SOURCE: McCullough, Kate. “Kate Chopin and (Stretching) the Limits of Local Color Fiction.” In Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women's Fiction, 1885-1914, pp. 185-226. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, McCullough attempts to show how Chopin both challenged and reinforced the status quo of Southern regional writing.

Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material … let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are … let it show the different interests in their true proportions … let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of unaffected people everywhere.

—William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (1891)

Local Color, Southern Femininity, and the Politics of Canonization

In May of 1899, a month after Kate Chopin (1851-1904) published The Awakening and at the time...