Kate Chopin FAQs

General Questions and Answers

Most of the questions and answers on this page also appear at other places on this site. You can follow the links to those places, where you'll find related information. Scroll down for questions about The Awakening, "The Storm," or other Chopin works.

Q: How do you pronounce "Chopin"?

A: In the French way, like that of the composer, Frédéric Chopin—something like SHOW-pan.

Q: When was Kate Chopin born? Some internet sites say 1851 and others 1850.

Her tombstone says 1851, but thirty years ago a French scholar revealed that the United States census and her baptismal certificate show that Chopin was born on February 8, 1850. Some printed sources and websites erroneously give her birth date as 1851.

Q: Was Kate born a Chopin or is that her married name?

A: She was born Catherine O'Flaherty. You can read a brief description of her life.

Q: Was Kate Chopin’s work forgotten until her literary revival in the 1970s?

A: With a few exceptions here and there, The Awakening was. But some of Chopin's short stories were not forgotten. Several of those stories appeared in anthologies from the 1920s on, and several important scholars were writing about her fiction for decades before it caught fire with the appearance of her Complete Works in 1969.

Q: Was Kate Chopin involved in the women's suffrage movement, in the progressive movements for educational reform, health care reform, or sanitation improvement? Was she involved in any other historically significant happenings of her time?

A: Kate Chopin was an artist, a writer of fiction, and like many artists--in the nineteenth century and today--she considered that her primary responsibility to people was showing them the truth about life as she understood it.

So if you're asking if Kate Chopin was involved in social activism as political scientists today would understand that term, the answer is no. She was not a social reformer. Her goal was not to change the world but to describe it accurately, to show people the truth about the lives of women and men in the nineteenth-century America she knew.

If, however, you're asking if Chopin was involved in "historically significant happenings" as many artists would understand those words, then the answer is yes. She was among the first American authors to write truthfully about women's hidden lives, about women's sexuality, and about women's relationships with their husbands.

As the critic Per Seyersted phrases it, Kate Chopin "broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman’s submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce, and of woman’s urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom."

Artists like Kate Chopin see the truth and help others to see it. Once people are able to recognize the truth, then they can create social reform movements and set out to correct wrongs and injustices.

Q: Why are there so many French expressions in Chopin's novels and stories? If I don't understand French, how do I know what those expressions mean?

A: Most of the characters in Kate Chopin's short stories and in her two novels, The Awakening, and At Fault, speak French, Spanish, Creole, or all three, in addition to English. Many people with French and Spanish roots live in Louisiana, where most of Chopin's works are set, and some of them speak more than one language. Like Mark Twain and other writers of her time, Chopin was determined to be accurate in the way she recorded the speech of the people she focused on in her fiction. Some editions of her works include translations of French expressions, and Chopin usually subtly glosses such expressions in the text. Missing the meaning of a French expression is not likely to lead to a mistake in understanding a story or novel.

Q: Did Kate Chopin herself speak French as well as English?

A: Yes. Her mother’s family was of French stock, and Kate grew up bilingual.

Q: I find it difficult to find the right terms for describing Kate Chopin's style, which I think has some romantic elements but also some realistic ones. In what ways was Chopin influenced by other writers, like Maupassant?

A: Chopin read widely and drew from many movements in nineteenth-century literature—romanticism (she had read Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson), realism (she reviewed a book by Hamlin Garland) and local color (she places her characters in a geographical and historical moment and details their sometimes exotic speech patterns and cultural dispositions). She mentions German philosopher and playwright Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in her work as well as other European writers from Aeschylus to Ibsen. She was deeply influenced by French writers Guy de Maupassant (she loved his economy of detail) and Émile Zola (she was impressed by his determination to tell the truth), both of whom she read in their original French. She understood that Maupassant and Zola rejected sentimental fiction, but she was drawn to the work of the French writer George Sand who at times used sentimental elements to describe a woman trying to balance the well-being of others with her own freedom and integrity.

Q: How can I find out when Kate Choopin wrote her stories and novels and where those works were first published?

A: Composition dates and publication dates for Chopin's works appear on pages 1003 to 1032 of The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969).

