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.