This is a transcript of the documentary Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening. The program was produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting and premiered on PBS on June 23, 1999.

The people walked in little groups toward the beach. They talked and laughed. Some of them sang...

There were strange, rare odors abroad—a tangle of the sea smell and of weeds, and damp, new plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfume of a field of white blossoms somewhere near....

She was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.

On the eve of the 20th century, Kate Chopin confronted the fundamental dilemma of what it meant to be a woman. In a stream of stories and in her novel, The Awakening, she explored the unsparing truth of women's submerged lives.

Chopin's stories were set in Louisiana in the aftermath of war. It would be a landscape she would draw from memory in the final years of her life.

Kate Chopin's own story began four decades earlier, further north along the river.

St. Louis in the 1850s still harbored the spirit of a fur-trading town, but the city was expanding as waves of settlers passed through to the West.

Here on the Front Street levee, Captain Thomas O' Flaherty, an Irish merchant, furnished them with boats and supplies.

He had married Eliza Faris when she was only 16, but her family had fallen on hard times and needed financial support. She gave him legitimacy in the French Creole aristocracy.

In 1850 their daughter Kate was born.

They were doing well. Then fate intervened.

On November 1st, 1855, Thomas O'Flaherty joined city leaders in celebration of a new line of the Pacific Railroad. Just as the train crossed a bridge, the structure buckled under the weight. Ten cars plunged thirty feet into the river, amidst rain and lightning. Kate's father and 29 others were killed.

Kate was only five, in a household now run solely by women.

Her great-grandmother, Mme. Victoire Charleville, determined to take over her education. She taught Kate music and French.

The nuns at Sacred Heart convent took over her days, with an elite education for French intellectual women. It was unusual, given that most girls didn't go to school at all.

There she met Kitty Garesche, a classmate.

But there were hardships. Civil War intervened.

Tragedies in the O'Flaherty household multiplied with the deaths of Kate's half-brother and Mme. Charleville.

Kitty's family was forced to leave town when it was learned her father was supplying the Confederates with guns. Kate and Kitty did not see each other for years.

When they finally came together again in the late 1860s, they were young women of marriageable age. "I do not think that Kate resembled her mother so much as her father," Kitty remembered, "She was an Irish beauty. Her eyes were brown and looked right at you."

Meanwhile, Kitty had decided to enter a convent. It was as if a curtain had fallen between them. The 1870's was a time of few choices for women. Kate's questioning of Catholicism and of women's roles came to the fore in her story, Lilacs.

Lilacs

Mme. Adrienne Farival never announced her coming, but the good nuns knew very well to look for her. With the scent of lilacs, Sister Agathe would turn to the window, upon her face the happy beatific expression with which pure and simple souls watch for the coming of those they love. . . . Adrienne rang the bell. The door was opened cautiously by a lay sister, who stood there with downcast eyes and flaming cheeks, saying "by order of our Mother Superior," after which she closed the door. Adrienne remained, stunned. The lilacs fell from her arms.

Kate chose another path and stepped into a world of social engagements.

Many were held at Oakland, the elegant country home of Louis A. Benoist. It was the heart of St. Louis's French Creole society.

At one of these gala affairs Kate met Oscar Chopin, the son of a wealthy Louisiana planter and a relative of the Benoist family.

On June 9th, 1870, they married and embarked on a three month tour of Europe.

By the time they reached Paris, the Franco-Prussian war had broken out.

On August 19 Kate despaired, "Rain still falling so Oscar went out alone and returned with the very sad news of the war. Never have the French armies suffered such repeated mortifications."

Oscar and Kate were forced to retreat to his native Louisiana and settle in New Orleans in the Fall of 1870.

It was a world unto itself.

She arrived in the city pregnant with her first child.

She recalled, "I can remember yet that hot southern day on Magazine Street in New Orleans... waking from out of a stupor to see in my mother's arms a little piece of humanity all dressed in white which they told me was my little son!"

Over the decade, five more children were born.

Kate's time in New Orleans offered characters and settings to explore.

But to Oscar, the city stirred only bitter frustration. Business at the Cotton Exchange was down forty percent. The aftermath of the war affected everyone, white and black alike.

Kate's fiction would explore some of the racial tensions that had swept through the city during and before her time there...

La Belle Zoraide

Zoraide had seen the beau Mezor dance the Bamboula in Congo Square as proud looking as a king and Zoraide grew sick with love for Mezor. But when Zoraide kneeled before her mistress, and asked to marry Mezor. . . Madame Delariviere was speechless with rage. Mezor was sold away into Georgia where he would no longer hear his Creole tongue spoken, nor dance Calinda, nor hold la belle Zoraide in his arms. When their baby was born, Zoraide came out of the awful shadow. But the baby was removed (and) sent away to Madame's plantation far up the coast. Zoraide could only moan . . "Li mouri, li mouri," and turned her face to the wall. . . She was known ever after as "Zoraide la folle."