Q: Your site lists articles about Chopin's work written in languages besides English. Have people also written books about Kate Chopin in other languages?

A: Yes. Here's a recent book (2002) by a French scholar:

If you know of other books, would you email us?

Q: Can you help with the identity of Mrs. F. M. Estere of 4434 Laclede Avenue of St. Louis and her possible connection with Kate Chopin?

We don't have an answer for this. If you have any information about Mrs. F. M. Estere, would you please email us?

The Awakening

Q: Was The Awakening really banned from libraries in Chopin's hometown of St. Louis?

A: Not so far as we can tell. Emily Toth, Chopin's biographer, tried to verify that claim—one that has been repeated for decades—but could find no evidence to support it. But it is true that The New York Times on July 6, 1902, reported that the Evanston, Illinois, Public Library had removed from its open shelves The Awakening and other books that the library board found objectionable (the article is on p. 9 of the newspaper).

Q: Does Edna Pontellier have sex with Alcée Arobin in Chapter 27 of The Awakening?

A: Yes. The language in Chapter 27 reflects literary conventions of the 1890s. Kate Chopin almost certainly would not have found a publisher for the novel if she had included more sexually explicit phrasing.

Q: What about the more explicit phrasing in “The Storm”?

A: Chopin did not try to publish that short story. It did not appear in print until long after her death.

Q: Has The Awakening been translated into other languages?

A: Yes. It appeared in a French translation by Cyrille Arnavon in 1953.

That edition has illustrations by André Hubert. Here's Edna and Robert:

And here is the first page of the 1953 French translation:

The Awakening has also ben translated again into French and into other languages, including Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, and Polish since 1953.

And it was Per Seyersted, a Norwegian scholar, who made Chopin’s complete works available to Americans in the 1960s. Kate Chopin has been an international figure for a long time.

Q: Has The Awakening been made into a film? I can't find such a film anywhere.

A: In 1982 director Bob Graham did a feature-length version of the novel called The End of August. It's apparently not available on DVD, but you may be able to find a VHS copy:

There is also a fine novel by Robert Stone called Children of Light, about a production company making a film of The Awakening using a performer struggling with some of the same issues that Edna struggles with.

You can email us questions about The Awakening.

"The Storm"

Q: The story's title says it is "A Sequel to 'The 'Cadian Ball.' " Does "The Storm"stand by itself or does it need to be read with the earlier story?

A: It stands by itself, but some scholars have argued that Chopin obviously intended for "The Storm" to be read with "At the 'Cadian Ball" and that resonance is lost when they are separated (see one of the questions below). The earlier story describes how Calixta came to marry Bobinôt and how Alcée came to marry his wife. Some anthologies print "The Storm" alone. Many print the two stories together.

Q: Isn't the phrasing of "The Storm" sexually explicit for something written in the 1890s?

A: Yes, the phrasing is way beyond what any respectable American magazine, even a comparatively advanced magazine like Vogue (in which Kate Chopin published nineteen stories), would have printed at the time. From everything we can tell, Chopin did not try to send "The Storm" out to editors. The story was not published until 1969, sixty-five years after Chopin's death.

Q: So readers at the time were uptight about explicit sex in short stories?

A: By the standards of most twenty-first-century American or European magazine readers, yes. But unlike today's countless magazines often selling to small, closely-focused segments of the population, American national magazines in the late nineteenth century usually appealed to broader, more heterogeneous audiences. Many, if not most, magazines of the time were viewed by children as well as adults, so editors needed to keep in mind the tastes and preferences of the people who bought their publications and, perhaps, shared them with their families.

Q: What kind of relationship exists between Calixta and Alcée? What can you infer from their past?

A: Much depends on whether you think of the two as characters who exist only in "The Storm" or if you see them as characters who exist also in "At The 'Cadian Ball." Assuming you are looking at both stories: as we explain on the page for the earlier story, Alcée and his wife Clarisse are Creoles, descendants of French settlers in Louisiana. Calixta and her husband Bobinôt are Acadians, descendants of French-American exiles from Acadia, Nova Scotia, who were driven from their homes by the British in 1755. Most of the Creoles in Kate Chopin's stories are comparatively wealthy, usually landowners or merchants. Most of the Acadians (or 'Cajuns) in the stories are much poorer, living off the land, farming or fishing or working for the Creoles.

