American author Kate O’Flaherty Chopin (1850–1904) is known around the world for her landmark novel, The Awakening (1899), a text that sparked generations of readers and scholars who would shift the foundation of the American literary canon with their interest in Chopin’s life and work—nearly sixty years after The Awakening had fallen into obscurity and virtually ignored after Chopin’s death. The Awakening challenged conventional gender roles, as its protagonist Edna Pontellier sought to determine the direction of her own life—as a wife, a lover, a mother, and an artist—an effort that culminated in her apparent suicide, a final attempt to protect her self-determination, free of society’s conventions. Beginning with Per Seyersted, several literary scholars and students of the 1960s and 1970s took up The Awakening as an iconic text of the women’s rights movement—one which brought sexual freedom and autonomy to new societal levels, as well as one that saw more and more women attending college and creating lives independent of familial expectations—a deepening of many of the inroads to women’s autonomy forged during Chopin’s own lifetime. Since then, The Awakening has become identified with women’s rights and gender studies in literature, as it also has become one of the most widely read texts in the English-speaking world. However, despite the proliferation of Catholic imagery, references, settings, and characters in The Awakening, as well as her earlier novel, At Fault (1890), and numerous short stories, the presence of Catholicism in her work has been largely ignored or subordinated to feminist and other readings. Certainly, the tremendous work of feminist scholars has been essential to keeping The Awakening at the forefront of reading audiences for several decades now, but Kate Chopin and Catholicism begins to reconcile this oversight of scholarship on the religious aspects of Chopin’s collective work. This study explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in her fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of her novels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism examines the ways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that served on multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as a trope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’s struggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinated authenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to the distinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled the articulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church.
Educated in parochial school, Chopin was a practicing Catholic most of her life, until her husband Oscar Chopin’s untimely death in 1882. She spent her childhood and early education in and out of the Sacred Heart Academy in St. Louis, Missouri. In keeping with her Catholic upbringing, which derived from her Irish and French heritage, she had married Oscar, a New Orleans-based Catholic Creole, and raised their children within the Catholic tradition in Louisiana: in New Orleans and later in Natchitoches Parish, when the family moved in an effort to better manage their finances. Throughout her married life, Chopin seemed to be a reasonably devout Catholic, with all the outward appearances of devotion, including several (yet not all) of her children’s baptisms, the crucifix she wore—as seen in family portraits (Ryan 150), and the prie dieu next to her bed for kneeling prayers (Toth, Kate Chopin 143)—all of these expressions of faith in spite of the fact that no Louisiana church holds a record of the Chopins’ membership (Toth, Kate Chopin 143).
During the 1880s, Chopin started to abandon her Catholicism and began reading Charles Darwin’s work, although she retained her Catholic sensibilities. Throughout her life, she remained very close to her school friend Kitty Gerasché and a beloved teacher, Mary O’Meara, from the Sacred Heart Academy, both of whom were nuns. Through their examples, Chopin knew that Catholicism could foster independent, educated, and thoughtful women. At Sacred Heart, as biographer Emily Toth has noted, girls’ education was rigorous, and the nuns “dedicated themselves to teaching young Catholic girls ‘of good family’ to be pious wives and mothers—but also to be knowledgeable, clear, and independent thinkers, to ‘meet with adequacy the demands of time and eternity’” (45). The mission of the Sacred Heart nuns complemented—or more accurately, paralleled—the dramatic shifts occurring in the Catholic Church, as well as American culture, in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the early seeds of Modernism began to reshape the landscape of culture and society. Chopin’s lifetime overlapped with the development of the American Catholic Church as a church closely identified with an exploding immigrant population at a time when the United States tried to reconcile the forces of immigration waves, Nativism, expansion, and, of course, abolition and Civil War. This historical moment, during the century following independence, marked a time when citizens sought to define an American national identity that, amid these competing forces, was also fraught with a religious struggle between Protestantism and an expanding American Catholic Church. While the collective religious identity of the United States was definitively Protestant—in its various denominations—the Catholic Church had gained a sizeable foothold in the nineteenth century, expanding over 1000 percent in the course of several decades, from 1830 to 1870, making it the single, largest denomination in the country (Carey 30).
Although Chopin was a practicing Catholic for much of her life, she swiftly abandoned most of the formality as a widow, and her fiction, which she began writing after her husband’s death, was anything but conventional. Chopin wrote as if she had her ear to the wall of humanity and her eye to its keyhole: her characters reflected the world she observed, the world she lived and breathed in. Her embarking upon a literary career came at a time when Modernism began to influence all aspects of American culture. Along with the scientific advances in theories of natural selection by Darwin, Modernism made it possible for Americans to begin to consider “unbelief” as an viable possibility. Prior to the late nineteenth century, the notion of unbelief was unthinkable. But science had begun to separate from its partnership with faith, and many Americans—many Catholics, too—began to question the validity of the Church and even the Scriptures themselves. As major religious institutions were under scrutiny, more and more women, including many Catholic women, were becoming educated and exploring pathways of independence. Not surprisingly, the number of nuns during this time soared, from 1,375 in 1850 to 40,000 in 1900 (Dolan, In Search of 147), as the vocation provided a viable option for further education and leadership opportunities for women who wished to remain unmarried. Chopin’s brief but prolific years as a writer began as the world around her started to rethink ordinary institutions and practices, and the restrictions on women’s roles began to loosen.
