“Athénaïse” is Kate Chopin’s short story about a willful young woman who runs away from her husband’s Louisiana plantation and lives secretly in New Orleans.
By the Editors of KateChopin.org
“Athénaïse” was the Library of America’s “Story of the Week” for the first week in February 2013. And it turned out to be one of the most popular stories for 2013.
If you’re not yet fluent in English, you can hear a version of this story read in “Special English,” used by the Voice of America to “communicate by radio in clear and simple English with people whose native language is not English.”
Reading Kate Chopin’s “Athénaïse” online and in print
“Athénaïse” characters
“Athénaïse” time and place
“Athénaïse” themes
When “Athénaïse” was written and published
Questions and answers about “Athénaïse“
How to pronounce Athénaïse
Accurate texts of “Athénaïse“
New All of Kate Chopin’s short stories in Spanish
Recent articles about “Athénaïse“
Books that discuss Kate Chopin’s short stories
Kate Chopin’s “Athénaïse” online and in print
You can read the story online, although if you’re citing a passage for research purposes, you should check your citation against one of the accurate texts listed below.
In print you can find “Athénaïse” in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, in the Penguin Classics edition of Chopin’s Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, and in the Library of America Kate Chopin volume, as well as in other paperback and hardcover books. For publication information about these books, see the section “For students and scholars” near the bottom of this page.
“Athénaïse” characters
- Athénaïse: mentioned in Chopin’s story “In and Out of Old Natchitoches”
- Cazeau: husband of Athénaïse
- Felicity: house servant of Cazeau
- Montéclin Miché: brother of Athénaïse
- Madame Miché: mother of Athénaïse
- Michu: father of Athénaïse
- Sylvie: owner of the New Orleans boarding house where Athénaïse lives
- Gouvernail: journalist and long-term residence at Sylvie’s. In French his name means a rudder, a tiller, with the implication that he is someone who knows the direction, who understands where things are headed. He is also a major character in Chopin’s story “A Respectable Woman,” and he appears at Edna Potellier’s party in Chapter XXX of The Awakening
- Pousette: house servant at Sylvie’s
“Athénaïse” time and place
The story takes place at Cazeau’s plantation along the Cane River, in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, and in New Orleans—probably in the 1880s or early 1890s.
“Athénaïse” themes
As we explain in the questions and answers below, readers often find fundamentally different ways to read the story. Some are disappointed that this strong, independent, daring woman returns to her husband when she discovers she is pregnant. Others see her as acting out exactly what Chopin tells us about her early in the story: “People often said that Athénaïse would know her own mind some day, which was equivalent to saying that she was at present unacquainted with it. If she ever came to such knowledge, it would be by no intellectual research, by no subtle analyses or tracing the motives of actions to their source. It would come to her as the song to the bird, the perfume and color to the flower.”
You can read about finding themes in Kate Chopin’s stories and novels on the Themes page of this site.
When Kate Chopin’s “Athénaïse” was written and published
The story was written between April 10 and 28, 1895, and published in the Atlantic Monthly in August and September 1896. It was one of three Kate Chopin stories that the Atlantic Monthly published.
You can find out when Kate Chopin wrote each of her short stories and when and where each was first published.
Questions and answers about “Athénaïse”
Q: How do you pronounce “Athénaïse“?
A: Probably Ah-TEN-ah-ease. But, like the names of some other characters in Chopin’s work, it’s complicated, perhaps impossible, to know how Chopin herself would have pronounced it or how she would have wanted her readers to pronounce it–or whether she would have cared how it’s pronounced. Two Chopin scholars discuss the matter.
Q: This story seems really out of character with Kate Chopin’s other works—with The Awakening and stories like “The Storm,” “The Story of an Hour,” “A Respectable Woman,” or “A Pair of Silk Stockings.” What do critics and others think of it?