So on the basis of the two stories together, you could describe Calixta as coming from a different social class than Alcée, and you could say that it's in good part because of that difference in class that Calixta and Alcée are married to other people. And you could add that, unlike anyone else in either story, Calixta comes in part also from a Spanish-speaking cultural background (her mother is Cuban) and so, as Kate Chopin presents her, she has different ways of behaving, more sensual ways of expressing her sexuality--which is partly why she is so attractive for both Alcée and Bobinôt. As everyone in the earlier story understands, she's not like the other Acadian girls.

In brief, Calixta is an Acadian influenced by Cuban culture who had been attracted to Alcée--and he to her--long before either of them was married (they had some passionate moments together one summer in Assumption Parish, moments that apparently scandalized some people). Calixta married Bobinôt, the earlier story suggests, because Alcée was not available as a marriage partner--at least partly because his Creole family, and certainly Clarisse, think of him as coming from a comparatively higher social class.

Q: I've read an article about "The Storm" that suggests Calixta has some African-American blood. Is that right?

A: No. Her mother is Cuban. Everyone in the community thinks of her as Acadian with some Spanish blood.

Q: What have critics said about "The Storm"?

A: Until 1969, when the Norwegian scholar Per Seyersted first published the story, critics had not heard of its existence (Daniel Rankin did not discuss it in his 1932 Chopin biography). Seyersted praises the story for its "daring," its "happy" and "healthy" treatment of sex. In the story, he says, sex "is a force as strong, inevitable, and natural as the Louisiana storm which ignites it." The work has, he adds, the "unreserved directness and supreme authenticity of truth." Later critics follow Seyersted's lead, and, although some focus on themes like isolation, gender, ethnicity, or autonomy, and a few see the story as immoral and the two lovers as sinners, others consider it one of America's great short stories. One writes that Calixta and Alcée reach out impulsively "for what they want, what they need, what for them is life itself, their 'birthright'--not selfishly, not unaware of the risks and costs, not with the intention of hurting anybody, but with a lust for life itself, with an ecstatic acceptance of what the moment is offering them, with trust and peace and hope."

You can email us questions about "The Storm."

"The Story of an Hour"

Q: Is it true that "The Story of an Hour" is Kate Chopin's most popular story?

A: It may be true. The story certainly appears in a great many anthologies these days. From 1929 to about 1970, "Désirée's Baby" was the best known of Chopin's works, praised by critics and often reprinted. When the Complete Works of Kate Chopin was published in 1969, "The Storm"—unknown until that time—became famous almost over night, as did "The Story of an Hour." Today "Désirée's Baby," "The Story of an Hour," and "The Storm" are heavily discussed by scholars and regularly read in college classes, although a few other stories—"A Respectable Woman," "Lilacs," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," "Athénaïse," and "At the 'Cadian Ball," among them—are also frequently read.

Q: Why is the story so powerful? What do readers find in it?

A: In 1975 Susan Cahill called the story "one of feminism's sacred texts," and many readers have since concluded that Kate Chopin's sensitivity to what it sometimes feels like to be a woman is on prominent display in this work—as it is in The Awakening. Chopin's often-celebrated yearning for freedom is also on display here—as is her sense of ambiguity and her complex way of seeing life. It's typical of her to note that it is both "men and women" who "believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature."

"Athénaïse"

Q: The story "Athénaïse" seems really out of character with Kate Chopin's other works—with The Awakening and stories like "The Storm," "The Story of an Hour," "A Respectable Woman," or "A Pair of Silk Stockings." What do critics think of it?

A: They fall into two camps. Some ignore the story, in part because, like Athénaïse's brother Montéclin, they are unhappy when the life of this independent, daring woman takes—as Chopin phrases it—"a very disappointing, an ordinary, a most commonplace turn, after all." Others find the story one of Chopin's richest, a dress rehearsal for The Awakening in its treatment of a dissatisfied woman following her instincts, and in its setting that moves from a rural area to New Orleans and back to the rural area again. Susan Lohafer considers it a nineteenth-century classic.

