Last October, I happened upon a circular announcing the performance of a stage adaptation of Kate Chopin’s acclaimed novel, The Awakening, at Washington University. Intrigued, I got myself to the Edison Theatre and enjoyed a deeply moving student production of this murky American classic. Yet this rich theater experience celebrating not just a major literary figure but one of St. Louis’ great lights got little publicity. What should have stimulated interest and local pride never even ruffled the surface of public consciousness.
For readers who don’t know (and that’s probably most), and since March is Women’s History Month, Kate Chopin, née Catherine O’Flaherty, was born in St. Louis in 1851. Daughter of a successful business-man, she attended local Catholic academies, where her impertinence rendered her a problematic student and an accomplished flirt.
Upon her marriage to young Creole Oscar Chopin at age 20, she moved to rural Louisiana, where she bore six children in 10 years. Though the marriage was happy, she eschewed conventional wifehood and motherhood to pursue her own interests: cards, stylish clothes, cigarettes and long, watchful walks among bayou folk. Oscar died of malaria in 1883, and some years later Kate returned to St. Louis, where she would raise her children and, over 14 years, write two novels, three collections of short fiction and dozens of stories and poems, all notable for unconventional characters who tilted social mores.
The Awakening, however, published in 1899, proved one of the most controversial novels of the day. Her frank, unsentimental depiction of a bored young New Orleans matron who leaves her husband for another man and then takes her own life set off a critical firestorm. Stung by scathing condemnation of the story’s disturbing moral complexities (critics deemed it “gilded sin,” among other things), she never wrote again and died suddenly at age 53, after a day at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Chopin then faded into obscurity until a wave of scholarly interest 25 years ago confirmed her importance in the American literary pantheon. That The Awakening is now required reading in literature courses the world over would probably amuse her. That the local media failed to note this centennial production of her masterpiece should probably not surprise us.
As I watched those thoroughly engaged students play out Chopin’s dark, prescient drama, I wondered: Just what, exactly, compelled her to dare write this, here in a city we’ve since come to regard as deeply conservative?
Consider that after its founding in 1764, St. Louis burgeoned with nationalities and languages and, thus, newspapers, bookstores, schools, clubs and societies to serve peoples’ needs and interests. By the time Chopin returned here in the 1880s, she found a city rich in concerts, lectures, theaters, museums, libraries, exhibits, parks and gardens. And a diverse and curious citizenry was deeply committed to serious cultural life. The art museum was founded in 1879, the symphony in 1880 and, by decade’s end, the Daily Mirror was regularly publishing the works of Oscar Wilde, Theodore Dreiser, James Joyce and Amy Lowell.
Upon settling into her modest home on what is now Delmar, Chopin soon established a “salon” renowned for the local intellects and bohemians who gathered to discuss literature and philosophy, make music and enjoy her inimitable storytelling. Though attractive and popular, she never remarried. In choosing to remain single, she willfully joined what was then a national phenomenon—a rising tide of women who, earning more and living longer, could afford to make their own way, provided sufficient “social machinery.” Chopin found it here and relished it.
So if all art is to some degree social—the result of a relationship between an artist and her time—then St. Louis offered one gutsy woman the traction to write a powerful, radical book that, in the wondrous interplay of actors, audience and artist on a campus stage a century hence, can still shape our lives.
Something to celebrate, surely … if only we had known about it.
