SOURCE: Toth, Emily. “Kate Chopin's New Orleans Years.” New Orleans Review 15, no. 1 (spring 1988): 53-60.

[In the following essay, Toth explicates biographical aspects of Chopin's stories set in New Orleans.]

“N. Orleans I liked immensely; it is so clean—so white and green. Although in April, we had profusions of flowers—strawberries and even black berries,” Kate O'Flaherty of St. Louis wrote in her diary for May 8, 1869.¹

She had just returned from a two-month trip with her mother, cousin and friends—her first long venture from home. Exactly thirteen months later, Kate O'Flaherty would be marrying Oscar Chopin of Louisiana and going to live in New Orleans. The Chopins would stay in New Orleans for the first nine years of their marriage—formative and inspiring years for the future writer.

Two decades later, Kate Chopin would begin publishing novels and short stories set in New Orleans and in the Cane River country of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. By the mid-1890s, Chopin would win national acclaim as a Louisiana writer—but by then she had long since left the state.

Kate Chopin, a widow in St. Louis, wrote about Louisiana from memory, from emotion recollected in tranquility: she wrote about Louisiana as a way of meditating on her own past. During her years in New Orleans, 1870-1879, Chopin had given birth to all but one of her children, and it was in New Orleans that she herself came of age.

Kate O'Flaherty Chopin, born and raised in St. Louis, was a twenty-year-old bride when she came to live in New Orleans in 1870. She and her new husband, the cotton factor Oscar Chopin, had just returned from their European honeymoon, which Kate described with great glee in her diary. She and Oscar had visited museums, cathedrals and zoos, where they saw “any number of wild beasts that showed their teeth in the most wonderful manner.” Kate and Oscar had examined mummies (“ghastly old things”), climbed mountains and gambled at famous spas—and, at least once, they skipped Mass and refused to feel guilty (A Kate Chopin Miscellany 71, 72).

Although the new Mrs. Chopin dutifully collected linens for future housekeeping, she also smoked cigarettes in public and revelled in wandering around alone, drinking beer. But the young Chopins' time in Paris was cut short by the Franco-Prussian War: they witnessed the overthrow of the French Empire, and escaped the city just days ahead of the invading Germans.

By the time the Chopins arrived in New Orleans, Kate was pregnant with her first child.

In The Awakening, the novel she began writing twenty-seven years after her own arrival in New Orleans, Kate Chopin gave Edna Pontellier and her husband

a very charming house on Esplanade Street in New Orleans. It was a large, double cottage with a broad front verandah whose round fluted columns supported the sloping roof. The house was painted a dazzling white; the outside shutters, or jalousies, were green.²

According to Daniel Rankin, Chopin's first biographer, that description in The Awakening “is a picture of Kate Chopin's own home in New Orleans”—but Rankin was wrong.³ Only old-line Creole aristocrats still had homes on Esplanade Avenue in the French Quarter, and the young Chopins lived on a much more modest scale. Their first home, at 443 Magazine Street, was indeed a double cottage, like the Pontelliers', but the Chopins lived in only one side of the side-by-side duplex. Another family occupied 445 Magazine, and shared the balcony in front and the long gallery in back.⁴

The Chopins' block, between Terpsichore and Robin (now Euterpe) Street, was not in the Garden District, where the wealthy “Americans” lived. The Chopins' first home was ordinary, fairly new and pleasant enough: a two-story frame building, with the gallery in back forming part of a servants' wing. (Most middle-class white people kept servants, and the Chopins employed a cook and a laundress.)

Kate and Oscar had been in New Orleans for only a month when Oscar's father died in a French Quarter hotel (Oscar's mother had died the previous April). The rest of his relatives were in Natchitoches Parish, or St. Louis, or France—and Kate's were all in Natchitoches Parish or St. Louis.⁵

For the first time in her life, Kate Chopin was without a circle of friends and relatives, and she was able to create, out of her solitude, an inner world of her own.

Much of Kate Chopin's life during her New Orleans years is mysterious, unknown. There are no school records, no surviving diaries, no letters, and no church records. Kate Chopin led a quiet private life—although she did have her unusual side: she liked to do imitations of animals and birds and people, and Oscar used to egg her on (Rankin 89). She also spent months at a time in St. Louis, visiting her mother, a practice that may have been an attempt at birth control.