A: They fall into two camps. Some ignore the story, in part because, like Athénaïse‘s brother Montéclin, they are unhappy when the life of this independent, daring woman takes—as Chopin phrases it—”a very disappointing, an ordinary, a most commonplace turn, after all.” Others find the story one of Chopin’s richest, a dress rehearsal for The Awakening in its treatment of a dissatisfied woman following her instincts, and in its setting that moves from a rural area to New Orleans and back to the rural area again. Susan Lohafer considers it a nineteenth-century classic.
And Kaye Gibbons writes in her introduction to the 2000 Modern Library Paperback Edition of The Awakening and Selected Stories, “This wonderfully developed story avoids stereotypes, creates suspense, and is a model of Chopin’s ability to satisfy all the requirements of a successful piece of fiction at once. One element is not sacrificed for another, the pathways the characters choose seem inevitable only in afterthought, and the sound moral choice Athénaïse makes at the end would please anyone who might decry Edna’s treatment of her children [in The Awakening]” (xxxviii–xxxix).
Q: Just what is going on near the end of Section II, as Cazeau rides past the old live-oak?
A: Cazeau remembers a moment when as a little boy he was riding on horseback with his father past that tree. His father was bringing back home a slave who had escaped from the plantation, and they stopped by the tree so the slave could take a breath. Cazeau is now on horseback bringing back his wife who had run away from the plantation, and he sees a parallel between the situation of the slave and that of his wife. He finds the thought “hideous.”
Q: Isn’t Gouvernail an unusual man for a Kate Chopin story?
A: Yes. Most of Chopin’s sensitive, intelligent, insightful characters are women. But there are a few exceptions, and Gouvernail is one of them. He is also a major character in Chopin’s “A Respectable Woman,” and he makes a cameo appearance in The Awakening.
Q: I am a reporter in Washington DC and have recently written an abbreviated adaptation of Kate Chopin’s short story “Athénaïse” for one of our weekly features on American culture. I am concerned about how one correctly pronounces Athénaïse. In French, I would think it would be Ah-TEN-ah-ease…but I do not know how it would be given a Cajun pronunciation. So I have searched for Chopin specialists online and thought you might be able to guide me. [You can hear how this word is pronounced in the “Special English” broadcast for the Voice of America.]
A: Two Kate Chopin scholars, Emily Toth (Louisiana State University) and Thomas Bonner, Jr. (Xavier University of Louisiana) discuss the question.
Emily: As to how Kate O’Flaherty (Chopin’s name at birth) would’ve heard “Athénaïse” pronounced: I doubt if there’s anyone who would know. I’m not sure it matters a whole lot, really. She would’ve been hearing the name her whole life (her grandmother Athénaïse died when Kate was in her mid-forties), no doubt spoken by relatives and friends in Natchitoches Parish, New Orleans, and St. Louis. Even today some names are pronounced differently in those three places.
Joan Marie Lally did a dissertationin 1973 on the different dialects in Chopin’s work, and that’s the only source I know of about pronunciations. But we don’t even know how Chopin would’ve pronounced Reisz or Ratignolle–so really, it’s all hopeless!
P. S. Further example of hopelessness: Chopin’s daughter was called Lélia (French, George Sand pronunciation) but also “Lil.”
Tom: Tom Klingler, Department of French at Tulane University, has done much work on Creole French in Louisiana. He has two books, including a dictionary on the subject, and with a grant has been developing tutorials. Amanda Lafleur at Louisiana State University has been working on Cajun French. She and Klingler are both cooperating to develop the tutorials in both local dialects of French. There has long been a dictionary of Cajun French by Jules Daigle, and a number of dictionaries have been subsequently developed. This is an interesting issue, as there are Creole and ‘Cajun characters in the work. There is the question of linguistic variations of French as spoken in old St. Louis as well. As Chopin’s family and friends had strong Louisiana connections, as Emily has indicated, it seems likely that the patterns of language to which she had been exposed in her youth, aside from her school experiences, were similar to those in Louisiana.
Emily: Thanks to Tom for further names of experts. I continue to think it’s something that can’t be determined, because Kate O’Flaherty, even as a youngster, would’ve heard many varieties of Americanish French.
