Kate Chopin House

This two-and-a-half story brick property was the home of the nineteenth-century writer, Kate Chopin (1850 - 1904). In addition to writing short stories and reviews for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, Kate Chopin was also a novelist. She is best known for her second novel, The Awakening, which was published in 1899. Due to the criticism that she received at the time of the novel's publication, she was unable to publish her third novel, and she subsequently destroyed the manuscript. Today, however, her work is viewed differently, and The Awakening is frequently taught in women's studies departments at colleges and universities. Chopin lived in St. Louis for much of her life, apart from her time in Louisiana, where she lived with her six children and her husband until his death. Kate Chopin herself died in St. Louis in 1904, shortly after attending the World's Fair, which was held in St. Louis that summer. In 1986, Kate Chopin's house in the Central West End was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2012, the Central West End Association commissioned a statue of author, which was installed at a public ceremony in the Writers' Corner section of the city.

Kate Chopin (née O'Flaherty) was born in St. Louis in 1850 to a French-American mother, Eliza Farris, and an Irish immigrant father, Thomas O'Flaherty. Kate was raised primarily in a French-American neighborhood in St. Louis, where French was still spoken at home and in the local parish. Beginning at age five, she attended a Catholic boarding school, the Sacred Heart Academy, where she excelled at academics and was at the top of her class. When her father, a railroad investor, died during a bridge collapse, Kate returned home to live with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of whom were widows. As a teenager, she was expected to appear at society parties, where she met her future husband, Oscar Chopin, whom she married in 1870 at the age of twenty. They moved to Louisiana together and resided in New Orleans, where he ran a general store and later, his family's cotton plantation. Following his death, Kate Chopin moved back to St. Louis, where she raised their six children.

Shortly before she turned forty, Kate Chopin began writing and earning a small amount of money for her work. Initially, she wrote reviews and short stories purchased by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She also wrote two collections of short stories, as well as two novels, which were accepted by a publisher. Her second novel, The Awakening, was published in 1899. Although it received positive reviews in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it was criticized elsewhere for its candid portrayal of the protagonist's emotional distress within her marriage and within her role as a mother, topics that were not readily discussed outside of private life at that time. Within the circumscribed social environment of the late nineteenth-century, women were expected to adhere to restrictive social roles with relatively little freedom. As scholars have noted, it was not until a generation later when the work of another American novelist, Edith Wharton (author of Ethan Frome) began to normalize such topics in American literature.

During the mid-twentieth century, Chopin's second novel finally began to receive the acclaim that it was previously denied, although earlier criticism prevented Chopin from publishing any other novels during her lifetime. The Awakening eventually enjoyed a renaissance when feminist scholars rediscovered Chopin's writing and began to incorporate her texts into college and university courses, in alignment with the emergence of women's studies as an academic field. Nevertheless, The Awakening continued to be perceived as amoral by some critics, given how it challenged social conventions at the time that it was written, especially as the novel's protagonist was viewed as placing her own welfare over that of her children.

Yet, post-modernist and feminist scholars have noted that in Chopin's own view of her novel, she perceived the protagonist's choices in existential terms, as apart from bourgeois morality. Chopin's letters and other private correspondence reveal that she viewed truth itself as something that was always subject to contextualization and different interpretations. One scholar has stated that The Awakening depicts:

“a series of events in which the truth is present, but with a philosophical pragmatism [the author] is unwilling to extract a final truth. Rather, she sees truth as constantly re-forming itself and as so much a part of the context of what happens that it can never be final or for that matter abstractly stated."

Today, Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, continues to be read and discussed by scholars, students, and general readers, further ensuring her place in American literature. In 1986, more than a century after The Awakening was first published, Kate Chopin's home in the Central West End was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2012, a statue depicting the author was designed and unveiled at a special ceremony attended by her descendants and members of the public. Guest speakers discussed the author's literary legacy and her St. Louis-Creole heritage, while the statue was installed at the northwest corner of McPherson and Euclid Avenues in the city's Central West End. Sponsored by the Central West End Association, the statue is located in the Writers' Corner section of the neighborhood. It is proximate to statues of other famous writers who resided in St. Louis, including the Modernist poet T.S. Eliot and the playwright Tennessee Williams.

Rice, Patricia. A welcome home for Kate Chopin, St. Louis Public Radio. March 7th, 2012. Accessed September 24th, 2022. https://news.stlpublicradio.org/arts-culture/2012-03-07/a-welcome-home-for-kate-chopin.

Wyatt, Neil . A Biography of Kate Chopin, VCU Archive. Accessed September 24th, 2022. https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/webtexts/hour/katebio.html.

Kate Chopin House - Nomination Form, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed September 25th, 2022. https://mostateparks.com/sites/mostateparks/files/Chopin%2C%20Kate%2C%20House.pdf.

Homepage, Kate Chopin International Society. Accessed September 25th, 2022. https://www.katechopin.org/.