Q: Just what is going on near the end of Section II of "Athénaïse," as Cazeau rides past the old live-oak?

A: Cazeau remembers a moment when as a little boy he was riding on horseback with his father past that tree. His father was bringing back home a slave who had escaped from the plantation, and they stopped by the tree so the slave could take a breath. Cazeau is now on horseback bringing back his wife who had run away from the plantation, and he sees a parallel between the situation of the slave and that of his wife. He finds the thought "hideous."

Q: Isn't Gouvernail an unusual man for a Kate Chopin story?

A: Yes. Most of Chopin's sensitive, intelligent, insightful characters are women. But there are a few exceptions, and Gouvernail is one of them.

"Désirée's Baby"

Q: "Désirée's Baby" is an amazing story. Do other people know about it?

A: Yes. It's been reprinted countless times since 1929 and was Chopin's best-known work before The Awakening was revived in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1936, critic Arthur Hobson Quinn called it "one of the greatest short stories in the language," and many readers over the decades have shared his opinion.

Q: I was totally unprepared for the ending of that story. It stunned me! Is this typical of Kate Chopin?

A: Chopin handles closings as well as any writer. "The Storm," "The Story of an Hour," and "A Respectable Woman," among other short stories, also have brilliant last sentences.

Q: Should I have seen that ending coming?

A: There are some suggestions that point to it. The story notes in paragraph six that Armand Aubigny's mother was French. She and her "easy-going and indulgent" husband raised Armand in Paris, where an interracial marriage was, it seems, socially possible in the first half of the nineteenth century, in part because slavery as it was known in rural Louisiana did not exist in mainland France. And the description of L'Abri, Armand's house, in the sixth paragraph carries overtones of trouble to come.

Q: How did Kate Chopin know about slavery? Did she grow up with slaves in the house?

A: Yes. Her family in St. Louis, like many families in the city, held slaves in the 1850s.

"A Respectable Woman"

Q: In "A Respectable Woman," are the lines of poetry that Gouvernail recites his own or is he quoting someone else?

A: He is quoting Walt Whitman—from section 21 of "Song of Myself" in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. The remaining lines of the apostrophe to the night read:

"Press close bare-bosomed night—press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night—mad naked summer night."

Q: So did Kate Chopin assume that her readers were familiar with Walt Whitman? Did she assume they would find these remaining lines and understand what Gouvernail is thinking?

A: We don't know what she assumed, but she sent this story to Vogue, which was edited at the time by Josephine Redding for people, Kate Chopin would say, of "advanced opinions," a phrase Chopin uses in "Athénaïse" to describe Gouvernail. Chopin's circle of friends in St. Louis in the 1890s certainly included people who would have known Whitman.

"Lilacs"

Q: It's strange to read "Lilacs," a Kate Chopin story set in France, rather than in Louisiana. What prompted Chopin to turn to France and nuns and a performer rather than stay focused on the Creoles and Acadians she usually writes about?

A: Kate Chopin spoke French throughout her life and visited Paris on her honeymoon. She studied with the sisters of the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart when she was a child. Her lifelong friend Kitty Garesché entered the Sacred Heart Convent. And Chopin loved the theatre and opera. Bernard Koloski argues that she had in mind the great French player Sarah Bernhardt as she wrote this story. Bernhardt made many tours of the United States and liked to perform for French-speaking audiences in St. Louis and New Orleans.

Q: I don't understand: Why is Adrienne banned from the convent?

A: There are other elements in the story, but one straightforward explanation is that she is denied entrance to the convent because someone has revealed that Adrienne lives a wild, scandalous life, a life of "picturesque disorder," as a singer and dancer in Paris. She is not the "older and wiser" widowed woman with "household duties" that the nuns had thought she is. It is hinted in the last paragraphs of the story that Adrienne will try to find out who told the nuns this, who is responsible for "this treacherous turn."

