Chopin, Kate - Barbara C. Ewell (essay date summer 1999)

Barbara C. Ewell (essay date summer 1999)

SOURCE: Ewell, Barbara C. “Unlinking Race and Gender: The Awakening as a Southern Novel.” Southern Quarterly 37, no. 3-4 (summer 1999): 30-37.

[In the following essay, Ewell argues that both The Awakening and Chopin were heavily shaped by the tradition of Southern American literature.]

We do not typically think of The Awakening as a southern novel, which (set in Louisiana and dealing with many Reconstruction issues, such as the post-war role of women and life in the upper classes) it certainly is. At the same time, we do customarily regard Kate Chopin as a southern writer—despite the fact that she was from St. Louis (albeit in a family of southern sympathizers) and that she only spent the thirteen years of her marriage in the South and that much of her fiction (fully a third) is not specifically southern. But if Kate Chopin is not technically a southerner and The...

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