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: With Chopin the dark crannies of the human soul were part of what is to be human. It was part of her war against platitudes. If you look only at the surfaces you're not going to begin to understand what people are about. It's a measure of both her talent and her character, her strength as a woman, that she didn't find the depths of the human soul, even human depravity, threatening.

Where Kate explored, Oscar leapt to take a stand. He joined a White League in opposition to black leaders and Union forces. On September 14, 1874, the League led a full-scale riot in New Orleans. It took a week for Federal troops to restore order.

Five years later, economic pressures finally forced the Chopins to move. In 1879, they retreated to Oscar's ancestral home in northwest Louisiana.

Here along the Red River in Natchitoches Parish lay remnants of one of the oldest French plantation communities in America.

The land became the central focus of Chopin's first novel, At Fault, and many of her short stories.

A No-Account Creole

There were acres of open land cultivated in a slovenly fashion, but so rich that cotton and corn and weed and "cocoa-grass" grew rampant ...

The Negro quarters were at the far end of this open stretch, and consisted of a long row of old and very crippled cabins. Directly back of these a dense wood grew, and held much mystery, and witchery of sound and shadow, and strange lights when the sun shown.

Of a gin house there was left scarcely a trace.

They dealt with the despair of Creoles ruined by the war.

Ma'ame Pelagie

About the great, solemn pillars, she reached her arms, and pressed her cheek and lips upon the senseless brick. Adieu! Adieu! (she) whispered......

She had grown very old. While the outward pressure of a young and joyous existence had forced her footsteps into the light, her soul had stayed in the shadow of the ruin.

They told of Acadians and former slaves gathering for weekly dances in the woods.

A Night in Acadie

Telesphore, looking out across the prairie, could see them coming from all directions. The little Creole ponies.....the mule carts....The Negro musicians . . .

There was the same scene every Saturday at Foche's. And all on account of the gumbo. . .. Foche stormed at old black Doute for her extravagance... she hurled it back at him while into the pot went the chickens and the pans-full of minced ham, and the fists full of onion and sage and piment rouge...She knew how to cook.

While the land inspired her imagination, her time there was limited.

A mere three years after they had arrived, Oscar became ill with malaria and died. It was fifteen days before Christmas.

Kate tried to hang on, taking over Oscar's place as manager of their plantation store, even keeping shop herself.

By 1884, legal matters were settled. Kate moved back to her native St. Louis, now a major commercial center.

Chopin seemed happy and the children were settled. Then on June 28, 1885, her mother, Eliza O'Flaherty, died. It was devastating. Kate felt she had lost her best friend.

She was now absolutely alone, with six children to support, the oldest of whom was fourteen. She had only a modest income.

In the 1880s, writing was one of few ways women could make a living, averaging some $l5 to $30 a story, and a few hundred for a novel.

At the age of 45, Chopin began her own journey towards becoming a published writer.

"Here was life, not fiction".. she wrote in her diary. "Here was a man who escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw."

Her first work, a poem, appeared in January 1889. Soon it was her short stories that proved most successfull. Her social world expanded. Her home became a literary center.

She seemed to be thriving, but how much freedom did an artist really have? In 1897, Chopin was beginning her most ambitious novel, The Awakening.

The Awakening

Edna had attempted all summer to learn to swim. . . but that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence. . . . Once she turned and looked toward the shore . . .a quick vision of death smote her soul. .

The novel was set on Grand Isle, a fashionable resort for New Orleans' Creole elite. It is the story of Edna Pontellier, a discontented wife and mother. Her visit to the island and the sensuality of the Gulf trigger an awakening.

The Awakening

Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing the greater part of them . . .

She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh. . .

By novel's end, Edna has awakened to herself, but finds no place for that self in the world she knows. She swims out to sea till her strength is gone.

The Awakening

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. . . .

Along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long sweeping stroke. She went on and on.

The question was whether Americans were prepared to read such emancipated fiction. There were a few positive letters, then the critical reviews came in.

After the harsh reception of her novel, Chopin retreated into private life. She sank into obscurity.

There was a brief moment of optimism when the Louisiana Exposition, a World's Fair, came to St. Louis. On August 20th, 1904, Chopin visited the fair grounds.

It was a hot day and she returned exhausted. That night she had a stroke.

It was in the late 20th century that her writings were really recovered. They came back into print, and they were newly recognized and appreciated by critics, and taught in schools, and that's what brings a writer back into currency.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: The rediscovery of The Awakening came as a Godsend, the most incredible gift to the women's movement.

Emily Toth: I'd first read her when I was given a copy of The Awakening by a woman who said to me, "You should read this book," and the big question that we asked ourselves was how did Kate Chopin know all that in 1899?

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: She's one of those writers whose sense of craft puts her right on the edge of poetry.

The Awakening

She could have shouted for joy. A feeling of exultation overtook her as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul.

How strange and awful to stand naked under the sky! How delicious! She felt like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world it had never known.