Mapping Gender: Feminist Cartographies in Kate Chopin's "Regionalist" Stories

Abstract

In this article the fourth in a series which examines relationships between women and literary space. I examine ways in which conjunctures of literature, geography, and gender shed new light on nineteenth century U.S. author Kate Chopin's "regionalist" stories. In the process of examining her life and her work in terms of geographics of identity and gendered subjectivity, the two representative short stories analyzed here take on a significance far beyond their -local color- surface and themselves become like the stories of their female protagonists sites of struggle. While traditional readings of Chopin's "regionalist" fiction yield mildly intriguing tales which reaffirm cultural boundaries, analysis from a perspective of feminist geographies highlights Chopin's challenges to the circumscribed literary and gender spheres of her own context.