Coloring the U.S.-Mexico Border Geographical Othering and Postbellum Nation Building in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

We are first introduced to Léonce Pontellier in the opening scene of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, as he lounges outside the resort cottages that pepper Grand Isle, Louisiana. Léonce reads a day-old newspaper because "the Sunday papers had not yet reached the Grand Isle" (3). Léonce's day-old paper hints that Grand Isle, along with its preserved slave quarters, now serving as resort cottages for the vacationing Creole elite, is just slightly behind the rapidly progressing New South. This racially varied and multilingual New Orleans society is represented by a disruptive parrot preventing Léonce from reading his paper or enjoying his cigar in peace:

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right." He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence. Mr. Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, arose with an expression and an exclamation of disgust.¹

The novel's introductory setting provides the proper context for understanding the status of the U.S. nation and its postbellum national economy. According to Helen Taylor, the opening scene on Grand Isle emphasizes the South as "economically moribund," "its plantation/slave economy" having been "destroyed by emancipation and the Civil War," which turns a once thriving economic system into a mere "resort" for the vacationing Creole elite.² Léonce thus typifies the antiquated former social and economic structure of the prewar South. However, the now moribund plantation space on Grand Isle serves as a geographic and temporal rupture in the novel at once evoking the antebellum South and the elite Creole social status.

The Awakening's setting and its evocation of an unspoiled sanctuary are all the more significant given that Chopin wrote her novel in 1897, a mere four years after a hurricane devastated Grand Isle. Barbara Ewell and Pamela Menke posit that the "Great October Storm of 1893" looms large within the text, despite never being referenced outright. Chopin's focus on "destroyed places" like Grand Isle and Cheniere Caminada functions to emphasize "part of a past … that was now irretrievably lost."³ By setting her novel a year before this storm, on a site "whose destruction was imminent," Chopin emphasizes the tenuousness of this particular time and place.⁴ For Ewell and Menke, the encroaching destruction of Grand Isle "prohibits any hope of return or recovery"; however, I find it productive to return to these "destroyed" or lost spaces.⁵ In particular, I argue that Chopin's imaginative "recovery" of Grand Isle, with its multiple levels of spatiotemporal removal—existing simultaneously as an antebellum plantation site undone but repurposed and as a destroyed but reenlivened locale in post-storm Louisiana—reveals productive sociohistorical features of race and nation in the late nineteenth-century global exchange.

Grand Isle's spatiotemporal racial valences find a national counterpart in two imperial endeavors that bookend the Civil War and likewise provide crucial context for understanding the novel and the nation-state: the impending Spanish-American War of 1898 and the U.S.-Mexico War fifty years previous. Both wars were predicated on expansionism and nation formation during their respective eras. According to Jason M. Colby, the filibustering efforts of the 1850s, which resulted in the United States' forcibly seizing Central American territories in order to secure and buttress confederate slavery interests before the Civil War, also reflect the abiding effects of the U.S.-Mexico War: "The 1848 victory over Mexico left thousands of American men enthralled with conquest and convinced of their racial superiority."⁶ While Colby allows that there were multiple contributing factors to the Spanish-American War, he posits that its origins in white supremacy can be traced to the "racial threats" posed by Cuban rebels because the United. States...