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 Awakening does not always “feel” like a southern novel, both writer and text were shaped by the very specific contexts of southern literature.

Perhaps what has diminished our sense of this famous feminist text as southern is the conflicted character of those contexts themselves. On the one hand, as Susan Donaldson so articulately argues, the canon of southern literature has been determinedly defined as “white, male, and conservative” (493). Donaldson traces what she calls the southern “project of imposing boundaries and exclusions” back from modernists like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom to antebellum critics like Henry Timrod and William Gilmore Simms (495). But such careful boundary-keeping—especially against women and African Americans—only exposes the “gender and racial anxieties” they are meant to contain (Donaldson 493). Such practices of exclusion simply reveal how profoundly southern literature resists enclosure any carefully marked perimeters, how fundamental and unstable race and gender are in southern writing.

Naming the crucial links among race, gender, and notions of region has become a familiar practice in southern studies.¹ In numerous texts, writing by African Americans or by white women has been shown to challenge standard contours of southern identity and its explicit reflection of patriarchal values. For example, both the reevaluation of nineteenth-century local color and the attention to the slave narrative as a southern genre have exposed the gaps and fissures that everywhere disturb the serenity of the plantation myth underlying definitions of southern literature.² But if inserting an alternative notion of gender or race (or class or sexuality) into a text undeniably troubles its regional identity, the sheer persistence of southernness alone suggests that the ultimate effect is not as destructive as those who abhor racism and sexism or elitism might hope: southern identity might waver a bit, but it does not shatter. Deconstructing southern literature turns out to be no easy feat, not least because of the complexity of the interrelationships on which a notion of region depends. The staggering appeal of southern mythology affirms just how coherently its pieces interlock and how many can be damaged or absent without seriously distorting its recognizability.

At the turn of the century, when Chopin was writing her own text about a southern woman, southernness was being sharply contested—as indeed were notions about women, about race, and even class. The South in 1898 (when Chopin began to write her second novel) was just emerging from the wholesale reconfiguration were not altogether set. The effects of Plessy v. Fergusson had legally, but not socially, rigidified the color line; the defeat of southern Populism in the elections of 1896 had practically but not completely dashed hopes for improving the lot of working-class southerners; and the racial compromises of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to attract southern support had not fully resolved the “woman question” in the region.³ Chopin's own agenda as a writer could not but be shaped by these shifting and unstable contexts in which southern literature, indeed, the national identity itself, was being redefined. Examining just how Chopin negotiated these contexts and with what success is one way of gauging the southernness of her novel. But such an inquiry also exposes how Chopin's proposed interrogation of gender roles implicates a complex web of southern identity, one whose designs on women could not easily—if at all—be detached from notions of race and class. By employing a southern setting for her reconsideration of the ways that social roles limit female selfhood, Chopin also discloses how fiercely the fortresses of southern identity resist any challenge to its interlocking hierarchies.

Chopin was certainly conversant with the texts that had helped to shape southern consciousness. As we know from her notebooks and her biographers, her reading habits as a child were both conventional and wide-ranging. Her best friend, Kitty Garesché, recalled that they particularly enjoyed Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott—the novelist whose romantic spirit and aristocratic trappings southerners had eagerly incorporated into their fictional self-images. As an avid reader and an active contributor to the burgeoning literature of southern local color in the 1890s, Chopin would have understood, with no small degree of sympathy, the issues of southern identity and social conservatism that the genre encoded. (Her husband had after all been a member of New Orleans's reactionary White League.) She knew the work of Thomas Nelson Page (whose Red Rock was a bestseller in 1898) and Joel Chandler Harris (whose Sister Jane she reviewed in 1897 [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin [hereafter abbreviated as CW] 718-19]), as well as that of James Lane Allen (whose “exquisite” short novel “A Kentucky Cardinal” she approvingly mentions in 1894 [Miscellany 91]), Ruth Stuart (whom she met with great pleasure in 1897 [CW 711-12]), and many others, including George Washington Cable and Grace King, with whom she was often compared.

