Much of the best work on Kate Chopin's fiction over the past two decades has sought to contextualise her writing firmly within the discourses and contexts of the nineteenth century. Valuable and influential essays have been written, for example, on Chopin's debts to French nineteenth-century authors such as Maupassant and Flaubert; on Chopin and the New Woman; on New Orleans and the figure of the female flâneur; on Chopin and other women authors of the fin-de-siècle period such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton; on Kate Chopin as part of the nineteenth-century American literary tradition; on Chopin and Darwinism. Indeed, the essays in this volume continue and richly develop work in these areas. By contrast, publications on the connections between Kate Chopin's work and modernism have been halting and piecemeal. Moreover, they have invariably focused on The Awakening, either dwelling on its formal and experimental aspects or emphasising its relation to the New Woman, sexuality and feminist thought. Michael T. Gilmore's essay, 'Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening' is a good example of the former approach, stressing as it does similarities between Chopin's work and impressionist painting and music. Marianne DeKoven's essay 'Gendered Doubleness and the “Origins” of Modernist Form' extends consideration of the formal experimental qualities of The Awakening into an argument that elements of ambivalence and contradiction in the story are not only typical of early modernist writing but also that they result in a 'self-cancelling narrative stance' that indicates an ambivalence about feminism itself: 'given the depth and intractability of the fear of punishment for female anger and desire [...] inherent doubleness of modernist form is precisely what allows the expression of feminist content at all.'

“The individuals at the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits / “That's the way with them Cajuns...ain't got sense enough to know a white man when they see one.” (327) / Kate Chopin came of age as a writer at the end of a century that had brought complex social and linguistic transformations to Louisiana. First settled by the French, then ceded to Spain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War, reclaimed for France by Napoleon and then sold to Thomas Jefferson's USA in 1803, it has always been a space characterised by a volatile confluence of cultures, languages, skin colours and ethnic affiliations. Unequivocally, a key factor in the lasting appeal of Chopin's fiction is the vividness with which she evokes the human diversity of fin-de-siècle Louisiana. In what follows, I shall begin by providing a brief overview of recent theorisation on 'race' and ethnicity. I then go on to analyse representations of slaves of African origin, free people of colour, Native Americans and French Creoles and Cajuns in Kate Chopin's fiction, focusing on her first novel At Fault and on selected short stories from her collection Bayou Folk. In her landmark study The Word in Black and White: Reading Race in American Literature, 1638-1867, Dana Nelson observes that 'race' has been convincingly refuted as a valid scientific category, pointing out that it has never been a fixed or stable concept and that at different points in US history it has stood for cultural, evolutionary, moral, metaphysical and biological difference.

Like many other 'regional' - that is, not Boston or New York - writers of the late nineteenth century, Kate Chopin participated in an ambitious post-Civil War publication project designed to open up the diverse richness of the USA to a growing reading public. The 'Local Color' movement involved making strange or exotic the particular and parochial - in terms of landscape, character, dialect and so on - and expanding the range and scope of the 'national' literature. One of many who took Louisiana as her subject, Chopin is recognised as having captured brilliantly the state's atmosphere, fine detail, ethnic and racial mixtures, fleshing out as she does the nature of this post-colonial society in a bruised post-bellum world. Chopin takes pains to emphasise the specific linguistic and social differences between French-speaking regions of Louisiana and the rest of the USA. Quotation marks are frequently appended to phrases, sayings and aspects of Louisiana life and artefacts, and her use of dialects - mainly Negro and French Acadian, though also French Creole - is authoritative. Writing at a distance in St Louis, Missouri, following the deaths of her husband and mother, she was involved in interpretation and explication, not only to portray for readers the essence of a state that fascinated her but also to record a world that was disappearing fast into the maw of 'Americanness'. Much of her fiction records what a newly post-colonial state felt like within a larger homogenising nation, particularly in terms of the impact on its French Creole and French Acadian peoples. Kate Chopin had a complex relationship with Louisiana's French culture, offering multiple perspectives on fin-de-siècle issues of gender, ethnicity and language. Her work has rightly been celebrated for its subtle treatment of the changing face of southern life, and especially of southern women. In all her work, female characters embody the tensions and transformations within post-bellum life.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) first published a story, 'Wiser than a God', in the Philadelphia Music Journal in 1889; her last, 'Polly's Opportunity', appeared in the Youth's Companion in 1902. The thirteen years in between marked a hugely productive career as a writer, primarily of short stories, with a novel at the beginning and at the end of the 1890s; an earlier novel, Young Dr. Gosse, she seems to have destroyed. Chopin did not work seriously at her fiction until she was a widow and had returned to her birthplace, St Louis, Missouri, to live. During her brief married life (although it was long enough for her to produce six children), she lived in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then in Cloutierville, and it is in this southern state, in every way more French than American in its heritage and culture, that she set most of her stories and both her novels. Indeed, the publisher's advertisement for her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk, in 1894, drew attention to the fact that Chopin's characters were 'semi-aliens' and featured in narratives 'quite unlike most American tales'. Chopin's work was published in the leading magazines of her day; she wrote for a variety of different audiences, including children, but she also found ways and exercised the means to place stories which were often daring in terms of their subject matter and expression. She was expert in her manipulation of both form and language so as to position herself to write about issues which she found compelling - issues which were often controversial. Commentators on her work are always sensitive to the level of Chopin's awareness of the editorial and critical reception of her writing in turn-of-the-century America. It is clear that the knowledge she had of the literary marketplace operated alongside a determination to write about difficult subjects.

