Other wise : locating the "evolution" of the construction of whiteness in Kate Chopin's At fault, "Desiree's baby," and The awakening

Within her fiction Kate Chopin constructed and reconstructed whiteness as a means of allaying her own fears about the permeability its boundaries. The first chapter provides a detailed discussion of the way in which the concept of America as a "Melting Pot" was being addressed by scholars in the late nineteenth century. By looking at the ways "turn of the twentieth century Americans" were attempting to establish an ideology in response to the freedom of a population of people who had been present as slaves for several hundred years, it becomes less difficult to understand the social setting in which Chopin was creating her work. The second chapter provides a chronological look at the ways in which whiteness is constructed and reconstructed in Chopin's At Fault, "Desiree's Baby," and The Awakening. The early American self-identifying concept of "not free and thus not me," which applies to this particular author in terms of both gender and race, pervades her literature. The construction takes place both consciously and unconsciously, simultaneously expressing and questioning the idea of the "universal." At various intervals whiteness encompasses not only race and heritage but also morality, acceptable social behavior, freedom, personal sacrifice, sexuality, power, civilization, and voice. The third chapter provides a picture of what appears to be Chopin's views on overidentification with the Afiicanist or non-white Other by "white" women. The author presents motherhood, chastity, sobriety, and moral obligation as synonymous with white womanhood, which is at once an exclusive privilege and counterproductive to female self-actualization and freedom of choice. Within Chopin's pages sexual awakening and freedom are presented as immorality and rejection, respectively. In her fiction, the two states of being are mutually exclusive; they cannot exist in one individual simultaneously, but rather must be exchanged for one another. Emblematic of the Victorian concept of the woman, female sexual awareness and freedom from patriarchal definitions of morality belong to women of the lower classes, who in America are the non-white and un-whitened, and who pay for their freedom with the denial of white privilege.