How did the slaves in St. Louis, for instance, pronounce “Miz Athénaïse”–or would they have said “Madame Athénaïse” or “Madame Faris”? (I dunno.) Then of course there were Sacred Heart teachers [Kate studied at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart], who taught in French but were often Irish. There were neighbors and other family friends, and Kate’s father, Thomas O’Flaherty himself, who probably pronounced French in some kind of Irish way (which leads me to one of my all-time favorite Kate Chopin lines–in her short story “A Matter of Prejudice”–about the crotchety maman’s theory that “the Irish voice is distressing to the sick . . .”).
Tom: Absolutely–on variety. All one has to do is experience the anglicized pronunciations of French and Greek named streets in New Orleans. And given the variances of pronunciation of French and German in St. Louis and especially New Orleans, I am with Emily on this matter.
What we say about the pronunciation of Athénaïse could apply to the names of other Chopin characters as well.
You can read more questions and answers about Kate Chopin and her work, and you can contact us with your questions.
For students and scholars
Accurate texts of “Athénaïse”
The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Edited by Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie. Edited by Bernard Koloski. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Short Stories. Edited by Sandra Gilbert. New York: Library of American Literature, 2002.
Recent articles about “Athénaïse”
Lohafer, Susan. “Kate Chopin and the Future of Short Fiction Studies.” Bernard Koloski, ed. Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival. 157–72. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009, 2012.
Lippincott, Gail. “Thirty-Nine Weeks: Pregnancy and Birth Imagery in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” This Giving Birth: Pregnancy and Childbirth in American Women’s Writing. 55-66. Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 2000.
Lund, Michael. “Kate Chopin and Magazine Publication: Human Birth and Periodical Issue at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth-Century Feminisms 1 (1999): 95-117.
Goodspeed, Julie. “The Use of Endogamous Marriage in the Formation of Creole Identity in Cable’s The Grandissimes, Chopin’s ‘Athénaïse,’ and King’s ‘La Grande Demoiselle’.” Southern Studies 9 (1998): 45-67.
Thomas, Heather Kirk. “‘The House of Style’ in Kate Chopin’s ‘Athénaïse’.” Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. 207-217. New York: Hall, 1996.
Koloski, Bernard. “The Anthologized Chopin: Kate Chopin’s Short Stories in Yesterday’s and Today’s Anthologies.” Louisiana Literature 11 (1994): 18-30.
Books that discuss Chopin’s short stories
Fox, Heather A. Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers. University Press of Mississippi, 2022.
Ostman, Heather. Kate Chopin and Catholicism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Ostman, Heather, and Kate O’Donoghue, eds. Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. The book contains these essays:
Koloski, Bernard. “Chopin’s Enlightened Men”: 15–27.
Walker, Rafael. “Kate Chopin and the Dilemma of Individualism”: 29–46.
Armiento, Amy Branam. “‘A quick conception of all that this accusation meant for her’: The Legal Climate at the Time of ‘Désirée’s Baby’”: 47–64.
Rossi, Aparecido Donizete. “The Gothic in Kate Chopin”: 65–82.
Gil, Eulalia Piñero. “The Pleasures of Music: Kate Chopin’s Artistic and Sensorial Synesthesia”: 83–100.
Ostman, Heather. “Maternity vs. Autonomy in Chopin’s ‘Regret’”: 101–15.
Merricks, Correna Catlett. “‘I’m So Happy; It Frightens Me’: Female Genealogy in the Fiction of Kate Chopin and Pauline Hopkins”: 145–58.
Sehulster, Patricia J. “American Refusals: A Continuum of ‘I Prefer Not Tos’ as Articulated in the Work of Chopin, Hawthorne, Harper, Atherton, and Dreiser”: 159–72.
Rajakumar, Mohanalakshmi and Geetha Rajeswar. “What Did She Die of? ‘The Story of an Hour’ in the Middle East Classroom”: 173–85.