Virtually the only sign of Kate Chopin's presence in New Orleans between 1870 and 1879 is her name on three birth certificates:

Jean Baptiste, born May 22, 1871

Frederick, born January 26, 1876

Felix Andrew, born January 8, 1878

During that decade, Kate also gave birth to two other sons, both born in St. Louis:

Oscar Charles, September 24, 1873

George Francis, October 28, 1874

And on December 31, 1879, after the family had moved to Cloutierville in Natchitoches Parish, Kate gave birth to her last child and only daughter, Lélia (baptized Marie Laiza).⁶

Kate Chopin spent the 1870s as a mother-woman, at least outwardly, and her only description of those years is her recollection of giving birth.

On her son Jean's twenty-third birthday, May 22, 1894, Kate Chopin described his birth in her diary:

I can remember yet that hot southern day on Magazine street in New Orleans. The noises of the street coming through the open windows; that heaviness with which I dragged myself about; my husband's and mother's solicitude; old Alexandrine the quadroon nurse with her high bandana tignon, her hoop-earrings and placid smile; old Dr. Faget; the smell of chloroform, and then waking at 6 in the evening from out of a stupor to see in my mothers arms a little piece of humanity all dressed in white which they told me was my little son! The sensation with which I touched my lips and my fingertips to his soft flesh only comes once to a mother. It must be the pure animal sensation: nothing spiritual could be so real—so poignant.

(A Kate Chopin Miscellany 93)

Few of Chopin's contemporaries recorded childbirth so directly in their diaries. Sometimes they wrote, with delicate reticence, that “a little stranger” had arrived; rarely did they talk about the sensuous, animal pleasure in touching a newborn baby. But by 1894, Chopin had had ten years of “my real growth,” as she said in the same diary entry, and she had overcome whatever reticence she once possessed.⁷

Kate Chopin also drew on her own memories of childbirth for The Awakening, in which Adèle Ratignolle, the traditional mother-woman, chooses to suffer a “scene of torture” in bringing children into the world. But Edna Pontellier, like Kate Chopin, had preferred chloroform for her own confinements, which seem to her “far away, unreal, and only half remembered”:

She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go.

(chap. 37)

Edna, a motherless child, takes no particular pleasure in the memory, and the following day she takes her life into her own hands for the final time.

But when Kate Chopin gave birth for the first time, she was in her mother's hands: Eliza O'Flaherty had come from St. Louis for the 1871 Mardi Gras, at which—for the first time—a Queen of Carnival was chosen. (King Rex made his first appearance in 1872.) By Mardi Gras time, Kate, six months pregnant, would not have been appearing regularly in public: like Madame Ratignolle in The Awakening, she would have been considered “unpresentable” (chap. 30).

By the 1870s most white middle-class women had doctors for their deliveries: midwives had been losing ground to male physicians for several generations. The presence of a physician—even one whose major interest was yellow fever, not babies—was supposed to lend prestige and extra skill to the occasion, although it was generally acknowledged that midwives had more practical knowledge.⁸

Dr. Charles Jean Faget, the eccentric French-born practitioner who attended Kate Chopin, had made significant medical discoveries: he was the first to define the differences between yellow fever and malaria. But among everyday New Orleanians, Dr. Faget was equally noted for something else: his “very striking appearance.”⁹

Dr. Faget was tall, thin, unbearded, with “a slightly hooked nose, a high receding forehead and long wavy black grizzly hair, brushed backward.” His clothes were deliberately unstylish: he wore a low crown silk hat, with the broad brim rolled up, and liked to imitate the apparel of European priests. In wintertime, he wrapped himself in a long black coat and fastened it with a silver chain and hook, just as priests did; in the summer he wore a black straw hat like the priests, and he cultivated the look and the soft, gentle voice of a priest.

Still, he was not a conservative man: he was one of the first physicians to provide chloroform for women in childbirth. Chloroform had come into regular use for childbirth only recently, after Queen Victoria took it in 1853 with the birth of her eighth child. Evidently Dr. Faget did not share the traditional physicians' belief that women would love their children more if they suffered more in bringing them into the world.

But chloroform also required that a woman trust her doctor: the drug made some women more tractable, but in others it induced unseemly displays of obscene language and sexual excitement. Medical literature stressed the need for doctors' discretion about whatever confessions they heard, and Dr. Faget's priestlike garb and his gentle, priestlike voice allayed women's fears.

