This is the widely heralded adaptation of the short story by Kate Chopin, the late-19th-century writer whose work is only now receiving the major recognition it deserves. The setting is Kate Chopin's own world-the world of the upper-class Creole society that dominated New Orleans in the 1870s, a world with a strict code of behavior, one of whose strongest tenets required a wife to subordinate her will and her very being to her husband.