Beyond Gender: Sex, Class, and Ethnicity in Kate Chopin’s Short Stories

Abstract

[Abstract] The object of study of this dissertation are three short stories by one of the most representative writers of nineteenth-century American literature, Kate Chopin. The author is specially appreciated by feminist literary critics for her exploration of the female identity in her novel The Awakening (1899). This project aims to demonstrate that gender must be studied alongside other analytic categories such as sex, class, and ethnicity through an analysis of the selected stories: “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (1894), “The Storm” (1969), and “Désirée’s Baby” (1893). In my studies, I also discuss the stories’ form and content—characters, settings, descriptions, etc.—from an intersectional feminism perspective. This project required the close reading of my object of study and the consultation of specialized dictionaries—such as The Dictionary of Feminist Theory and Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies—and academic works about intersectionality—e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. I also read several publications about Chopin’s literary production, as the works of Holtman, Jeffers, and Toth, the latter being recommended by Kate Chopin International Society. Some of the key concepts addressed in the below pages belong to the fields of feminism and critical theory like gender, class, ethnicity, and intersectionality. The latter term is particularly relevant because it offers the possibility to remove the local color label from Chopin’s works (Holtman). Therefore, analyzing the stories from an intersectional feminism approach allows the reader to understand the way society pressures individuals to stay within determined identity categories, and so interferes with class mobility and social change. My dissertation is divided in two parts. In the first part, I explain the theoretical framework of this project. 1.1 consists of an explanation of the concepts of gender, sex, class, race, and ethnicity; it includes a summary of their academic history, as well as brief accounts of some terminological debates around them. 1.2 reviews the concept of intersectionality and its application to feminist theory. The second part of this project applies the reviewed theoretical concepts to the analysis of “At the ‘Cadian Ball”, “The Storm”, and “Désirée’s Baby”. Each story takes one subsection of this part. The B.A. thesis ends with a conclusion, which gathers some of its key ideas in order to ratify the initial hypothesis: expanding upon previous feminist work, to challenge the traditional classification of Chopin’s short fiction as local color writing through an intersectional feminism perspective. It must be noted that, although the stories are not revolutionary in terms of defying social norms, they do question the analytical categories of gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as explore their boundaries.