Kate Chopin’s literary development and changing women’s fiction

Kate Chopin developed as a writer through several phases of women's fiction. That's our starting point. We don't need to know The Awakening beforehand; we need to follow how she arrived at her own way of writing it.

First come the sentimental novels she read growing up. Their language was elevated and romantic, and their female characters pursued social standing through courtship and marriage. So this was a literary world centered on finding a husband and establishing a place in society. Did Chopin simply reproduce it, or did she move away from it? We haven't been told yet.

When she began writing, she took the local colorists as models. The next paragraph explains who they were and the changing world around them. Women were entering education, professions, and politics in greater numbers. The local colorists welcomed those new opportunities and wrote about regional life with a detached, almost scientific eye.

But their response wasn't entirely forward-looking. As the older domestic culture faded, they began to idealize it. A garden became a kind of paradise, a house an emblem of nurturing, and household objects took on almost sacred significance. They were attracted to new possibilities while also mourning what was disappearing. Those reactions can coexist; nostalgia doesn't necessarily mean wanting to give up every new freedom.

Now we get Chopin's difference. She focused on loneliness, isolation, and frustration rather than sharing that idealization. Yet she could still borrow the local colorists' technique. This is an important distinction: taking someone's method doesn't require taking the same attitude or subject matter.

What problem did that method solve? She wanted to write about extreme psychological states without the sentimental novels' excesses. Reporting a shocking event as a piece of ordinary regional life let her present it without an exaggerated emotional delivery.

The description “uninflected” initially gives me pause. It doesn't mean the event itself becomes boring or stops being shocking. It describes the restraint of the telling. We can have an emotionally intense story and a detached narrative voice at the same time. That helps explain what Chopin took from the local colorists even as her concerns differed from theirs.

The final paragraph introduces another step. Chopin didn't share their growing nostalgia, and she looked beyond them to the New Women. These writers sought freedom and innovation in both content and form. They added fantasy and parable to the sentimental novel, including imagined worlds different from the ones women actually inhabited.

They also experimented with impressionistic writing to explore parts of women's consciousness that earlier fiction hadn't recorded. Chopin embraced that approach more fully in The Awakening. Its 39 uneven sections aren't held together chiefly by a uniform style or content; the sustained attention to the protagonist's mind provides the connection.

So my initial main-point prediction is that Chopin evolved as a writer amid changes in women's fiction and women's lives. The literary development is the part I feel most certain about. We've followed the sentimental background, what she borrowed from the local colorists, what she didn't share with them, and her turn toward the New Women's innovations. The Awakening is the endpoint of that development.