Kate Chopin

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Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin in 1894
Born February 8, 1850(1850-02-08)
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Died August 22, 1904 (aged 54)
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Occupation Novelist, short story writer
Genres realistic fiction
Literary movement feminist
Notable work(s) The Awakening

Kate Chopin (born Katherine O'Flaherty on February 8, 1851 – August 22, 1904) was an American author of short stories and novels, mostly of a Louisiana Creole background. She is now considered to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century.

From 1889 to 1902, she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, the Century, and Harper's Youth's Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included "Desiree's Baby", a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana; "The Story of an Hour" and "The Storm."

Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which is set in New Orleans and Grand Isle. The people in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana. Many of her works are set about Natchitoches in north central Louisiana. In time, literary critics determined that Chopin addressed the concerns of women in all places and for all times in her literature.

Contents

[edit] Childhood

Chopin was born Kate O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was a successful businessman who had immigrated from Galway, Ireland. Her mother, Eliza Faris, was a well-connected member of the French community in St. Louis. Her maternal grandmother, Athena'ise Charleville, was of French Canadian descent. Some of her ancestors were among the first European inhabitants of Dauphin Island, Alabama.[1]


After her father's death, Chopin developed a close relationship with both her mother and her great-grandmother. She also became an avid reader of fairy tales, poetry, and religious allegories, as well as classic and contemporary novels. Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens were among her favorite authors.


In 1865, she returned to Sacred Heart Academy, and began keeping a commonplace book. She graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in 1868, but did not achieve any particular distinction — except as a master storyteller.

[edit] Difficult years

In 1870, at the age of 20, she married Oscar Chopin and settled in New Orleans. Oscar Chopin was born into a well-to do cotton-growing family in Louisiana. Chopin had had all her children by the age of 28, which consisted of five boys and one girl.(Jean, Oscar Charles, George, Fredrick, Felix, and Lelia) Shortly after that, the family had to relocate to Oscar Chopin's old home in a small Louisiana county due to his poor business decisions. In 1879 Oscar Chopin's cotton brokerage failed, and the family moved to Cloutierville, Louisiana, south of Natchitoches, to manage several small plantations and a general store. They became active in the community, and Chopin absorbed much material for her future writing, especially regarding the Creole culture of the area. Their home at 243 Highway 495 (built by Alexis Cloutier in the early part of the century) is now a national historic landmark and the home of the Bayou Folk Museum.

When Oscar Chopin died in 1882 of swamp fever (like her half-brother two decades earlier), he left Chopin $12,000 in debt (approximately $229,360 in 2005 dollars) [2]. Chopin attempted to manage the plantation and store alone but with little success. According to Emily Toth, "[f]or awhile the widow Kate ran his [Oscar's] business and flirted outrageously with local men".[1] She engaged in a relationship with a married farmer.

Although Chopin gave an honest effort to keep her late husband's plantation and general store alive, two years later she sold her Louisiana life away. Her mother implored her to move back to St. Louis, and Chopin and the children gradually settled into life in St. Louis, where finances were no longer a concern. The following year, Chopin's mother died.

As to be expected, Chopin found herself in a state of depression after the loss of both her husband and mother. Her obstetrician and family friend, Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, felt that writing would be a sort of therapeutic healing process for Kate during her hard times because he said, "He understood that writing could be a focus for her extraordinary energy, as well as a source of income".[2] She was quite successful and found many of her publications inside literary magazines. Some of her writings, though, such as The Awakening (1899), were far too ahead of their times and therefore not socially embraced. Shattered by the lack of acceptance, Chopin seemed to be virtually nonexistent after almost 12 years in the public eye of the literary world. Kate Chopin then died in 1904 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

[edit] The writing years

By the late 1890s, Chopin was writing short stories, articles, and translations which appeared in periodicals, including The Saint Louis Dispatch. She became known as a regional local color writer, but her literary qualities were overlooked.

In 1899, her second novel, The Awakening, was published, and was criticized based on moral as well as literary standards. Her best-known work, it is the story of a dissatisfied wife. Out of print for several decades, it is now widely available and critically acclaimed for its writing quality and importance as an early feminist work.

Chopin, deeply discouraged by the criticism, turned to short story writing. In 1900 she wrote The Gentleman from New Orleans, and that same year was listed in the first edition of Marquis Who's Who. However, she never made much money from her writing and depended on investments in both Louisiana and St. Louis to sustain her.

While visiting the St. Louis World's Fair on August 20, 1904 Chopin was felled by a brain hemorrhage and died two days later, at the age of fifty-four. She was interred in the Calvary cemetery in St. Louis.

Chopin has been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

[edit] Literary themes

Kate Chopin experienced differentiated lifestyles throughout her time, which lent to her wide realm of societal understanding and analysis. Her childhood consisted of an upbringing by women with ancestry descending from both Irish and French family. Chopin also found herself within the Cajun and Creole part of the nation after she joined her husband in Louisiana. As a result, many of her stories and sketches were about her life in Louisiana in addition to the incorporation of her less than typical portrayals of women as their own individuals with wants and needs. Kate's seemingly unique writing style did in fact emerge from an admiration of Guy de Maupassant, who was a French short story writer.