Among the representations most crucial to postwar fiction, and on whom southern regional identity most prominently depended, was of course the antebellum belle. As Anne Goodwyn Jones insists, “the southern lady is at the core of [the] region's self-definition; the identity of the South is contingent in part upon the persistence of its tradition of the lady” (4). As traced by contemporary scholars, the lineage of the belle lies both in the romantic traditions of Sir Walter Scott and in the domestic fiction by women that dominated mid-nineteenth-century canons. From Scott and other sectionalist writers (like Lord Byron and Jane Porter, whose The Scottish Chiefs was recalled by Kitty Garesché as one of hers and Katie's childhood favorites [Toth 51-52]), the belle obtained her aristocratic status. Placed on the pedestal of chivalric caste, she was relieved (theoretically at least) from the domestic drudgery assigned to most women of the world. In the South, slavery enabled upper-class (and many middle-class) white women to assume in fact the exceptional status of leisure conventionally reserved for nobility. Pointedly excused from any other specific labor, the belle, as Kathryn Lee Seidel explains, became herself the culture's “object or work of art … the projection of her society's attitudes toward woman and sexuality, toward blacks and guilt, toward itself and its weakness and loss” (xv). But as Diane Roberts observes, this elevated “positioning within the political discourse” of southern feudalism also “placed her in the center of proslavery rhetoric” (6). Her leisure and refinement provided the chief evidence of aristocratic privilege, and the belle became the focus of any effort to defend or to discredit the South's peculiar institutions. Maintaining the privilege of the white woman became both a literal and figurative justification for slavery before the Civil War and for Jim Crow after it. The Lady was the South; as in other romantic traditions, her status and fate became identified with that of the region. Seidel traces this merging of the rhetorical image of the South as the Great Lady, fallen but still dignified, with the post-war version of the antebellum belle, who begins as spokesperson for the lost cause and gradually becomes its alter ego.⁴

The belle's other ancestry derived from the traditions of domestic fiction, with its powerful ideology of feminine culture. Writers like E. D. E. N. Southworth, Susan Warner, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (all familiar to Chopin) helped to construct an image of women as morally superior, functioning in a domestic sphere of her own, which served both to challenge and to support the public sphere of male power. As virgin, wife, and especially as mother, the Victorian lady epitomized the highest values of her culture. The southern belle was par excellence such a lady, defined by and destined for motherhood. But like her aristocratic status, that destiny made her a crucial site for white southern identity. As Roberts writes, if the body of the belle “provide[d] white heirs to the property[,] her chastity guarantee[d] racial purity” (186); a particular concept of gender thus explicitly maintained the privileges of class and white supremacy.

As in domestic fiction generally, motherhood in plantation ideology also assumed a spiritual cast, though not without significant contradictions. Like the “motherland” itself, the plantation mistress “mothers” all—even those persons who as chattel could be sold or abused. Such cruelty patently violated the regime of care that the idea of women's “domestic space” enshrines, so that, in a bitter irony, the nurturing work of women reinforced the patriarchal structures of a slave society. The ideal of womanhood both valorized the duties of the mother as caregiver and modeled a devout obedience to “higher powers,” even when those “higher powers” manifested themselves as the male marketplace—from whose intrusions the home was supposedly a refuge. The sacredness of motherhood could in no way protect a woman's children, whether actual or metaphorical, from the cruel requirements of profit.

If the ethic of care disguised certain demands of the marketplace, it also concealed what Roberts neatly terms the “fissures in sexual decorum” that marked actual plantation life (188). For while motherhood was the special calling of the lady, the passage through sexual experience necessary for individual women to reach that elevated status was systematically effaced in nineteenth-century discourse on womanhood, markedly so in the South. White women were not supposed to be sexual; that physical and implicitly inferior task was imposed on “other,” less pure, females: whores and black women (which in southern ideology were indistinguishable). This suppression of sexuality among “ladies” was central to the ideal of nineteenth-century motherhood. An influential tract on The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857) by Sir William Acton intones, for example, that “a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions” (qtd. in Roberts 188). Roberts also observes how “it was a southern gynecologist … who recommended that a patient who found intercourse ‘painful’ have sex while unconscious on chloroform so that she might conceive” and thus achieve her sacred duty of motherhood (189). This erasure of women's sexuality in a rhetoric of maternal worship ensured that no threatening female passion would unsettle the systems of marriage, family, and racial caste that their bodies were required to support. Not only in the antebellum period but even more emphatically after the war, when those institutions were being steadily pressured by large populations of ex-slaves and intensifying economic and political forces, that erasure proved a significant bulwark against unwanted social change.