Kate and Oscar Chopin named their little son after his late grandfather and registered his birth with the civil authorities. In August, Kate had him baptized in St. Louis.

She was now a mother, and entered a new phase of her life with the ecstasies, doubts, pleasures, and fears that she described much later in her fiction—from Athénaïse's delight in her pregnancy (“Athénaïse”), to Mrs. Mobry's terror of hereditary madness (“Mrs. Mobry's Reason”), to Edna Pontellier's sensing herself unfit as a mother-woman. In “Regret,” Chopin described once more the sheer animal pleasure of being close to a child's body: Mamzelle Aurélie, a single woman who has never before enjoyed the company of children, learns to “sleep comfortably with little Elodie's hot, plump body pressed close against her, and the little one's warm breath beating her cheek like the fanning of a bird's wing” (Complete Works [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin] 377).

But having a child meant that Kate Chopin herself was no longer a child, her time and creative energies all her own. For the rest of her life, she would do first what Edna Pontellier finally refuses to do: “Remember the children.”

Dr. Faget, Kate Chopin's first obstetrician, was an intensely religious man who evidently had little interest in material things. According to another physician of the time, Faget was “one of those intellectuals to whom the almighty dollar was of little concern. He at one time had a large practice, but he was a poor charger, a bad collector, no investor at all. He died poor” (Wilds 125).

But he had made a very strong impression on Kate Chopin. Two decades later, when she wrote her first short story about a doctor, she gave him Dr. Faget's compassion, generosity and discretion. She also celebrated Dr. Faget's medical honors: for his findings about yellow fever patients' temperature and pulse, Dr. Faget had been decorated as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor—and Kate named her hero Dr. Chevalier.

She made no great effort to conceal the real-life inspiration for her story. In “Dr. Chevalier's Lie,” Chopin's physician character lives in a poor part of town in a city not identified by name, but he can easily hear midnight rung in “the old cathedral tower,” as anyone could in the French Quarter of New Orleans (Complete Works 147-48).

In the story—based on the kind of event respectable ladies in New Orleans knew about, but weren't supposed to—Dr. Chevalier hears a sudden gunshot on an autumn night and is summoned to a house for a scene with “the ghastly sameness of detail that accompanied these oft-recurring events.”

Dr. Chevalier sees

the same scurrying; the same groups of tawdry, frightened women bending over banisters—hysterical, some of them; morbidly curious, others; and not a few shedding womanly tears; with a dead girl stretched somewhere, as this one was.

(147)

But “this one” turns out to be a young girl Dr. Chevalier knows. He had met her a year ago, at a homely cabin in Arkansas, with her proud, hard-working parents. The bright young girl, whom everyone agreed was “too clever to stay in an Arkansas cabin,” had resolved to seek her fortune in the big city.

“Dr. Chevalier's Lie” is only twelve paragraphs long, with a quick conclusion showing the doctor's generosity and discretion:

“The girl is dead,” said Doctor Chevalier. “I knew her well, and charge myself with her remains and decent burial.”

The following day he wrote a letter. One, doubtless, to carry sorrow, but no shame to the cabin down there in the forest.

It told that the girl had sickened and died. A lock of hair was sent and other trifles with it. Tender last words were even invented.

Of course it was noised about that Doctor Chevalier had cared for the remains of a woman of doubtful repute.

Shoulders were shrugged. Society thought of cutting him. Society did not, for some reason or other, so the affair blew over.

(148)

“Dr. Chevalier's Lie” was based on “an actual incident in the life of a physician of New Orleans,” his informants told Daniel Rankin. And when Kate Chopin wrote the story in St. Louis in 1891, twenty years after giving birth to her first child, the man she called “old Dr. Faget” was evidently still living in New Orleans (Rankin 134; Wilds 185).

“Dr. Chevalier's Lie” appeared in Vogue, a new literary periodical, in 1893. Chopin had six short stories in Vogue that year, marking her emergence as a national writer, and her literary ambitions may have impelled her to set “Dr. Chevalier's Lie” in an unnamed city, rather than New Orleans. But people in New Orleans would have recognized that she was drawing her character from life: praising the eccentric and compassionate Dr. Faget, and damning his critics.¹⁰

“Dr. Chevalier's Lie” was only the second story Kate Chopin wrote from New Orleans memories (the first was the romance called “A No-Account Creole”). Both drew on her first years in New Orleans, when she was listening and learning much more about the world than respectable ladies were supposed to hear or see.