'How good was the touch of the raw silk to her flesh!' Mrs Sommers senses in 'A Pair of Silk Stockings' (502). The mature mother, full of the fastidious demands of culture, responds with natural animal joy to the leisure and luxury that fifteen dollars can buy, purchasing along with the sleek stockings a pair of 'polished, pointed-tipped boots' and a symmetrical pair of soft kid gloves. The visceral comfort of silk and leather against skin stimulates a craving for 'a nice and tasty bite' of food and entering a restaurant, amid the damask and crystal, she orders 'a half dozen blue-points, a plump chop with cress, a something sweet - a crème-frappée' with a glass of Rhine wine and a cup of black coffee (503). Utterly contented, she wiggles her toes in the silk stockings. Chopin's naturalist story, published in Vogue in 1897, depicts fashion as the border between culture and nature. Beyond the mundane necessities of dress demanded by climate and geography, fashion signals gender, social class and economic status and marks supposed civilisation and intellectual range, as well as ethnicity and the subtle nuances of ideology, morality, idealism and aesthetics. Fashion theorists Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro in their study Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body trace the complex and often conflicting semiotics of sartorial meaning. Dress functions as hieroglyph, its material presence drapes the body, revealing and concealing in intricate patterns easily read by members of a society and clearly setting limits on who is included and who excluded from its web of meaning. On a more playful psychological level, fashion is the site of the drama between fabric and flesh, especially for a woman who announces her availability and receptivity to the gaze of others and sets limits on the possibilities of approach and interaction. How much of a woman's body will she reveal and to whom are questions that theorists and critics interpret and debate.

The republication of Kate Chopin's The Awakening in Per Seyersted's The Complete Works of Kate Chopin in 1969 after decades of comparative neglect established The Awakening as a major work, one that quickly became canonical in feminist literary studies. The same cannot be said, however, for the other novel in the volume: At Fault, Chopin's first novel and the only one besides The Awakening that she ever published. Printed in 1890 at Chopin's expense, At Fault is the story of a young widow who successfully runs a plantation but rejects the man she loves because of false idealism. Although it received some positive reviews when it first appeared, At Fault has inspired less critical comment, and much less favourable treatment, than its more controversial successor. Early critics saw the novel as a tale of social change, as Alice Hall Petry writes in her introduction to Critical Essays on Kate Chopin: “the novel is intended to probe disparate individuals' responses to a world of rapid (especially technological) change in the post-Reconstruction era. As the machine of the railroad ruptures their garden of a Louisiana forest, everyone in the novel is forced to reconsider his or her values regarding economics, social class, race, gender, and even marriage.” The emphasis on social change is also prominent in Peggy Skaggs's exploration of women's roles in the novel and in Barbara Ewell's study of its competing claims of individualism and social responsibility.

“[T]he national subject, - the child, the American child. It is possible to 'converse' with any American on that subject; every one of you has something to say on it; and every one of you will listen eagerly to what any other person says on it [...] It may be because you do so much for children, in America. They are always on your mind; they are hardly ever out of your sight.” Elizabeth McCracken, The American Child (1913) / “Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!” (995) / The parting injunction made by Madame Ratignolle to Edna Pontellier at the close of The Awakening reverberated in the agitated conversations roused by Kate Chopin's book. Just as reviewers deplored Edna's neglect of her children, so references to the young and vulnerable featured in much of the lexicon of disapproval. The Awakening risked promoting 'unholy imaginations and unclean desires'; even admirers agreed, it was 'not for young people but for seasoned souls'. Similar allusions appeared again, in the New York Times, in July 1902, in a fresh controversy, roused by the Evanston Library, Illinois, and pursued by the Chicago Tribune. Headed by Jude the Obscure, the Library Board's list of books 'retired' from general circulation (or, in the words of the New York Times's report, its 'black list', 'relegated' to 'a dusty attic') included The Awakening and a dozen others, ranging from Boccaccio's Decameron to Gertrude Atherton's epistolary romance, The Aristocrats (1901). As with fears about the possible dangers of the Internet today, the safety of young people was quoted as of central importance on each side of the debate. The Library Board declared itself 'compelled to protect the public', in particular those parents ignorant of modern literature, who might inadvertently allow their son or daughter to encounter an 'indelicate or immoral' volume.