Much Reconstruction fiction consciously constructed this view of self-sacrificing, asexual motherhood, reinforcing its potency as an ideal by merging female identity with southern regionalism. Since “true women” can exist only in and for their children (and the South can only live for its “true inheritors”), any sexual violation (which damaged the integrity of the racial or property lines insured by her purity) or sexual assertiveness (which manifested a threatening independence), necessarily results in the death of the lady, either figuratively or literally. Yankee ideas, black upstarts, and “outside agitators” all represented mortal, as well as moral, danger to the southern belle. Committed exclusively to the welfare of her children, she manifested an absolute, ahistorical identification with “traditional ways of life,” even though those traditions defined away her selfhood almost as radically as it abolished the humanity and independence of the former slaves. Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905), for example, among the most virulent of the southern apologia, makes explicit this connection among woman, child, and region: the mother so identifies with her raped daughter that she leaps to death with her, indicating, as Roberts suggests, her clear preference for annihilation over the chaotic reality of Reconstruction in which such “violations” of social order have become so commonplace that neither the southern lady nor the traditional values of the motherland can continue to exist (190).

Chopin's first novel, At Fault (1890), which exploited many of the conventions of southern fiction, including its North-South romance structure and its focus on the belle, signaled the beginning of her own fictional exploration of female desire within the confining social and institutional contexts of the South. However, throughout her short stories of the next decade, she thoughtfully posed a variety of narrative answers to how women might achieve or maintain selfhood inside and against the rigid roles prescribed for them—not exclusively in southern contexts.⁵ In that exploration, Chopin aligned herself with a new generation of women writers, many of whom, like Sarah Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Catherwood, or Mary Austin, were using the conventions of local color to express their own conflicted responses to the positive, though restrictive, aspects of “domestic culture” and the need to articulate their emerging sense of independent female selfhood. Linda Dowling asserts that the rebellion against Victorian culture and the cult of motherhood was expressed by these writers “chiefly through sexual means—by heightening sexual consciousness, candor, and expression” (qtd. in Showalter 69). Female sexuality, the admissability of passion for women, became the battleground for female selfhood, with motherhood emerging as an equivocal adversary.⁶

For southern women writers, the admission of sexuality into women's experience, even in fiction, was particularly difficult. As numerous Reconstruction novels and tracts insisted, challenging the ideal of the belle challenged sectional loyalty as well.⁷ Preserving the southern lady inviolate and impervious either to internal resistance or outside influences confirmed the South's regional fidelity to its old “verities” of caste and race. In posing the dilemma of her heroine explicitly in terms of motherhood (an issue that she had approached in several short stories, notably “Wiser than a God,” “Regret,” and “Athénaïse”), Chopin knew that she was engaging head-on the central issue for many nineteenth-century women writers: how to reclaim women's displaced desire, so that she might, in Cynthia Wolff's terms, re-possess her own libido from her children (8) or, in Edna terms, retain the “essential.” As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese suggests, Chopin may well have thought that her explorations of female sexuality were less threatening to the southern social order than exploring women's social independence. In other words, as Fox-Genovese argues, Chopin may have believed that Edna's struggle—that every woman's struggle—was an individual matter, necessary for personal fulfillment, but only incidental to the larger social structures that constrained her (39): that the lady's release from the pedestal would not undo the society that put her there.