Kate and Oscar Chopin never lived in the French Quarter.

After four years at 443 Magazine Street, they moved to the corner of Pitt and Constantinople—uptown—and then finally to 209 Louisiana Avenue, between Coliseum and Prytania. (The house—the only Chopin residence still in existence—is now numbered 1413 Louisiana.)

Kate and Oscar enjoyed entertaining friends at home, and a Mrs. L. Tyler, a frequent visitor, later described the Chopin ménage to Rankin:

Oscar, ever jovial and cheerful and funloving and really very stout, liked to romp with the children through the house and about the gardens. “I like disorder when it is clean” was his favorite saying.

As for Kate, she

enjoyed smoking cigarettes, but if friends who did not approve of smoking came to visit her, she would never offend them. She was individual in the style of her clothes as in everything else. She loved music and dancing, and the children were always allowed to enjoy themselves.

According to Mrs. Tyler, Kate was “devoted to Oscar and thought him perfect” (Rankin 89-90).

According to another informant, Mrs. John S. Tritle, “Kate was very much in love with her Oscar,” and though she was a social favorite, she and her husband always preferred each other's company to anyone else's.¹¹

Years later, of course, Kate Chopin described the apparently-perfect married couple in The Awakening: the Ratignolles “understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union” (chap. 18). Rankin believed that Kate was describing her married life with Oscar, but in fact, the Ratignolles fill Edna with depression and boredom and pity, for the “blind contentment” that strikes her as unthinking and even bovine (81).

Kate Chopin herself was never unthinking, and never totally conventional. Years later she more-than-hinted in her diary that Oscar's presence had inhibited her “real growth”—and her sharp insights into marriage and its discontents did not suddenly arise in the 1890s (A Kate Chopin Miscellany 92).

Evidently no one described any marital discord in the Chopin household, but, then, Southerners rarely reveal secrets of the human heart to outsiders. The sunny picture of Kate and Oscar's New Orleans years is not the whole story. Kate O'Flaherty Chopin, a spirited young woman who enjoyed solitude and reading and writing but found herself engulfed by the demands of children, was already gathering material for a very different kind of tale, and a different set of truths.

According to Daniel Rankin, Kate Chopin loved to explore New Orleans, taking solitary walks like Edna's in The Awakening. Chopin liked to take the mule car to the end of the line, where New Orleanians could explore City Park and the Metairie cemeteries, a favorite strolling place (Rankin 92-95).

She also kept a diary, now lost, in which she recorded realistic and minute details of everyday life. She was especially taken by the lavishly painted “mule cars” running on Canal Street (she described them in an 1894 story, “Cavanelle”); she frequently noted river front scenes in her diary; and she discovered out-of-the-way eating places like the one Edna finds in The Awakening—a place to read and eat and dream. As Edna says in The Awakening:

I don't mind walking. I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk; they miss so much—so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.

(chap. 36)

But by the time Kate wrote The Awakening, she knew a great deal of life, and most of it, contrary to Rankin, she could not have learned during solitary walks in New Orleans.

Kate Chopin was pregnant for much of the time she lived in New Orleans: she was expecting her sixth child when the family left in the fall of 1879. Unless she committed extraordinary violations of propriety, she would have spent most of her time indoors—listening to the stories of other people.

She was fascinated by New Orleans customs and people: the proud and beautiful Creoles of color, the gris gris and voodoo. New Orleans was the home of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, famous for her magical powers, her love powders and her snake rituals. By 1873, when the Daily Picayune described her monster serpent, named Zombi, seventy-nine-year-old Marie Laveau was said to be the best-known of three hundred Voodoos in New Orleans, among whom were, “strange to relate, at least eight or ten white women who partake as the others in the hellish orgies.”¹²

Native New Orleanians also told Kate about the blacks and their famous dancing in Congo Square, at Orleans and Rampart Streets. Before the war, slaves used to dance on Sundays on the dirt ground on Congo Square, performing the Calinda and the Bamboula to the intricate African rhythms pounded out on drums. It was a release of tension, and a passionate sexual display.¹³

According to Rankin, Kate Chopin “never attempted to write or take notes” during her New Orleans years, but she was constantly storing up impressions. For Kate O'Flaherty of St. Louis, voodoo queens and Congo Square dancing were exotic but revealing glimpses of what she called, much later, “human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it” (Rankin 92; Complete Works 691).

