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5. Trading Religion for Feminism: Kate O’Flaherty Chopin’s Bayou Catholics
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
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145 5 Trading Religion for Feminism Kate O’Flaherty Chopin’s Bayou Catholics The Catholic novel that fails is one in which there is no genuine sense of place and in which feeling is by that much diminished. Flannery O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the South” (1963) Astriking but seldom examined aspect in the fiction of Kate O’Flaherty Chopin (1850–1904) is its linkage of Catholic themes and characters with the picturesque conventions of local-color-writing: her religiously tinged evocations of regionally specific dress, mannerisms, dialect, patterns of thought, and geography. Chopin’s proto-feminist representations of expanded autonomy for women, made indelibly famous by her short novel The Awakening (1899), were written in keeping with the highly popular “local color” regionalist style then fashionable in American novels and short fiction. In staging her stories with infusions of the distinctive regional dialects and exotic settings of Louisiana, Chopin was following commercial literary conventions of the day, which placed a high value on representations of distinctive subcultures in various American regions, while at the same time advancing progressive ideas about gender roles. Although her works spent decades languishing in 146 E Trading Religion for Feminism obscurity and beyond the notice of most American literary scholars, the timely republication of her collected works in 1969 made her a canonical figure.1 The feminist critical energy that has canonized Chopin’s fiction, and especially The Awakening, has fostered much attention to that work, which has been praised for containing important literary and political documentation related to the history of American women’s psychology and sexuality. In The Awakening’s protagonist Edna Pontellier, for example, scholars of American literature have identified a presciently modern heroine, one whose resistance to traditional familial roles and erotic norms constitutes a welcome disruption of Victorian patriarchy. However, some implications of her writing have been given less weight than is proper, for in seeing her as primarily an icon of proto-feminist discourse, students of Chopin’s writing have directed less attention to other aspects of her work, such as her religious aesthetic, evidenced in a large number of her works. For example, one influential feminist critic has observed that Chopin’s work is notable mainly for a progressive view of gender politics rendered in mythical terms: not for its tinges of Catholic religiosity but instead for its inclination toward “an imaginary world beyond the restrictive culture of the nineteenth century, a world in which women might be as free as the mythic Aphrodite was.” Taking this argument by Sandra Gilbert to its logical conclusion, whatever Christian religion exists in Chopin’s work should be understood as merely incidental and is presented only as an occasion for its repudiation in favor of pre- or post-Christian frames of reference.2 Recognition of Roman Catholicism in Chopin’s writing should supplement nonreligious analyses that have generally been applied to her fiction, that is, interpretations that for the most part (and for good reason) see in Chopin ’s writing a precursor to later, twentieth-century feminist values. By contrast, attending to Chopin’s choice to infuse some of her fiction with Roman Catholic significance enriches our understanding of the ways that a Catholic religious aesthetic formed key elements of her fiction. In this way, Chopin can be seen not only as a proponent of an emerging feminist sensibility in American literature of the late nineteenth century but also in relation to evolving representations of Roman Catholicism in American fiction. That local-color writing, or what Carlos Baker has described as a late nineteenth-century American “regionalist impulse,” encompassed scenes of American Catholicism should come as no particular surprise since, as Baker notes, this regionalism was consequential first in New [18.116.42.208] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:47 GMT) Trading Religion for Feminism E 147 England literary circles but also “in one form or another accounted for the emergence of almost every prominent writer in the Middle Atlantic states and the Deep South in the last quarter of the [nineteenth] century.”3 Just as domestic-sentimental fiction opened doors into commercial publication for antebellum women, there were now new opportunities for women as regionalist local-color fiction writers. Richard Brodhead has taken a similar view of regionalism as the ticket to commercial success for postbellum American writers, but he goes even further by asserting that “the genre did not just create a place for writers : in the later nineteenth century, regionalism was...