Silencing Which Past?: Kate Chopin and the Buried Story

• In Event: Waiting To Be Heard: The Emergence of the Voices of Victims of America’s Racial Terror

Abstract

Second Wave feminism brought Kate Chopin forward as a “forgotten” woman writer who ought to be remembered especially for The Awakening, her masterpiece. The publication of a Norton Critical Edition with essays on southern manners and mores jump started Chopin’s resurrection, which unquestionably succeeded. The Awakening is now required reading not only across the United States, but in many other countries as well. Left out of the critical essays, then as now, was the history of reconstruction in New Orleans and, perhaps even more significantly, in Nachitoches Parish in northwest Louisiana, the two places where Chopin herself lived and about which wrote, not only in The Awakening but in an earlier novel and a set of short stories as well. During Reconstruction, Nachitoches Parish was second only to New Orleans in the amount of violence perpetrated on the African American population. Silencing this past entails disregarding the fact that Chopin’s Creole husband, Oscar Chopin, was a founding member of the White League in Louisiana, commemorated on the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place just now removed from downtown New Orleans by Mayor Mitch Landrieu; that Chopin’s beloved brother-in-law, Phanor Breazeale, (of whom she said that he suggested the story of The Awakening to her), served as District Attorney during an incident when the Nachitoches Democrats reported “that there were many objectionable Negroes who had to be killed. This was done by a company of patriotic Democrats;”* and that the Colfax and Coushatta Massacres of 1873 and 1874 were local news. This paper examines landmarks in the history of The Awakening’s critical resurrection, with a view to locating where the bodies are still buried, both literally and metaphorically. I will specifically recommend the use of historical photographs to stage encounters with the ghosts of the text.

*Pier Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969) p. 44

Author

• Laura Wexler, Yale University