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.

1. Introduction.- 2. Chopin and Catholicism in America, 1850-1904.- 3. Social and Religious Critique and Transformation through the Short Fiction.- 4. “Catholic Modernism” and the Short Stories.- 5. At Fault: Catholic Doctrine and Social Issues.- 6. The Awakening: Challenging Authority and Rewriting Women’s Spirituality.- 7. Mysticism in Chopin’s Fiction.- 8. Conclusion.