[In the following essay, Walker explores ways to incorporate Chopin's New Orleans Creole setting into classroom discussion of The Awakening.]

One dimension of Kate Chopin's The Awakening likely to be overlooked in the classroom is the richness of the historical and cultural background against which the novel takes place. New Orleans Creole culture in the late nineteenth century constituted a world unto itself—a set of traditions, mores, and customs unlike any other in America. Indeed, Chopin's descriptions of this culture serve as more than mere backdrop; the contrast between Edna's upbringing in Kentucky and the Creole society of Léonce Pontellier creates a subtle but persistent thread in the novel, one that helps to explain Edna's restlessness and alienation from the society around her. Approaching the novel as—at least in part—an account of the clash between the dominant southern culture in which Edna was raised and the New Orleans Creole subculture in which she finds herself after her marriage allows students not only to better understand a part of American cultural history but also to see Edna as a woman influenced by her past as well as by the events and surroundings of her present.

As Per Seyersted's biography and the letters and diary entries in the Kate Chopin Miscellany make clear, The Awakening is far from autobiographical. Kate Chopin and Edna Pontellier were the products of very different backgrounds, and that difference influenced their individual responses to the mores and values of New Orleans Creole culture toward the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas Edna has come to her marriage directly from the stern Protestantism of her father's home, Chopin grew up immersed in the cosmopolitan life of the Creoles in both St. Louis and New Orleans. Chopin's maternal grandfather, Wilson Faris, was a Kentuckian, a circumstance that, though it may well have contributed to Chopin's understanding of southern life east of the Mississippi River, had little effect on the atmosphere in which she was raised. In addition, Chopin had traveled extensively before she settled in New Orleans, and her perspective on cultural variety was far wider than that of Edna. On her way to New York to embark on a several-month honeymoon tour of Europe, Chopin commented favorably on Cincinnati and its beer gardens but was not at all pleased by Philadelphia, which she described as a “gloomy puritanical looking city” (Seyersted and Toth 68). The breadth of Chopin's experience with travel and reading—especially by the time she wrote The Awakening in her mid-forties—distinguishes her from the unworldly Edna and provides her with a far greater sense of cultural relativism.

The setting of the novel derives from Chopin's residence in New Orleans from 1870 to 1879 as well as from earlier visits there with her family. Born in St. Louis to an Irish-Catholic father and a French-Creole mother, Kate O'Flaherty married Oscar Chopin, a Creole from Natchitoches, Louisiana, and the couple settled in New Orleans, where Oscar became a cotton merchant. The Chopins lived in what was known as the “American” part of the city, an area now known as the Garden District, across Canal Street from the French Quarter. Constantinople Street and Louisiana Avenue, where the Chopins had successive residences, formed part of a burgeoning suburb outside what most long-time residents considered “real” New Orleans: the Vieux Carré. In fact, Per Seyersted, Chopin's biographer, mentions that Oscar Chopin's father, who had come to Louisiana from France and had clung to his French heritage, disliked the fact that the couple chose to live in the American section of the city (37). Nevertheless, Kate Chopin explored New Orleans with a freedom unusual for women in the 1870s and became well acquainted with the colorful mixture of cultures and the bustle of trade in this port city.

Between 1860 and 1880, the population of New Orleans grew from 168,675 to 216,090 (nearly half of the residents were black), and the city was at that time “the only metropolis in the South” (Ezell 232). Founded in 1718, it was also one of the oldest cities in the southern part of the country. Age and size had their negative effects on life in New Orleans in the 1870s. Because the city lacked an adequate system of sanitation and stood below sea level, its narrow streets were filled with human and animal wastes and garbage; and epidemics of yellow fever, smallpox, and cholera were common, largely due to the miasmal swamps immediately adjacent to the city. The yellow fever epidemic of 1878, for example, claimed the lives of more than four thousand New Orleans residents. In an attempt to escape this threat, the wives and children of many Creole families, including those of Oscar Chopin, spent their summers on Grand Isle, which, because it is an island in the Gulf of Mexico about fifty miles south of New Orleans, enjoys gulf breezes that virtually remove the fever-carrying mosquitoes.