O’Donoghue, Kate. “Teaching Kate Chopin Using Multimedia”: 187–202.
James Nagel. Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and George Washington Cable. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2014.
Brosman, Catharine Savage. Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study. UP of Mississippi, 2013.
Wan, Xuemei. Beauty in Love and Death—An Aesthetic Reading of Kate Chopin’s Works [in Chinese]. China Social Sciences P, 2012.
Hebert-Leiter, Maria. Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009.
Gale, Robert L. Characters and Plots in the Fiction of Kate Chopin. Jefferson, N C: McFarland, 2009.
Beer, Janet, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008. The book contains these essays:
Knights, Pamela. “Kate Chopin and the Subject of Childhood”: 44–58.
Castillo, Susan. “’Race’ and Ethnicity in Kate Chopin’s Fiction”: 59–72.
Joslin, Katherine. “Kate Chopin on Fashion in a Darwinian World”: 73–86.
Worton, Michael. “Reading Kate Chopin through Contemporary French Feminist Theory”: 105–17.
Horner, Avril. “Kate Chopin, Choice and Modernism”: 132–46.
Taylor, Helen. “Kate Chopin and Post-Colonial New Orleans”: 147–60.
Ostman, Heather, ed. Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. The book contains these essays:
Kornhaber, Donna, and David Kornhaber. “Stage and Status: Theatre in the Short Fiction of Kate Chopin”: 15–32.
Thrailkill, Jane F. “Chopin’s Lyrical Anodyne for the Modern Soul”: 33–52.
Johnsen, Heidi. “Kate Chopin in Vogue: Establishing a Textual Context for A Vocation and a Voice”: 53–69.
Batinovich, Garnet Ayers. “Storming the Cathedral: The Antireligious Subtext in Kate Chopin’s Works”: 73–90.
Kirby, Lisa A. “‘So the storm passed . . .’: Interrogating Race, Class, and Gender
in Chopin’s ‘At the ’Cadian Ball’ and ‘The Storm’”: 91–104.
Frederich, Meredith. “Extinguished Humanity: Fire in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Godmother’”: 105–18.
Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Stein, Allen F. Women and Autonomy in Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
Lohafer, Susan. Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics and Culture in the Short Story. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.
Shaker, Bonnie James. Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s Youth’s Companion Stories. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2003.
Perrin-Chenour, Marie-Claude. Kate Chopin: Ruptures [in French]. Paris, France: Belin, 2002.
Evans, Robert C. Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction: A Critical Companion. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 2001.
Koloski, Bernard, ed. Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie by Kate Chopin. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Macmillan–St. Martin’s, 1997.
Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Petry, Alice Hall, ed. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. The book contains these essays:
Pollard, Percival. “From Their Day in Court“: 67–70.
Reilly, Joseph J. “Stories by Kate Chopin”: 71–74.
Skaggs, Peggy. “The Boy’s Quest in Kate Chopin’s ‘A Vocation and a Voice’”: 129–33.
Dyer, Joyce [Coyne]. “The Restive Brute: The Symbolic Presentation of Repression and Sublimation in Kate Chopin’s ‘Fedora’”: 134–38.
Arner, Robert D. “Pride and Prejudice: Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’”: 139–46.
Bauer, Margaret D. “Armand Aubigny, Still Passing After All These Years: The Narrative Voice and Historical Context of ‘Désirée’s Baby’”: 161–83.
Berkove, Lawrence I. “‘Acting Like Fools’: The Ill-Fated Romances of ‘At the ’Cadian Ball’ and ‘The Storm’”: 184–96.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Kate Chopin’s Fascination with Young Men”: 197–206.
Walker, Nancy A. “Her Own Story: The Woman of Letters in Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction”: 218–26.
Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994.
Fick, Thomas H., and Eva Gold, guest eds. “Special Section: Kate Chopin.” Louisiana Literature: A Review of Literature and Humanities. Spring, 1994. 8–171. The special section of the journal contains these essays:
Toth, Emily. “Introduction: A New Generation Reads Kate Chopin”: 8–17.
