Gothic Chopin: Negotiating Realism’s Divide in Bayou Folk

Abstract

The Gothic in Kate Chopin’s work is often understood through the same lens of racialization that has elucidated much of American Gothic fiction. In this regard, Chopin’s realist stories depicting the marginalized and exotic are haunted with repressed secrets of a poisonous past and a violent, segregated present. But racism is not an isolated impetus for Gothic disruption in Chopin’s work as it also manifests a tension between provincial locality and an inherently cosmopolitan creolization that frustrates the regionalist/nationalist divide, one in which Chopin stands at the crossroads between realist idioms of local color/regionalism and modernity’s nationalist narrative Chopin’s ambivalent positioning with regard to a regionalist aesthetic is a source for her Gothicism in her stories, in which she claims a liminal insider/outsider status merging exoticism with nationalism.