she modeled herself on local colorists, not on the sentimentalists.
P2: The local colorists' world
After 1865, the traditional domestic women's culture started disappearing. Local colorists wrote about regional life, observing it almost like anthropologists. But as that women's culture continued to fade, they began to romanticize it — turning gardens, houses, and household objects into mythic symbols.
P3: How Chopin used them
Chopin wasn't writing nostalgic stories. She wrote about loneliness, isolation, frustration. But she used the local colorists' detached, regional-observation style as a tool — it let her describe psychologically extreme situations without the gushy excess of the sentimental tradition.
Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.