It is in this languid, semitropical setting that Chopin places the beginning and the ending of The Awakening. Because Grand Isle's summer population was almost entirely Creole, Edna is first shown here immersed in a culture with which she feels at odds and yet to which she is strongly attracted. Unlike Kate Chopin, who grew up speaking French and who managed to charm her Gallic father-in-law, despite his displeasure with her half-Irish heritage, Edna was born to a Kentucky Presbyterian family with values far removed from those of the warm, easygoing Creoles. Early in The Awakening. Edna recalls a day in her childhood when she felt a pleasant sense of escape from the rigidity of her home, and she says to Mme Ratignolle, “Likely as not, it was Sunday, … and I was running away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, read in a spirit of gloom by my father that chills me yet to think of” (7). Although Edna's family subsequently moved to Mississippi, her severe Calvinistic Protestant background underwent no apparent change, and she is again reminded of it in the novel when her father comes to New Orleans to visit. She is relieved when he finally leaves, taking with him “his padded shoulders, his Bible reading, his ‘toddies’ and ponderous oaths” (24).

Differences in values and behavior between the Catholic French Creoles of New Orleans and the Kentucky Presbyterians during the years before and after the Civil War could hardly have been more striking. Religious and political forces combined in the early years of the nineteenth century to alter southern Protestantism in ways that created a gulf between it and both Catholicism and northern Protestantism. As Ezell points out in The South since 1865, the “Great Revival” of 1800 strengthened evangelical Protestantism among the middle and lower classes of the South. Although this revival spirit initially fostered democratic and even liberal social attitudes, beginning in the 1830s northern criticism of the South—especially of the system of slavery—caused an increasing conservatism among southern Protestants that eventually led to the splitting of most denominations into northern and southern branches. “A great resurgence of religious orthodoxy began to regiment thought to protect Southern vested interests. … Liberalism brought threats to the status quo; therefore, Southern reaction was conservative in religion as well as in politics” (341). Edna's Kentucky Presbyterian father, who had been a colonel in the Confederate army, is a member of the generation of southerners who were most directly affected by this intense conservative trend in both religious and social attitudes.

The Catholic church, in contrast, was largely unaffected by the wave of southern conservatism in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and the Creoles of southern Louisiana, although many of them owned slaves, preserved through the century virtually the same traditions and social attitudes that they had developed during the years since their settlement of the area in the early eighteenth century. New Orleans, during the period of Chopin's residence there, was dominated by Creole culture, and the Creoles, who had developed a highly sophisticated society, were notably hostile toward the backwoods “Americans” who poured into this major port city with boatloads of timber, furs, and tobacco. To the refined Creole, these hunters and farmers seemed crude, dirty, and socially backward, and although they came down the Mississippi from a variety of states, Kentuckians must have seemed particularly offensive, because the Creoles calle all these outsiders “Kaintocks” (Chase 80).

From its street names and architecture to its Mardi Gras celebrations, New Orleans, under the influence of the Creoles, more nearly resembled a southern European than an American city. Edward King, a contemporary observer writing in Scribner's Monthly in 1873, stresses the European atmosphere of French New Orleans:

Step off from Canal Street, that avenue of compromises which separates the French and the American cities, some bright February morning, and you are at once in a foreign atmosphere. Three paces from the corner have enchanted you; the surroundings of a Southern-American commonwealth have vanished; this might be Toulouse, or Bordeaux, or Marseilles.

(10)

Long before the advent of jazz, music was an important part of the city's cultural life, and the French Opera House was the first in the country to stage productions of Wagner (Seyersted 42). Unconstrained by the Puritanism of their Protestant neighbors, for whom life was serious business, the Creoles played as hard as they worked. Indeed, to those from other parts of the country, Creole life seemed almost sinfully sensuous. Seyersted quotes Lafcadio Hearn, the author, who moved to New Orleans in 1877, as saying, “work … in this voluptuous climate … is impossible” (41). What appeared to some to be a hedonistic way of life, coupled with the Creole institution of concubinage with quadroon and octoroon women, gave New Orleans a reputation as a sinful city. As Clement Eaton notes in A History of the Old South, “Americans who came down the Mississippi were shocked at the Creole Sundays, when the Sabbath day was devoted to pleasure and commerce. Furthermore, these Latins were passionately fond of gambling, lotteries, and dancing” (183). Even those Americans living as neighbors to the French Creoles were vexed at their self-sufficiency, their lack of interest in political affairs. As Edward King describes the situation, “they seem as remote from New York and Washington as if limitless oceans rolled between” (12).