Two decades later, Kate Chopin did write about the dancing in Congo Square, but not—as her contemporary George W. Cable did—just for local color. Instead, in “La Belle Zoraïde,” Chopin created a light-skinned slave who is supposed to marry a man of her own caste. But Zoraïde falls desperately in love with “le beau Mézor,” because of his tenderness and the black beauty of his body—like a column of ebony—when he dances the Bamboula in Congo Square: “That was a sight to hold one rooted to the ground.” But the white world—represented by Zoraïde's mistress—refuses to understand that people of color love and hate and feel just as white people do (Complete Works 304).

Instead of making the world of Congo Square picturesque, charming and distant, Chopin made “La Belle Zoraïde,” in 1893, a universal tragedy: the story of a passionate woman deprived of her lover and her child (304).

During the social season—October to May, roughly—the Chopins lived in New Orleans, but according to her friend Mrs. Tyler, Kate's “long summer vacation times were spent with the children at Grand Isle” (Rankin 90).¹⁴

In the city, the Chopins evidently associated mainly with English speakers and Anglo-Saxons: Mrs. Tyler and Mrs. Tritle attended parties at the Chopin home, and Oscar's political allies included the Irish-born poet and lawyer Frank McGloin and the English-born dentist John Angell. But at Grand Isle, most people were Creoles, and Kate—like Edna in The Awakening—was a foreigner.

Whether Kate was astonished, like Edna, to read racy books that were passed around and discussed freely, and whether she blushed when childbirth was described in harrowing detail, and whether Creole gentlemen stopped telling risqué stories because she was present, cannot be known. But Kate, though she spoke French and was a Catholic, was not a Creole descended from generations of New Orleans Creoles. She was a Northerner, an outsider (étrangère) and an oddity (Awakening chap. 4).

Grand Isle had become the quintessential Creole resort after the Civil War, when middle-class people began to patronize “home resorts,” where they could live in cottages, like the ones in The Awakening. Men came to Grand Isle on the weekends, but mostly it was a world of gossip and swimming and amusements for women and children.

The approach to Grand Isle was romantic, through mazes of swamp forest, and on Grand Isle itself, the birds were everywhere, as in The Awakening: mockingbirds, and gulls with broken wings, and at midnight the only sound was “the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak,” with its eternal accompaniment, “the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night” (chap. 3).

For Kate Chopin, and any other young mother, Grand Isle was a wholesome escape from a city that was mercilessly humid, with swarming mosquitoes, festering open canals and sewers, marauding street gangs, and annual epidemics of yellow fever. On Grand Isle, children could romp everywhere, and guests had no need to lock their rooms. (In The Awakening, Edna brings down her key only “through force of habit” [chap. 7].)¹⁵

Especially to someone like Kate Chopin, who had spent summers among the baking red brick streets of St. Louis, Grand Isle was a tropical paradise of palm trees and vines, orange and lemon trees, acres of yellow camomile, and no streets—only grassy green or sandy paths. And everywhere there were the “strange, rare odors” Edna Pontellier notices: the smell of damp, new-plowed earth, the “heavy perfume of a field of white blossoms,” and always “the seductive odor of the sea” (Awakening chap. 5).

When Kate Chopin described Grand Isle, she concentrated on its irresistible emotional resonance, on Edna's susceptible soul:

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

(chap. 6)

Possibly Kate Chopin had also celebrated the seductions of the sea in her 1889 novella, Unfinished Story—Grand Isle—30,000 words. Possibly she included the soft, baby-sounding Creole patois, which she used several years later in “La Belle Zoraïde.” But she destroyed the unfinished novella, and by the time she wrote for publication about the Grand Isle she remembered, it was gone.

On October 1, 1893, the hurricane of Chênière Caminada devastated the lower coast, killing 2,000 people and destroying the resort cabins. John Krantz, owner of the Grand Isle Hotel (Klein's in The Awakening), barely escaped alive.

In St. Louis, three weeks later, Kate Chopin wrote “At Chênière Caminada,” about the kind of romance that was gossiped about at Grand Isle: the passion of a poor, illiterate fisherman for a young society woman from New Orleans.