But by setting her novel in south Louisiana, Chopin, whether she meant to or not, was also engaging issues critical to southern identity. Given her resistance to being classified as a regionalist and the drift of her late fiction away from specifically southern settings, it is unlikely that she saw her new novel as part of the contemporary conversation on the fate of the South. She had already been there and done that in At Fault. But southern identity implied not simply a useful construction of womanhood, but also its complex interdependence on race and class, not all of which was Chopin equally prepared to challenge. As Margaret Ferguson analogously argues of Aphra Behn's Oronooko, Chopin's asymmetrical allegiances to woman's desire and white, upper-class privilege strikingly reveal the intricate interdependence of region upon constructions of race, class, and gender. Not necessarily intending to write a southern novel, but only to make use of its evocative locales, Chopin discloses the dependent relationship between what seems to be an individual woman's desire for “personal fulfillment” and the system of hierarchies that circumscribes any southern identity. The lady simply cannot escape being southern, just as Chopin's parable about seeking freedom from the restraints of gender ultimately cannot separate itself from the suppressions of race and class that its setting presupposes. Nonetheless, writing out of—or into—such contrary allegiances, Chopin successfully exploits those conflicting relationships toward her own ends: creating selfhood for her character and narrative authority for herself.

The creole South in which Chopin sets Edna's search represented a familiar fictional terrain, one whose exotic distances and conventional assumptions helpfully exaggerated the role of women that she wished to explore and critique. Chopin could rely on audiences, northern and southern, to appreciate the importance of being a lady in the upper-class South—and creole society was, thanks to Cable, viewed as notoriously elitist and exclusive. But Chopin uses that elitism not only to underline Edna's difference as an outsider (a “northern” southerner, whose radical ideas are specifically alien to the conservative creoles), but also to provide her with an economic mobility that in fact gives her choices. Edna's very presence on Grande Isle indicates her economic means to escape the heat and disease of New Orleans's summers, a status confirmed by the upper-class occupations she pursues in the city: entertaining the female relatives of Léonce's business associates, attending musical soirees at the Ratignolles or the racetrack with her father and Alcée Arobin, participating in Léonce's decoration and travel plans. Mr. Pontellier's wealth underwrites Edna's leisure, though she begins to resist the constraints imposed by that ladyhood. That Edna wants to be an artist rather than a cultural artifact certainly affirms her agency, but that she can in fact “do it” demonstrates that even her presumed autonomy depends on her position in the same culture whose confinements she resists. When Edna begins to defy her conventional role, she already has what Virginia Woolf knew was essential: a room of her own. As a southern mistress (rather than as, say, a single or lower-class woman), Edna can enlist the whole hierarchy of her household “in the service of art”; children, quadroons, housemaids—all take turns posing in the atelier as material for her self-expression (CW 19: 939). The very responsibilities that Edna experiences as encumbrances to her autonomy specifically enable her to explore it.

Edna's freedom assumes racial as well as economic caste. Unlike her contemporaries King and Stuart and most other southern writers, Chopin was not particularly engaged by southern sectionalism and the racist agenda of segregation that most defenders of the South supported. Even so, as Violet Harrington Bryan indicates, The Awakening tacitly approves the racial structures of southern society (58). The labor and presence of black people are systematically assumed in the novel. Edna's spiritual journey is directly supported by the nameless black servants who care for her children and cook her meals and drive her carriages while she tries to figure out how to be a lady and still have a self. As Pamela Menke argues, Chopin's focus (not unlike Behn's) simply did not permit her to see the ways that the chafing suppression of her own “dark desires” depends upon the control of the same “dark people” who make possible her individual enfranchisement.

