“The Whole Island Seems Changed”: A Bioregional Approach to Kate Chopin’s Fiction1

This essay offers a bioregional reading of Kate Chopin’s “At the ’Cadian Ball” (1892), “At Chênière Caminada,” (1894), The Awakening (1899), and “The Storm” (1969). These are works that specifically engage with Louisiana’s unique hydrological features. I argue that Chopin’s bioregionalism is a cartographic instrument, charting places otherwise obscured by linear spatiotemporal constructions (including sites made and unmade while characters are at sea or in the time during or after a cyclone). Within these provisional places, Chopin contemplates the contingency of class and racial identity in Louisiana at the end of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, I demonstrate Chopin’s bioregionalism is a reason for reading her fiction ecologically, in a way that attends to the overlapping environments, characters, relations, and worlds in her short stories and longer fiction.