Chopin described going to church on the Chênière—on a midsummer day, “with a lazy, scorching breeze blowing from the Gulf straight into the church windows,” while (she noted wryly) “A few mosquitoes, floating through the blistering air, with their nipping and humming fretted the people to a certain degree of attention and consequent devotion” (Complete Works 309).

“At Chênière Caminada” was a preliminary sketch for The Awakening, with many of the same local characters, and much of the sensuous atmosphere: the sea and the sky, the power of love and the power of music, birds and water, love and death, and the magical atmosphere of the island.

And even The Awakening itself, Rankin reported, was based on a story Kate Chopin heard at Grand Isle. According to Chopin's brother-in-law, Phanor Breazeale of Natchitoches, the main theme and the ending were from the real life of a woman well known to the Creoles of the French Quarter (Rankin 92). Just after she read the proofs for The Awakening, Chopin wrote a short poem which seems to be about that woman:

Of course, 'twas an excellent story to tell

Of a fair, frail, passionate woman who fell …

But when you were gone and the lights were low

And the breeze came in with the moon's pale glow,

The far, faint voice of a woman, I heard. …

(Complete Works 733-34)

By then Grand Isle as a resort had died, and so had the happy moments of Kate's married life in the 1870s. The Awakening, like “At Chênière Caminada,” was an elegy to a lost way of life—and to memories of youth.

The Louisiana cotton crops in 1878 and 1879 were poor, and Oscar Chopin's business failed. And so, in the fall of 1879, the Chopins left New Orleans for Oscar's remaining properties in Natchitoches Parish, in northwest Louisiana. Kate and Oscar and their five sons left the busy, crowded, raffish city for a tiny French village just one street long: Cloutierville in the Cane River country, where their daughter was born.

In Cloutierville Kate and Oscar rejoined the world of kinship and family, tradition and religion. Lélia was baptized much more promptly than her brothers had been, and most of the relatives from Kate's mother's side disapproved of “Madame” Chopin's Cuban cigarettes, flamboyant fashions and flirtatious ways with other women's husbands.¹⁶

It was also in Cloutierville that Kate lost her own husband. Oscar Chopin died of malaria in December 1882, just two weeks before Christmas.

Two years later, Kate Chopin moved back to St. Louis, and five years after that, she began publishing short stories, poems, essays, and novels. She wrote frequently about New Orleans, and published eight short stories in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, including one about hereditary syphilis (“Mrs. Mobry's Reason”). She also frequently visited Natchitoches Parish, but rarely returned to New Orleans: only one visit—in December 1898—can be documented.¹⁷

And with The Awakening, which appeared in 1899, exactly twenty years after she left New Orleans, Kate Chopin produced a masterpiece that was damned by male reviewers and critics. Women readers praised The Awakening for its daring portrait of an artistic soul—but men condemned it, and Chopin's literary career was destroyed. She died five years later.¹⁸

At least in the beginning, New Orleans for Kate Chopin was associated with a profound solitude, a separation from a houseful of female relatives, the women's world in which she had spent all her life. The New Orleans years were also her immersion in motherhood, and she had many questions about the role of mother-woman.

But after Kate and Oscar Chopin left New Orleans in 1879, evidently Kate considered that part of her life and her literary growth to be over. When she wrote The Awakening, originally titling it “A Solitary Soul,” Kate Chopin was revisiting New Orleans, but by her favorite method: her imagination.

Notes

1. Kate O'Flaherty's diary is reprinted in A Kate Chopin Miscellany, eds. Per Seyersted and Emily Toth (Natchitoches, La.: Northwestern State Univ. Press, 1979) 47-88. A more fully annotated edition of the diary and Kate Chopin's other personal papers will appear in Kate Chopin's Private Papers, eds. Emily Toth and Per Seyersted.

2. Kate Chopin, The Awakening in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969) 931.

3. Daniel Rankin, Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1932) 79.

4. The house was renumbered 1431 Magazine Street in 1894, and the site is now the paved playground for Jackson School. Information about the Chopins' first house appears in Insurance Map of New Orleans, LA. (New York: Sanford Publ. Ltd., 1876) 1: n.p. Volume 4 shows that the house was still standing in 1964. Photographs of surviving houses in the Chopins' block, together with architectural descriptions, appear in Mary Louise Christovich, Roulhac Toledano and Betsy Swanson, eds., The Lower Garden District, vol. 1 of New Orleans Architecture (Gretna, La.: Friends of the Cabildo and Pelican Publishing Company, 1971) 135-36. I am indebted to Geoffrey Kimball for assistance with these materials.

