Chopin, Kate - Elizabeth Ann Wolf (essay date winter-spring 1997)
Elizabeth Ann Wolf (essay date winter-spring 1997)
SOURCE: Wolf, Elizabeth Ann. “The Politics of Rhetorical Strategy: Kate Chopin's ‘La Belle Zoraïde’.” Southern Studies 8, nos. 1 & 2 (winter-spring 1997): 43-51.
[In the following essay, Wolf contends that Chopin's indirect rhetorical strategy functions to attack prevailing myths of racial superiority and Southern womanhood in “La Belle Zoraïde.”]
The large body of Kate Chopin's fiction was written in the 1890s, during a critical transition in the history of the social and legal classification of Creole identity in Louisiana1. This point does not assume its full significance, however, until it is considered in the context of Louisiana's legislation of race and gender relations during the same period2. Surprisingly, that context has received little critical attention.
At the close of the centennial celebration of Chopin's writing, scholarship has...
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