Much critical work on Kate Chopin has focused on the historical, geographical and personal contexts to her writings, illuminating her work by reference to social practices in Louisiana, the world of the Creoles, the myths of the Bayou and her own upbringing and adult experiences. Of particular interest to critics has been the issue of literary influence, with much attention being paid to French writers. Contemporary reviewers compared her unfavourably with such minor French writers as Paul Bourget, and Willa Cather's labelling of The Awakening as 'a Creole Bovary' continues to dominate much critical thinking, even though Edna Pontellier has little in common with Emma Bovary and Chopin's use of descriptive language and of direct and indirect speech is very different from that of Flaubert. More recently, Per Seyersted asserts that Chopin was influenced by 'the 'feminism of Madame de Staël and George Sand and by the realism of Flaubert and Maupassant' (32), and Eliane Jasenas emphasises the importance of Flaubert and Maupassant and asserts Baudelaire as an important influence. Chopin herself includes references to French writers, with the result that suppositions are made about their influence on her. However, the fact that, for instance, she refers in The Awakening to a novel by Daudet (890) is in itself not directly meaningful, since it could be either one of his charming stories of southern France, a Zolaesque novel such as Fromont Jeune et Risler aîné, or Sapho, which anatomises bohemian French society.

“the artist must possess the courageous soul... The soul that dares and defies.” (946) / “Any literary succession is first of all a struggle, a destruction of old values and a reconstruction of old elements” Jurrii Tynyanov (1921) / Kate Chopin's well-documented descent into literary obscurity after the publication of The Awakening (1899) is most often attributed to her engagement with the taboo issues of female sexual desire and infidelity. Her marginalisation, however, may have been as much a result of her overt rejection of traditional literary form and blatant transgression of conventional genre boundaries. While reviews of Chopin's earlier collections of short stories, in particular Bayou Folk (1894), had focused on the 'quaintness', 'charm' and distinctly regional flavour of the writing and had positioned her firmly within the framework of local-colour fiction, The Awakening resisted such generic categorisation. The highly original style and voice that Chopin established in this impressionistic narrative, with its lyrical, sensuous prose, symbolism, unusual circular structure and its focus on the inner consciousness of its heroine, evidently unsettled the expectations of critics. Although C.L. Deyo, writing in the St Louis Post-Dispatch in May 1899, recognised Chopin's originality and innovation, observing that 'The work is more than unusual. It is unique', many interpreted the text as an 'aberration', a radical departure for a writer who had previously adhered to convention. Few critics actually attempted definitions of genre, their commentaries relying primarily on moral condemnation of the novel's controversial themes.

“that night she was like a little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its power and walks for the first time alone...She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as...she lifted her body to the surface of the water. / A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.” (908) / Edna Pontellier's euphoria at learning to swim pinpoints the conceptual, and feminist, dimensions of Chopin's complex metaphor of a turn-of-the-century woman's 'awakening' to her ability to 'control the working of her body and soul'. Compared as it is to a toddler's first independent walk - a first step in the development towards adulthood - Edna's midnight swim is much more than a victory of physical coordination. It establishes her sense of self-ownership, physical, mental and spiritual, which in turn triggers two fundamental insights that determine her progression from disengaged wife to autonomous subject: in control of her body, she becomes aware of its potential for pleasure and learns to claim her right to self-determination. The novel begins with Mr Pontellier's assertion of his ownership rights: his act of 'looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property' poignantly reminds her of the wedding ring she gave into his safe-keeping when she went for her seabath (882). It ends with the newly born New Woman Edna's declaration of economic and sexual independence: 'I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose' (992). Edna's proclamation of rights is the equivalent of Chopin's claim to independence in her choice of subject matter, as is the desire to venture 'where no woman had swum before'.

Because it was so far ahead of the times, The Awakening has had a turbulent history. It was rejected when it appeared in 1899, forgotten for thirty years, rejected again in the 1930s and forgotten for another generation, rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s by scholars in Europe and the USA, embraced in the 1970s by feminists in the USA and the UK - and then accepted ecstatically by teachers, students and readers of all kinds. Today, it is reprinted in dozens of editions and textbooks, as well as in several translations, and is one of America's most widely read, most widely loved classic books. It took 100 years for all this to play out, and there were contradictions along the way. Not all readers rejected the novel or forgot it, not all feminists liked it, and not everyone today is pleased with its omnipresence in bookstores and classrooms - but scholars are virtually unanimous about the ups and downs of its reception. We should, however, distinguish between the history of The Awakening and that of Kate Chopin's short stories. The 100 or so stories Chopin wrote throughout the 1890s were, by almost any writer's standards, more than merely accepted in her own time. Many of them appeared in America's most prestigious magazines, including Vogue, the Century, Youth's Companion, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Young People. Several were syndicated by the American Press Association. Twenty-three were published by Houghton Mifflin in Bayou Folk (1894) and twenty-one others by Way and Williams in A Night in Acadie (1897), and both anthologies were well received by critics across the country who praised the regional charm of the stories, their local colour, their realistic treatment of Louisiana Creole and Acadian life. When The Awakening appeared in 1899, Kate Chopin had every reason to think that her national reputation would ensure the success of her novel.

