ABSTRACT
Kate Chopin is best known for her prose fiction, but her first publication, in fact, was a polka. Though not a professional musician, she was by all accounts a competent pianist, and her keen appreciation of music is apparent in her novel The Awakening, and in a number of her short stories. Among the composers Kate Chopin names in The Awakening, Fryderyk Chopin recurs consistently; and because of the convention of using last names, any discussion of this aspect engenders confusion, a difficulty to which the author herself must have been alive. As a pianist herself in the late nineteenth century, Kate Chopin would have known intimately at least some of Fryderyk Chopin's music, which was not only ubiquitous but synonymous with the piano. She was criticized for not being 'feminine' enough. Her representation of free-willed female sexuality was shocking for late nineteenth-century Louisiana, where the belief that Southern white women had no sexual desires was still widely upheld.