If the notion of female autonomy is not separate from southern contexts but in fact dependent upon them, even Chopin's focal issue—detaching “womanhood” from synonymity with selflessness—is complicated by southernness. Edna protests to Adèle that she simply wants to preserve what is “essential” about her being. She would readily sacrifice the external and physical “self” that motherhood demands (“Nobody has any right—except children perhaps. … Still, I shouldn't want to trample upon the little lives” [38: 995-96]), but she does not want to allow that sacrifice to exhaust her entire identity as a human being. But while Edna perceives sexual desire as the touchstone of a deeper selfhood, the sine qua non of existence, the novel itself retains alternative space for more conventional options. Though Edna pities the Ratignolles' life of “domestic harmony” as “appalling and hopeless ennui,” Chopin clearly reserves more irony for Edna's vague longing for “life's delirium” than for Adèle's apparently rich and sexually satisfied life (18: 938). Conspicuous in her fertility as well as in her marital content, Adèle counters Edna's restless desire with an affirmation of the mother-woman that does not, in fact, exclude a satisfying female sexuality. If “[t]here are no words to describe [Madame Ratignolle] save the old ones” reserved for “the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams” (4: 888), those words only half-conceal their sexual charge: “the spun-gold hair that comb nor confining pin could restrain … two lips that pouted, that were so red one could only think of cherries or some other delicious crimson fruit” (4: 888). The perfect southern mistress perfectly congruent and even happy with her assigned place in creole society, Adèle astutely recognizes Edna's own alienation and warns Robert, “She is not one of us; she is not like us” (8: 900). If Edna's difference does indeed challenge the sufficiency of motherhood in meeting the needs of a fully human self, it nonetheless fails to discount the adequacy of that role for at least some women within the limited terms of creole society. The presence of Adèle, desiring and desirable, as well as a source of unfailing good sense and sound advice, unsettles Chopin's own critique of conventional mother-womanhood.⁸ When stretched across the narrow grid of region—or any other cultural space—the selflessness of women appears a perfectly comprehensible, even admirable, description of selfhood.

While Edna's central insistence on her “own way” exposes intolerable constrictions on southern places for women, it still cannot entirely deconstruct southern womanhood. The radical ambivalence of her suicide, together with the contradictory affirmations of southern hierarchy that the text incorporates, ultimately minimizes the effectiveness of Edna's revolt. Even her most dramatic attempt to move out of the social place assigned to her (like the novel's singular focus on gender) results in an ironic reaffirmation of the larger systems that define female status. The pigeon house is, after all, purchased with Edna's father's money and staffed by a black servant, and though Edna can invite Robert to resist a conventional relationship there, she cannot finally rescind his gentlemanly allegiance to patriarchal propriety—or stop him from leaving.

In posing her heroine's dilemma as essentially gendered, Chopin succeeded in undermining one version of the southern belle: the nurturing, selfless, undesiring female. But to construct her alternative in a specifically southern setting, Chopin also had to leave in place the economic and racial hierarchies that had made the belle central to southern ideology. Differences of race and class were critical to the exaggerated female identity that Chopin sought to challenge. Yet Edna's own difference from southern society remains equivocal. Her (admittedly incipient) version of autonomous selfhood still depends on the same hierarchies of class and race that support the conventional belle. By framing Edna's repression solely in terms of feminine desire and not also in terms of the racist hierarchies the belle is meant to protect, Chopin corroborates a modern critique of the South, one that insists on the interdependence of race and gender and class in defining regional identity—or any enclosed system. In its partiality, Edna's problem and her solution remain personal and unique—and thus safely marginal. At the end, Edna may seem to slough off the stifling roles that constrict her dream of an essential self, but her birth remains an act of individualism, itself enveloped by figures of the South she has supposedly rejected. The voices of the sea are those that recall her to a very southern place of fathers and families, sycamores and cavalry officers, humming bees and musky pinks (CW 39: 1000).

Partiality inevitably limits the effectiveness of Chopin's interrogation, but it also enables her critique. For if Edna is not wholly outside the paradigms of southern culture, neither is she contained by them. Chopin's calculated use of southern womanhood does heighten Edna's dilemma, and the novel's insistence on the ownership of sexual desire as critical to human wholeness does conspicuously broaden the fictional territory of female identity. At the same time, Chopin's deployment of a southern locale in the interests of a problem she clearly understood to be “universal” reflects a notion of region as a far more significant space than its contemporary relegation to “mere local color” would admit.

