Kate Chopin



Kate Chopin

Introduction

Kate Chopin, the acclaimed author of the now classic novel The Awakening (1899) and of an impressive body of short fiction, focused on women as characters; she revealed the startling discrepancies between them and the men in their lives. She was undeniably unconventional for her era and region, especially in her attention to the solitary artist, and to women's changing identity as they sought social and financial independence and decreased dependence on men. Although a general furor and an outraged sense of morality greeted The Awakening, by the end of her career Chopin had managed to write two novels and nearly 100 short stories as well as essays and poems. Nearly all they portray the truth about women—as Chopin saw it—especially how they would act and feel were their lives not dictated by societal norms and male expectations (Taylor, 1989).

A native of St. Louis, Chopin was born on February 8, 1851, to Thomas O'Flaherty and Eliza Faris O'Flaherty. When she was five years old her father was killed in a railroad accident, leaving his 21-year-old widow wealthy and independent. Raised in a household that consisted of mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Chopin graduated from the Sacred Heart Academy in 1868, and on June 9, 1870, married Oscar Chopin, son of a Louisiana cotton planter. By 1879 the couple had six children. After her husband's death three years later, the 39-year old Chopin moved back to St. Louis with her mother. Her writing career, in which she drew on both the New Orleans and Coulterville environments where she had lived with her husband, began (Streater, 2007).

Chopin's first novel, At Fault, published in 1890, features Thérése LaFirme, a Creole widow in love with David Hosmer, a married man and a Yankee sawmill owner. Here Chopin presents the clash between northern urban industrialism and southern plantation life through the twin settings of St. Louis and rural Louisiana. Theautobiographical sources for this novel are fairly obvious: after her own husband's death, Chopin managed his remaining plantations and had an affair with Albert Sampite, a married planter. As she would later in The Awakening, Chopin examines unhappy marriages and the question of divorce in a rational, unemotional manner. In The Awakening, it is Mme. Edna Pontellier who does not love her husband, Léonce, a New Orleans businessman; she engages in highly charged romances with Robert Lebrun, a bachelor, and Alcée Arobin, the local lothario (Skaggs, 1985).

The critical firestorm that greeted The Awakening effectively ended Chopin's writing career: her publisher cancelled her new story collection, A Vocation and a Voice, and Chopin did not even attempt to publish "The Storm," a steamy, frank depiction of sexuality. (Both eventually were published, in 1991 and 1969, respectively.) Kate Chopin lived only five more years. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 22, 1904 and was buried in the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. A century later, her work is studied in nearly every American literature classroom. Most ofChopin's papers are housed at the Missouri Historical Society ...