Koloski, Bernard. “The Anthologized Chopin: Kate Chopin’s Short Stories in Yesterday’s and Today’s Anthologies”: 18–30.
Saar, Doreen Alvarez. “The Failure and Triumph of ‘The Maid of Saint Phillippe’: Chopin Rewrites American Literature for American Women”: 59–73.
Dyer, Joyce. “‘Vagabonds’: A Story without a Home”: 74–82.
Padgett, Jacqueline Olson. “Kate Chopin and the Literature of the Annunciation, with a Reading of ‘Lilacs’”: 97–107.
Day, Karen. “The ‘Elsewhere’ of Female Sexuality and Desire in Kate Chopin’s ‘A Vocation and a Voice’”: 108–17.
Cothern, Lynn. “Speech and Authorship in Kate Chopin’s ‘La Belle Zoraïde’”: 118–25.
Lundie, Catherine. “Doubly Dispossessed: Kate Chopin’s Women of Color”: 126–44.
Ellis, Nancy S. “Sonata No. 1 in Prose, the ‘Von Stoltz’: Musical Structure in an Early Work by Kate Chopin”: 145–56.
Ewell, Barbara C. “Making Places: Kate Chopin and the Art of Fiction”: 157–71.
Boren, Lynda S., and Sara deSaussure Davis (eds.), Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992. The book contains these essays:
Toth, Emily. “Kate Chopin Thinks Back Through Her Mothers: Three Stories by Kate Chopin”: 15–25.
Bardot, Jean. “French Creole Portraits: The Chopin Family from Natchitoches Parish”: 26–35.
Thomas, Heather Kirk. “‘What Are the Prospects for the Book?’: Rewriting a Woman’s Life”: 36–57.
Black, Martha Fodaski. “The Quintessence of Chopinism”: 95–113.
Ewell, Barbara C. “Kate Chopin and the Dream of Female Selfhood”: 157–65.
Davis, Sara deSaussure. “Chopin’s Movement Toward Universal Myth”: 199–206.
Blythe, Anne M. “Kate Chopin’s ‘Charlie’”: 207–15.
Ellis, Nancy S. “Insistent Refrains and Self-Discovery: Accompanied Awakenings in Three Stories by Kate Chopin”: 216–29.
Toth, Emily, ed. A Vocation and a Voice by Kate Chopin. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 1991.
Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. New York: Greenwood, 1990.
Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989.
Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.
Bonner, Thomas Jr., The Kate Chopin Companion. New York: Greenwood, 1988.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Kate Chopin. New York: Chelsea, 1987. The book contains these essays:
Ziff, Larzer. “An Abyss of Inequality”: 17–24.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “The Fiction of Limits: ‘Désirée’s Baby’”: 35–42.
Dyer, Joyce C. “Gouvernail, Kate Chopin’s Sensitive Bachelor”: 61–69.
Dyer, Joyce C. “Kate Chopin’s Sleeping Bruties”: 71–81.
Gardiner, Elaine. “‘Ripe Figs’: Kate Chopin in Miniature”: 83–87.
Ewell, Barbara C. Kate Chopin. New York: Ungar, 1986.
Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Toth, Emily, ed. Regionalism and the Female Imagination. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984.
Stein, Allen F. After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism. Columbus: Ohio UP, 1984.
Huf, Linda. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature. New York: Ungar, 1983.
Christ, Carol P. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon, 1980.
Springer, Marlene. Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1976.
Cahill, Susan. Women and Fiction: Short Stories by and about Women. New York: New American Library, 1975.
Seyersted, Per, ed. “The Storm” and Other Stories by Kate Chopin: With The Awakening. Old Westbury: Feminist P, 1974.
Freedman, Florence B., et al. Special Issue: Whitman, Chopin, and O’Faolain. WWR, 1970.
Leary, Lewis, ed. The Awakening and Other Stories by Kate Chopin. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.
Rankin, Daniel, Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1932.
