Kate Chopin and Catholicism

‘Heather Ostman’s Kate Chopin and Catholicism is meaty, interesting, and

provocative. It may change the way we all read this marvel of a writer.’

— Linda Wagner-Martin, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and author of Hemingway’s

Wars: The Public and Private Battles (2017)
‘Heather Ostman’s Kate Chopin and Catholicism heralds an innovative
methodology with rich possibilities for studies of Kate Chopin and American

realism. As Chopin became immersed in the studies of Darwin, she drew away

from practicing Catholicism. Ostman demonstrates how Chopin used Catholicism

as a device to examine social issues and critique the schism between physical and

corporeal pleasure. Ostman exemplifies how Chopin leveraged Catholicism to

arrive at a revolutionary and unorthodox definition of mysticism and spirituality.’

— Kate O’Donoghue, Associate Professor of English, Suffolk County

Community College, USA

This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in Kate

Chopin’s fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of her

novels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at the

ways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that served

on multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as a

trope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’s

struggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinated

authenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to the

distinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled the

articulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book reveals

Chopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in the

natural world.