Most Catholic writers at the time did not turn a critical eye toward religious practices and institutions. Other Catholic authors, such as Anna Hanson Dorsey, Christian Reid, Jedediah Huntington, and Mary Ann Sadler, were evangelist writers who sought to convert or proselytize (Ryan 147). But this was never Chopin’s intent. Instead, her use of Catholic themes or motifs was always in service of a secular purpose. Therefore, perhaps because of how and why she depicted Catholic characters, institutions, and practices, Chopin has rarely been considered as a Catholic writer. But she developed as a unique type of Catholic author, one who drew on familiar Catholic scenarios but used them to show the ways the religion alternately could meet or could not meet the shifting social roles and expectations that arose with the forces reshaping American society. Furthermore, her deep reverence for nature emerges in so many of her stories; in fact, the natural world’s prominent presence in Chopin’s fiction at times overshadows the significance of the Church. In flowers, forests, bayous, and stars—in all of its earthly splendor—the natural world often provides access to divinity in her work, sometimes in concert with the Catholic Church and frequently in contrast to it. Therefore, unlike other Catholic authors, Chopin did not write to support or promote or necessarily depict Catholicism favorably. She absolutely was not interested in converting readers. Even as she used Catholicism as an aesthetic in her local color fiction, she infused her work with ambivalence toward religion—with equally competing forces marked by rejection, criticism, acceptance, and possibility. She avoided making religion her primary subject, and instead used it liberally as an indicator of the setting and culture for her stories, providing a space for the critical interrogation of gender roles, as well as a space for reimagining spirituality.
The Awakening, Chopin’s best-known novel, has provided such a space. This text, like Chopin’s earlier novel, At Fault, and multiple short stories, depicts the challenges of its protagonist against the backdrop of a southern Catholic landscape. Though not a Catholic herself, the main character, Edna Pontellier, through her marriage to Léonce Pontellier, a New Orleans Creole, is well acquainted with nineteenth-century Catholicism. Edna’s struggles for autonomy parallel a moment of enormous expansion in American Catholicism, as it emerged in Chopin’s own lifetime as a major religion in the United States. The Catholic Church in this novel offers an aesthetic for foregrounding Edna’s shift from sleepwalking wife and mother to awakened, independent woman; the juxtaposition of Edna’s “awakening” to the static Catholic characters, such as the “mother-woman” Adèle Ratignolle, and a visit to a mass are just some of the ways Chopin used Catholic representations to frame her major work. The materiality within the Catholic aesthetic adds a nuanced dimension that foregrounds the body within the earthly realm—a logical place, it seems, for an interrogation of women’s autonomy. The Catholic aesthetic here and in her other works often provides a tangible, corporeal element for articulating the social conventions that prohibit Chopin’s women characters—and sometimes men characters—from realizing their autonomy.
In her earlier and lesser known novel, At Fault, Catholic doctrine directs the protagonist Thérèse Lafirme’s moral compass, as she insists that the man she loves—and who loves her—remarries the alcoholic woman he has divorced, not for reasons of logic, but for reasons of Thérèse’s seemingly arbitrary doctrinal priorities. Here, Chopin uses religion as a plot device that at once advances the romantic scheme and disables it with insidious critique. The only way love may manifest is when Hosmer’s wife dies tragically. This novel and The Awakening provide aesthetic as well as metaphoric value through a Catholic lens, in addition to its historic and cultural contexts for both stories. And both novels invite the interrogation of gender roles, women’s autonomy, and religious doctrine—within the context of a Catholic landscape at the same time the texts critique dogma and piety through irony. The Awakening challenges the institution of marriage as Edna seeks her own autonomy through art, through love affairs, and ultimately through apparent death. At Fault also foregrounds questions over the sanctity of marriage and the morality of divorce within the context of Catholicism and the desire to love—a desire that does not necessarily need the sanctity of marriage. Both novels press the questions of love and autonomy beyond the parameters of religious and societal conventions, and in doing so, raise the possibilities for both in the spaces beyond convention and institution. Both novels, like much of Chopin’s shorter fiction, depict the complexities of living, of simply being human and hence corporeal, as they transcend and even defy the unmoving boundaries of social rules and religious doctrine.
Many of Chopin’s short stories similarly interrogate these possibilities within the portraits of relationships and personal challenges in local contexts. In several of her stories where romantic love is central to the plot, the author uses a religious aesthetic to illuminate the trials of love. For example, stories such as “Love on the Bon-Dieu ,” “A Morning Walk,” and “After the Winter ” use the occasion of Easter to articulate the complexities of romantic love and human struggles. Additionally, just as in At Fault, certain stories use Catholicism to foreground social issues like divorce. “Madame Celéstin’s Divorce” depicts the question and challenges faced by individuals within the context of divorce and all of its social, romantic, and religious implications. In fact, the main female character in “Madame Celéstin’s Divorce” seeks the advice of her confessor, as well as the pope, on the subject of divorce, and in this portrait, Chopin does not appear to directly cast critical judgment on the Church’s position against divorce while she enables her character to search for the truth. Furthermore, in stories such as “With the Violin ,” “A Matter of Prejudice ,” and “Madame Martel’s Christmas Eve,” the Christmas holiday figures centrally in the construction of the plot. Other Catholic masses and feast days appear in numerous stories, functioning similarly, including “Odalie Misses Mass ” and “At Chênière Caminada .”
Several other Chopin stories move even beyond the author’s repertoire of ambivalence, critiques, and local color depictions of Catholicism, and these stories show a much deeper, more contemplative Chopin who probes the possibilities of mystical experience beyond the dogma, ritual, and materiality of Catholic practice—a quality of her writing that is nearly entirely ignored by critics. In these stories, Chopin shows herself to be contemplative, but even more importantly, a writer who is deeply connected to nature and who demonstrates a deep awareness of mysticism, if not as a mystic herself. In fact, a few of her stories parallel the type of women’s spiritual experience described by mystics such as sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Á...