Kate Chopin

Introduction

As a tool that enables and frees a writer to speak his or her mind, fear, ideas, and feeling, a writing gives the reader a privilege to understand the writer's notions, belief, and even desire. Often some writings enable the reader to gain a lot of knowledge, which is beyond expectation and comprehension and sometimes the content is unexpectedly beyond the understanding and acceptance of its era.

Such writings are often considered unacceptable, scandalous, or even morally incorrect by the society at its time. As a result, these scandalous and immoral writings are banned from the literary society(Chopin, 110-125). On one hand this banning could raise people's curiosity about the works and increase their popularity, but on the other hand it could be a disastrous end for the works and the author.

The latter was what happened to American author Kate Chopin. Chopin is an American woman writer, who once was considered notorious by her era and forgotten for some time because of her scandalous, unaccepted and unhealthy idea, which she implies in her novel and short stories. She is an example of a writer whose ideas are considered ahead of her time. Her works were condemned to be unsuitable for the society norms and moral, and forgotten for some time until they were resurrected in 1969.

Chopin published two novels namely At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), and almost a hundred short stories which are mostly set in the Cane river country of Louisiana, such as Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadia (1897). She also wrote poems, essays, plays, and reviews. After the publication of her novel, The Awakening, which was widely condemned, her writing career ended. Her publisher cancelled the publication of her third short story collection. Within a few months, her books were banned by the libraries of St. Louis, and she was refused membership in the St. Louis Fine Arts Club.

In 1904, almost five years after her second novel was published, Chopin died. Most of Chopin's major characters in her stories are married women. Through a woman's point of view, Chopin tries to capture the women's struggles and presents reality to her reader(Beauvoir, 125-130). From her writings, one can learn a lot about marriage as well as women's position and condition in her time. In her story, Chopin is believed to attempt to deconstruct the ideas of a wife and a mother, which are previously constructed and assigned by the patriarchal world.

Her notions and belief can be seen from and represented by her female major characters. This article is going to analyze the images of wife and mother in Chopin's works and analyzing these images, would reveal Chopin's purposes in presenting these images as well as unearthing the differences between Chopin's representation of wife and mother with the stereotype or the traditional images mostly found in literature.

The analysis will be based on her short stories entitled “A Story of An Hour”, “A Respectable Woman”, and “A Pair of Silk ...