Multilingual Literary Urbanism? Kate Chopin, St Louis and the Decline of Francophone America

A single writer’s multilingualism can help in understanding personal and urban identities. In the post- Civil War United States, the presence of New Orleans and, especially, St Louis in the novels and short stories of Kate Chopin (1850– 1904), and the changing status of languages in these cities and in these writer’s literary output, exemplifies this. Whereas she has most often been situated as a writer of Louisiana, St Louis was actually the site of Chopin’s writing. the literary multilingualism of nineteenth- century St Louis included the earlier high status of French there, reflecting its colonial past, during a period when this city became a new inland hub of the Anglophone United States. The essay proposes a practice of literary urban multilingualism. Chopin’s urban representations depict varied uses of French in Louisiana, as well as accounts of a de- located Anglophone American urban environment for the features of which Chopin clearly drew on her experience of St Louis. A quality of Frenchness often detected by critics in Chopin’s writing is reinterpreted when the urban language encounters of her novels and short stories are explored more fully: in Chopin’s literary career readers witness the birth of the more monolingual twentieth- century America.