5. Rankin claims that Dr. J.B. Chopin, Oscar's father, was at first hostile to his new daughter-in-law, but that Kate's charm, perfect French accent and piano playing won him over (84). But the two actually knew each other for only a month before the Doctor died, probably of yellow fever, in Nov. 1870. As my forthcoming biography of Kate Chopin will show, many of Rankin's generalizations are not supported by historical facts.

6. Kate and Oscar's first three sons—Jean, Oscar and George—were baptized at Holy Guardian Angels Church in St. Louis. According to diocesan archives in St. Louis and New Orleans, no baptismal records have been found for the fourth and fifth sons, Frederick and Felix.

7. For an example of a reticent diarist, see Arvazine Cooper's journal in Growing Up Female in America: Ten Lives, ed. Eve Merriam (New York: Dell, 1971) 148-49.

8. The displacement of midwives by male doctors is discussed in Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979); Ehrenreich and English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (Oyster Bay, New York: Glass Mountain Pamphlets, n.d.) 15-32; and Mary Poovey, “‘Scenes of an Indelicate Character’: The Medical ‘Treatment’ of Victorian Women,” forthcoming in Representations. I am indebted to Mary Poovey for sharing with me an earlier draft of her essay.

9. John Wilds, Crises, Clashes and Cures: A Century of Medicine in New Orleans (New Orleans: Orleans Parish Medical Society, 1978) 125, gives information about Dr. Faget, whose name is sometimes listed as Jean Charles rather than Charles Jean. Faget's famous medical papers include “Type and Specific Character of True Yellow Fever” (New Orleans: Jas. A. Gresham, 1873) and “The Type and Specificity of Yellow Fever” (Paris: J.B. Balliere, 1875).

10. Kate Chopin's manuscript account book, now at the Missouri Historical Society, will be published in Kate Chopin's Private Papers. See n. 1.

11. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: a Critical Biography (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969) 38.

12. Raymond J. Martinez, Marie Laveau (Jefferson, La.: Hope Publications, 1956) 13-14. Marie Laveau is also a character in many historical novels, among them my own Daughters of New Orleans (New York: Bantam, 1983).

13. Grace King, New Orleans, the Place and the People (New York: Macmillan, 1911) 340. See also George W. Cable, The Dance in Place Congo and Creole Slave Songs, originally in the Century Magazine Feb.-April 1886, reprinted New Orleans: Faruk von Turk, 1974. Congo Square, later renamed Beauregard Square, is now Louis Armstrong Park.

14. Mrs. Tyler's statement is the only evidence that Kate Chopin and her children spent summers at Grand Isle. In fact, Kate Chopin spent at least two and possibly three summers in St. Louis (1871, 1873 and 1874).

15. For history and descriptions of Grand Isle, see Sally Kittredge Evans, Frederick Stielow and Betsy Swanson, Grand Isle on the Gulf: An Early History (New Orleans: Jefferson Parish Historical Commission, 1979). Pp. 249-56 are particularly relevant to The Awakening. Literary portrayals of Grand Isle are discussed in Frederick Stielow, “Grand Isle, Louisiana, and the ‘New’ Leisure, 1866-1893,” Louisiana History 23.3 (Summer 1982): 239-57.

16. Kate Chopin's flirtations—at least one of which was not at all innocent—will be discussed fully in my Chopin biography.

17. According to the Natchitoches Enterprise 22 Dec. 1898: “Mrs. Kate Chopin left for New Orleans on Friday night where after a short visit she will return to her home in St. Louis.” I am indebted to Evelyn Stallings and Carol Wells of the archives at the Northwestern State Univ. Library (Natchitoches, La.) for discovering this clipping.

18. Only two women reviewed The Awakening, and both praised its artistry. The women readers of St. Louis applauded the book, wrote Chopin admiring letters, and invited her to give a reading for St. Louis's most prestigious intellectual group, the Wednesday Club. But the male editors and reviewers, some of whom were Chopin's friends, condemned the book and its author.