This thesis focuses on Kate Chopin’s place in the literary history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first chapter examines her distinctiveness among other nineteenth-century naturalist authors and how the American Romantic era influenced her work. I identify Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne as particularly influential. Chopin embodies Whitman’s idea that embracing one’s sexuality can be an expression of freedom, and she develops a female martyr archetype that resembles Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. In her novels and short fiction, Chopin adapts these elements to better represent the plight of nineteenth-century American women. The second chapter discusses Chopin’s revival in the mid-twentieth century, both by tracking her importance to second-wave feminist scholars and then by linking her prose to the popular Harlequin romance novels of the 1970s. While second-wave feminists acknowledge the importance of Chopin’s critique of patriarchal norms, her anticipation of the ways mass-market romance novels depict sexual desire also demonstrates the enduring appeal of her unique approach to naturalist fiction.