In keeping with this atmosphere of social freedom, women in Creole culture, as is evident in The Awakening, were far less affected by the Victorian strictures that dictated the behavior of middle-class women in other parts of the country. Although they tacitly supported a sexual double standard by their acceptance of their husbands' part-Negro mistresses and were legally as powerless as other women, Creole women participated fully in the sensuous atmosphere that surrounded them: drinking wine, enjoying music and literature, wearing bright colors, and entertaining lavishly. Well-educated, especially in the arts, these women were acquainted with literary trends, and many were accomplished musicians and painters. Although Creole culture was patriarchal in the extreme, women enjoyed life in ways that those subjected to Edna's father's “gloom” could not.

Teaching The Awakening with an awareness of the religious and social differences in Kate Chopin's cultural milieu enriches students' reading of the novel. It also removes Chopin from the narrow designation of “regionalist” or “local colorist” to which she has often been confined and demonstrates her understanding of the larger cultural patterns and problems of the late nineteenth century. Certainly Edna Pontellier's brave if doomed attempts at self-definition remain the central issue of the novel, but complicating those attempts are the romanticism that results from her rebellion against her rigid Presbyterian background and her inability to adjust that romanticism to the reality of her present environment.

Early in the novel, Chopin makes clear Edna's distance from the mores of the Creoles summering at Grand Isle: “Mrs. Pontellier, though she had married a Creole, was not thoroughly at home in the society of Creoles; never before had she been thrown so intimately among them. … A characteristic which distinguished [the Creoles] and which impressed Mrs. Pontellier most forcibly was their entire absence of prudery” (4). Edna is shocked by Mme Ratignolle's detailed recounting of her childbirth experiences, and she reads “in secret and solitude” an unnamed novel that the others read and discuss openly (4). The gossipy, confidence-sharing ways of the Creoles does not merge easily with Edna's Presbyterian reserve—“Mrs. Pontellier was not a woman given to confidences” (7)—yet she is seduced by the easy relations of this culture: “That summer at Grand Isle she began to loosen a little the mantle of reserve that had always enveloped her” (7). Significantly, Chopin places the Pontelliers' New Orleans residence not in the Garden District, the “American” part of the city, but on Esplanade Street (actually, Avenue), at the edge of the French Quarter. Chopin had been familiar with this neighborhood since before her marriage, since it was noted for its grassy promenades where the part-black mistresses of white gentlemen strolled, often with their illegitimate offspring, just minutes from their homes on streets with such names as “Desire” and “Good Children.” Edna is thus immersed physically in the Creole world, both on Grand Isle and in New Orleans.

Edna's early desire to escape the grimness of her Kentucky home has led to her marriage to Léonce. Beneath her reserve lies a strain of romanticism and rebelliousness that early in her life manifested itself in imagined attachments to a series of unavailable men: the “dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer,” the young man in Mississippi who was engaged to someone else, and finally the “great tragedian” whose picture she kept on her desk. Chopin makes it clear that Edna's marriage is not the result of any such grand passion: “Her marriage to Léonce Pontellier was purely an accident” (7). One of her motives for marrying him, in fact, is her desire to flout the wishes of her father, who violently opposes her marrying a Catholic. Even after her marriage, her stern father attempts to dictate her values and her behavior. Though proud of her artistic talent, he takes credit for it, “convinced as he was that he had bequeathed to all of his daughters the germs of a masterful capability” (23). The Colonel disagrees with Léonce's rather liberal treatment of Edna's “moods”:

“You are too lenient, too lenient by far, Léonce,” asserted the Colonel. “Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife. Take my word for it.”

The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave.

(24)

Caught between the Puritanical sternness of her father's world and the relaxed familiarity of Creole culture, Edna can belong fully to neither. Mme Ratignolle recognizes Edna's position as an outsider early in the novel when she exhorts Robert Lebrum to stop flirting with her: “She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously” (8). Edna does, of course, take Robert seriously, just as he takes seriously her status as a possession of her husband, even though she tries to counteract this assumption toward the end of the novel: “I give myself when I choose. If he [Léonce] were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,’ I should laugh at you both” (36). Robert cannot understand this freedom, and so he does the “honorable” thing by leaving. And having effectively left her husband, Edna can imagine no future; therefore, she swims into the Gulf of Mexico.

Readers of The Awakening have tended, correctly, to see Edna as a “misfit” in several ways. She is not a “mother-woman” like Mme Ratignolle, nor is she a self-fulfilled artist like Mlle Reisz. She tries to be an artist—with Mlle Reisz's encouragement—but tragically, considering the milieu, fails for lack of sufficient talent and commitment. She feels unconnected to her marriage and wants independence, but divorce is not an option and she does not have the means to be financially independent. In these respects she is a woman who does not belong to her time, but it is equally important to realize that she does not belong to her place.