Q: Did Kate Chopin not include "Lilacs" in her short story anthology A Night in Acadie, even though she wrote it at about the same time as the stories in that anthology, because it's not set in Louisiana or because it didn't fit thematically with the other stories?

A: Probably because it's not set in Louisiana. Some of the story's themes and motifs are similar to those in Chopin's Louisiana works—a woman being pulled in different directions, yearning for both individual freedom and the comfort of community, feeling tension between living "in the world," as Sister Agathe in the story (and Lucilla Worthington in Chopin's novel At Fault) phrases it, and retreating from the world. Chopin had planned to include "Lilacs" in A Vocation and a Voice, her third anthology of stories, but the publisher cancelled the contract for the book, and it did not appear as a separate volume until 1991, long after Chopin's death.

"A Pair of Silk Stockings"

A: There may be many resemblances between Mrs. Sommers and Edna Pontellier, but one is especially noticeable. Kate Chopin writes that "impulse" is guiding Mrs. Sommers, and in Chapter XII of The Awakening she describes Edna as "blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility," a passage that calls to mind sentences from "A Pair of Silk Stockings."

Q: People seem to assume that Mrs. Sommers is a widow or a single mother. But could she be a woman married to a man who has lost his fortune and fallen on hard times?

A: There's no evidence in the story to rule out the possibility that Mrs. Sommers' husband is alive but the couple is poor.

In many of the stories that Kate Chopin included in her two books of short stories, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, we can tell a good deal about some characters because they live at a specific place in rural Louisiana, or they appear in several stories, or characters in other stories talk about them. But Mrs. Sommers does not appear in any other Chopin story and nobody in any other story speaks of her. We do not even know what city or state her story takes place in. All we can tell about her is what we have in those words in "A Pair of Silk Stockings."

Apparently Chopin did not consider Mrs. Sommers' marital status of importance to the story. She keeps her focus on Mrs. Sommers' actions in a center city over a period of several hours, and she does not show us this character's life at home--with or without a husband.

"At the 'Cadian Ball"

Q: Did "At the 'Cadian Ball" become known because it is a prequel to "The Storm"?

A: It certainly became better known after readers discovered "The Storm," and from what we can tell, it was not much read before "The Storm" was published in the late 1960s. But it was, in fact, the first of Kate Chopin's short stories to be reprinted after her death. It appeared in 1921 as one of sixteen local color stories in Short Stories of America edited by Robert L. Ramsay and published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin.

Q: In the story, why doesn't Clarisse go to the 'Cadian Ball? And why is she upset that Alcée does?

A: It's partly a matter of social class. Clarisse and Alcée are Creoles, descendants of French or Spanish settlers in Louisiana. Calixta and Bobinôt are Acadians, descendants of French-American exiles from Acadia, Nova Scotia, who were driven from their homes by the British in 1755. Most of the Creoles in Chopin's stories are comparatively wealthy, usually landowners or merchants. Most of the Acadians (or 'Cajuns) in the stories are much poorer, living off the land, farming or fishing or working for the Creoles. Clarisse takes her higher social status as a Creole seriously and thinks Alcée has no business at a 'Cadian ball. "Nice conduc' for a Laballière," she says. She understands, though, that it is common for a Creole man to appear at such get togethers, perhaps in search of a liaison with a 'Cadian woman. It would be unusual for a Creole woman to attend a 'Cadian ball.

At Fault

Q: I love The Awakening, but I don't know Kate Chopin's other novel, At Fault. Should I read it? Is it any good?

A: Yes and yes, but with qualifications. If you fell in love with The Awakening at some point in your life and want to preserve that magic moment by remembering Kate Chopin as you knew her from Edna Pontellier's story or from a few Chopin short stories like "The Storm," "A Pair of Silk Stockings," "The Story of an Hour," and a few others, then perhaps you should read no further. If, though, you want to know Kate Chopin more fully, as a woman not only way ahead of the times but as a complex, sophisticated woman of the times, then reading some of her other stories and her early novel is a good idea.

You can email us questions about At Fault or other Kate Chopin works.