The Awakening and the Great October Storm of 1893

"Didn't you know this was the twenty-eighth of August?"

"The twenty-eighth of August?"

"Yes. On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is shining—the moon must be shining—a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the semi-celestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But to-night he found Mrs. Pontellier. Perhaps he will never wholly release her from the spell…."

—Kate Chopin, The Awakening

On the night that Edna Pontellier learns to swim on the shores of Grand Isle, realizing for the first time her powers over the water that had before only generated "an ungovernable dread," Robert Lebrun teases her about having been captured by a spirit of the Gulf. Though Edna dismisses Robert's story as "flippancy," that twenty-eighth of August does prove to be a transformative moment in her life; it becomes, as she reflects, "a night in a dream" from which she never fully awakens, even as it marks a point of embarkation on her erratic and uncharted journey toward selfhood. Whether or not Edna is ultimately possessed by the Gulf spirit that Robert describes, she certainly is never "wholly release[d] … from the spell" of that magical night.

For many of us who live along the Gulf Coast, it was not the twenty-eighth but the twenty-ninth of August 2005 that marked the transformative moment: it was that night that a powerful spirit of the Gulf, one that has "haunted these shores for ages," rose up and overwhelmed an entire city, perhaps an entire nation, drenching us to the core, imposing a "semi-celestial" awareness of mortality and vulnerability—creating a spell of "penetrating vision" from which those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina may never be wholly released. Like Edna, we can no longer see the world in quite the same ways. Our old selves—like our flooded houses and gardens and broken levees and governments—are no longer adequate for negotiating the stark realities that we had not before recognized as the substance of our society. Like Edna, we have been forced to rebuild not just our lives but our understanding of what those lives really mean.

The power of large natural (or unnatural) disasters to reshape experience and self-definition is a commonplace of human history, though finding oneself a participant in such events can deeply affect one's perceptions of reality. Working together on the backgrounds of The Awakening, we noticed some interesting links between elements of the novel and a singular hurricane that devastated the Louisiana coast in 1893—the "Great October Storm." In the aftermath of Katrina, our findings intensified in relevance and poignancy, as we reflected on how great storms powerfully reverberate, transforming the meanings of fiction as well as the significance and contours of people's lives. Certainly, neither Edna Pontellier nor Kate Chopin were ever at the center of any literal hurricanes, though storms have been a key figure for representing the impact on American literary traditions of both the character and her creator. But just as Hurricane Katrina has changed both the literal landscapes and figurative meanings of New Orleans (how can we again think of one without the other?), the Great October Storm turns out to have had transformative effects on both the creation and the implications of Chopin's remarkable novel.

Hurricanes were certainly not part of Kate Chopin's early consciousness. A native of St. Louis, she only became a resident of Louisiana after her marriage to Oscar Chopin in June 1870. When the couple settled in New Orleans after their European honeymoon, the city was still traumatized from the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. But even on her first visit to New Orleans the year before, Katie O'Flaherty...