“ ...I read his stories and marveled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinkable way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being an with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw... ”

[3] Kate Chopin went beyond Maupassant's technique and style and gave her writing a flavor of its own. She had an ability to perceive life and put it down on paper creatively. She put much concentration and emphasis on women's lives and their continual struggles to create an identity of their own within the boundaries of the male-ruled patriarchy. In The Story of an Hour, Mrs. Mallard allows herself time to reflect upon learning of her husband's death. Instead of dreading the lonely years ahead of her, she stumbles upon another realization all together. "She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome"[4]

Not many writers during the mid to late 19th century were bold enough to address subjects that Kate willingly took on. Although David Chopin, Kate's grandson, claims "Kate was neither a feminist nor a suffragist, she said so. She was nonetheless a woman who took women extremely seriously. She never doubted women's ability to be strong".[5] Despite this fact, there is no question regarding where Kate's sympathies lay.

Through her stories, Kate wrote her own autobiography and documented her surroundings; Kate lived in a time when her surroundings included the abolitionist movements and the emergence of feminism. Her ideas and descriptions were not true word for word, yet there was an element of nonfiction lingering throughout each story. Kate took strong interest in her surroundings and put many of her observations to words. Jane Le Marquand saw Chopin's writings as a new feminist voice. "Chopin undermines patriarchy by endowing the Other, the woman, with an individual identity and a sense of self, a sense of self to which the letters she leaves behind give voice. The 'official' version of her life, that constructed by the men around her, is challenged and overthrown by the woman of the story"[6] Kate was utilizing her creative writing skills to relay a nonfiction point of view regarding her belief in the strength of women. The idea of creative nonfiction becomes relevant in this case. In order for a story to be autobiographical, or even biographical, there has to be a nonfictional element, which more often than not exaggerates the truth to spark and hold interest for the readers.

Desiree's Baby focuses in on Kate's experience with the Creoles of Louisiana. The idea of slavery and the atmosphere of plantation life was a reality in Louisiana. The possibility of one having a mixed background was not unheard of. Mulattos, as those with both black and white backgrounds, were a common race in the Southern part of the nation. The issue of racism that the story brings up was a reality in 19th century America. The dark reality of racism shows its ugly head in this story because Chopin was not afraid to address such issues that were often suppressed and intentionally ignored in order to avoid reality, as Armand does when he refuses to believe that he is of black descent. The definition of great fiction is that which has the only true subject of "human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the view with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it". [7]

[edit] Works

[edit] Story collections

  • Bayou Folk, (Houghton Mifflin, 1894)
  • A Night In Acadie, (Way and Williams,1897)

[edit] Novels

[edit] Collected edition

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Toth, Emily. "Reviews the essay' The Shadows of the First Biographer: The Case of Kate Chopin.' Southern Review 26 (1990).
  2. ^ Seyersted, Per. Kate chopin: A Critical Biography.. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1985.
  3. ^ Le Marquand, Jane. "Kate Chopin as Feminist: Subverting the French Androcentric Influence". Deep South 2 (1996)
  4. ^ The Story of an Hour, Chopin
  5. ^ Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening. "Interview: David Chopin, Kate's Grandson". <http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/interviews.html> 14 March 2008/
  6. ^ Le Marquand, Jane. "Kate Chopin as Feminist: Suberting the Fench Androcentric Influence". Deep South 2 (1996)
  7. ^ Foy, R.R. "Chopin's Desiree's Baby". Explicatory 49 (1991): 222-224.

1. Toth, Emily. Reviews the essay 'The Shadows of the First Biographer: The Case of Kate Chopin', 26 Southern Review, 1990.

2. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1985.

3. Le Marquand, Jane. "Kate Chopin as a Feminist: Subverting the French Androcentric Influence". Deep South 2 (1996).

4. Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour.

5. Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening. "Interview: David Chopin, Kate's Grandson". <http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/interviews.html> 14 March 2008.

6. Le Marquand, Jane. "Kate Chopin as a Feminist: Subverting the French Androcentric Influence". Deep South 2 (1996).

7. Foy, R.R. "Chopin's Desiree's Baby". Explicator 49 (1991): 222-224.

[edit] Resources

Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
  • Foy, R.R. "Chopin's Desiree's Baby". Explicator" 49 (1991): 222-224.
  • "Kate O'Flaherty Chopin", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. I (1988), p. 176
  • Le Marquand, Jane. "Kate Chopin as Feminist: Subverting the French Androcentric Influence". Deep South 2 (1996).
  • Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1985.
  • Toth, Emily. Reviews the essay 'The Shadows of the First Biographer: The Case of Kate Chopin', 26 Southern Review, 1990.

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:


Persondata
NAME Chopin, Kate
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Flaherty, Katherine
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist, short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Louis, Missouri, United States
DATE OF DEATH August 22, 1904
PLACE OF DEATH St. Louis, Missouri, United States