Unfortunately for Chopin's own authority as a writer, neither of these achievements were much appreciated by her early readers. Precisely because Edna was a southerner, her concerns (like all regional matters) could be all the more easily dismissed by literary history as merely the plight of another aberrant southern “other”—certainly “not one of us.” And even when the importance of the South as a site for examining issues of national concern was acknowledged, it was race, not gender that engaged modern attentions. Indeed, southern writing has remained markedly resistant to images of female autonomy even though it has not infrequently challenged the erasure of black people's individuality. If southern writers considered the problem at all, they continued to isolate and privatize women's resistance to oppressive social roles, failing to perceive their function in supporting white supremacy or sectional loyalty, matters which even many southern white women continued to sympathize with or defend. If Chopin could not see the systemic links between racism and sexism, she was hardly alone. But she was unique in appreciating how damaging to white women were the narrow role of the southern belle and the loss of sexuality to female identity. By writing about that dilemma as applicable to “all” (white upper-class) women, Chopin thus not only profoundly revised the place of female desire, but she also expanded regional writing beyond sectionalism, opening the way for the next century's renderings of women as autonomous subjects and the South as the site of this nation's most searing self-examinations. Neither the southern novel nor the southern woman could ever be the same.

Notes

1. The best recent contribution to this discussion is Jones and Donaldson's Haunted Bodies. See especially their introduction, “Rethinking the South through Gender” (1-19.) See also the essays in Humphries.

2. On reassessing southern local color, see Taylor and Ewell.

3. See Ayers for fuller explication of these issues.

4. Seidel shows how the belle merely articulates the southern perspective in early works like William DeForest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion (1867), but functions more and more allegorically in novels like DeForest's The Bloody Chasm (1881), or Page's very popular Red Rock (1897), or Cary Eggleston's rather obvious Dorothy South (1902); Seidel, 23ff.

5. See “Mrs. Mobry's Reason,” “A Shameful Affair,” “Lilacs,” “Her Letters,” “The Kiss,” “Fedora,” and “An Egyptian Cigarette,” among others.

6. Earlier in the century, the role of motherhood had been, in Harriet Stowe's words, “the ‘Woman Question’ of the day” (Showalter 14). But instead of trying to bring maternal virtue to the “public sphere,” the new women writers of the 1890s were asking if motherhood itself were not an obstacle to creativity and personal fulfillment.

7. Thomas Nelson Page's nostalgic anatomization in The Old Dominion: Her Making and Manners (1908) is one of the most explicit versions of this identification (see Roberts 8-9).

8. Certainly Chopin's affirmation of motherhood in numerous short stories, like “Athénaïse,” “Regret,” or “A Matter of Prejudice,” together with her own evident personal satisfactions in the role, reinforce the ambiguity in Edna's desire for autonomy. See Chopin's comments about her own first experience of motherhood (Miscellany 92).

Works Cited

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Bryan, Violet Harrington. The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender. Knoxville: UP of Tennessee, 1991.

Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

———. A Kate Chopin Miscellany. Ed. Per Seyersted and Emily Toth. Natchitoches: Northwestern Louisiana State UP, 1979.

Donaldson, Susan V. “Gender, Race, and Allen Tate's Profession of Letters in the South.” In Jones and Donaldson. 492-518.

Ewell, Barbara C. “Changing Places: Women and the Old South; or What Happens When Local Color Becomes Regionalism.” Amerikastüdien/American Studies 42.2 (1997): 157-79.

Ferguson, Margaret W. “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oronooko.” Women's Studies 19 (1991): 159-81.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “The Awakening in the Context of the Experience, Culture, and Values of Southern Women.” Approaches to Teaching Chopin's “The Awakening.” Ed. Bernard Koloski. New York: MLA, 1988. 34-39.

Humphries, Jefferson, ed. Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990.

Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

Jones, Anne Goodwyn, and Susan Donaldson, eds. Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998.

Menke, Pamela. “The Catalyst of Color and Women's Regional Writing: At Fault, Pembroke, and The Awakening.” Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (1999): 9-20.

Roberts, Diane. Faulkner and Southern Womanhood. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994.

Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Southern Belle in the American Novel. Tampa: U of South Florida P, 1985.

Showalter, Elaine. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: Morrow, 1990.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Un-utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in The Awakening.” Studies in American Fiction 24 (1996): 3-22.