Kate Chopin's novels and stories are available in various reprints and editions; those referred to by essayists are included in the Primary texts below. Throughout the volume the textual references are all to The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted. Full bibliographical references to articles, books and other texts are included in the endnotes to each essay. The Selected Critical and Biographical Studies below are to be considered as the starting point to any study of Chopin's life and works.

Colliding worlds: the revolutionary impulse

On 28 May 1849, a political refugee named Richard Wagner crossed Lake Constance on a steamer to Switzerland. He had spent most of the previous month in flight or hiding because of his role in an uprising in Dresden that had begun on 3 May and was crushed within four days. Before then, for seven years, he served as Kapellmeister in the Saxon capital; he was now a wanted man. His closest comrades in the revolt, including his musical colleague and friend, August Röckel, were captured and soon condemned to death. (The sentences were not carried out, though these others did serve extended prison sentences.) The revolutionary provisional government had quit Dresden before advancing Prussian and Saxon troops. Most of its leaders, aiming to regroup, made their way to Chemnitz, to the west. The Kapellmeister – who had backed but was not a member of the government – went too, but stopped at a different hotel. Consequently, he did not fall into the trap that awaited the other insurrectionists.

Wagner scurried away, arriving eventually in Weimar where Franz Liszt, who was then rehearsing Tannhäuser, sheltered him. “I found it difficult to tell my friend that I had not left Dresden as Royal Kapellmeister in an entirely regular way,” Wagner recalled. “To tell the truth,” he added, “I had an extremely hazy conception of my relationship to the laws of what was, in the narrower sense, my native country. Had I committed a criminal act according to these laws or not? I couldn't come to any real conclusion about it” (ML 412).

There is a long tradition of identifying Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with Germany and Germany with Die Meistersinger, regarding the work as more than just an opera (or even music drama), but rather the very emblem of a nation. The connection of nation and art is intertwined throughout the history of Die Meistersinger. Three very different examples can serve to illustrate the point. In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche described the Act 1 Prelude as “a truly genuine token of the German soul … This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow – as yet they have no today.” A popular turn-of-the-century operatic guide called Die Meistersinger “the most beautiful, the most German of all operas.” And Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in a radio address before a 1933 broadcast of the opening Bayreuth festival production of Meistersinger commented that: “Of all [Wagner's] music dramas Die Meistersinger stands out as the most German. It is simply the incarnation of our national identity.” The perennial “German question” (“what is Germany?”) underlies this work, as it does most of Wagner's works, not simply by virtue of the proximity of German unification (1871) to its premiere (1868), but also through the resonance of this event in Wagner's contemporary writings, in the genesis of the work, and especially in its reception.

Wagner's biography has been researched to within an inch of its life. It has been dissected, drenched with no end of detail, eroticized, vilified, heroicized, and several times filmed. Its foundations are the collected writings, which in the first instance Wagner edited himself in the spirit of an autobiographical enterprise, a separate and lengthy autobiography Mein Leben (My Life) dictated to his mistress and later second wife Cosima, notebooks and diaries, photographs and portraits, an unusually large number of letters, mounds of anecdotal gossip, and no end of documentation on the way he lived and how his contemporaries saw him. In this sense, he is almost the exact antithesis of Shakespeare, whose life, or at least what is safely known about it in terms of verifiable “facts,” can be told in a relatively short space. I have summarized the history of Wagner biography elsewhere. Here I want to look at Wagner's own portrayals of his life, some issues they raise, the philosophical spirit in which I believe they were attempted, and their effect on the generation that came immediately after him.

Biographers of Shakespeare have had to resort to imaginative reconstructions and not infrequently to forged documents that have accorded their subject more lives than a cat. In stark contrast, there appears to be only one life for Wagner, which he did his best to determine in large part himself. It was also a singular life in another sense: maverick, turbulent, exceptionally creative on many levels, never afraid to attempt the impossible, uncannily prescient of modern thinking about media and human psychology, genuinely revolutionary in aspiration, and yet prone to an institutionalism with proto-fascist traits that were largely, but not only, the result of posthumous aggrandizement on the part of his apostles and admirers. In all its colorful detail, the story has been repeated so many times – with its hero’s adventures, amours, tribulations, and eventual acceptance among Western music’s cultural elite all in their proper place – that at first sight it seems like a never-changing biographical myth.