Coloring Locals examines how the late nineteenth-century politics of gender, class, race, and ethnicity influenced Kate Chopin's writing for the major family periodical of her time.
Chopin's canonical status as a feminist rebel and reformer conflicts with the fact that one of her most supportive publishers throughout her life was the Youth's Companion, a juvenile periodical whose thoroughly orthodox 鈥渇amily values鈥 contributed to its success as the longest-running and, at one time, most widely circulating periodical in nineteenth-century America. Not surprisingly, Chopin鈥檚 Youth鈥檚 Companion stories differ from her canonical texts in that they embrace and advance ideals of orthodox white femininity and masculinity. Rather than viewing these two representations as being at odds with each other, Bonnie Shaker asserts that Chopin's endorsement of conventional gender norms is done in the service of a second political agenda beyond her feminism, one that can help the reader appreciate nuances of identity construction previously misunderstood or overlooked in the body of her work.
Shaker articulates this second agenda as 鈥渢he discursive act of coloring locals,鈥 the narrative construction of racial difference for Louisiana peoples of African American, Native American, and French American ancestry. For Chopin, 鈥渃oloring locals鈥 meant transforming non-Louisianans鈥 general understanding of the Creole and Cajun as mixed-race people into 鈥減urely鈥 white folks, this designation of whiteness being one that conferred not only social preferment but also political protections and enfranchisement in one of the most racially violent decades of U.S. history. Thus, when Chopin is concerned with coloring her beloved Louisiana Creoles and Cajuns 鈥渨hite,鈥 she strategically deploys conventional femininity for the benefits it affords as a sign of middle-class respectability and belonging.
Making significant contributions both to the scholarship on Kate Chopin and on race and gender construction, this sophisticated study will be of great interest to scholars and students of nineteenth-century ethnic and cultural studies as well as Chopin scholars.
鈥泪苍 Coloring Locals, Bonnie James Shaker brings Kate Chopin鈥檚 Youth鈥檚 Companion stories out of the shadows to which they are usually consigned, showing how they illuminate an important aspect of Chopin鈥檚 social and racial attitudes as well as her continuing determination to publish her work after the seeming fiasco of The Awakening鈥檚 reception. Shaker thus offers a welcome new dimension to Chopin studies, to our understanding of the complexities of 鈥榣ocal color,鈥 and to the growing professional ambition of women writers at the dawn of the twentieth century.鈥濃擡lizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eleanore Raoul Professor of the Humanities, Emory University
鈥淪haker鈥檚 volume is an important contribution to both Chopin criticism and to the growing field of race research known as whiteness studies.鈥濃Choice
