Kate Chopin lived and created in a time when society could not or was not willing to handle her. When she died, in 1903, it felt like the world was putting her on hold. She was a woman ahead of her times who rang the "awakening" for a cohort of women. Her tolling bells would only be heard more than half a century later when a man, a Norwegian professor from the department of British and American studies from the University of Oslo, Per Seyersted, brought Kate Chopin's life achievements back to life.
Since then, as Per Seyersted wrote in his Preface to the book Kate Chopin's Private Letters: "We have come a long way"(X). But, as all her readers will understand now, not only has Kate Chopin "finally received the recognition she deserves"(X), but she gave the world a special insight into the life of women and bourgeois families living in the middle of the nineteenth century along the lines others were tracing for them.
Chopin's novel, the Awakening, republished and translated in many languages at a time when women were in the middle of an emancipation movement never heard of before, made her powerful voice travel in time and join them on their way towards independence. Kate Chopin's exceptional life makes her work the more credible. Her literary work is the direct result of whom she was and how she chose to live. Kate Chopin is Edna Pontellier, as much as any other prestigious writers who identified themselves with their most prominent characters are those characters they created.
In her novel, The Awakening, Kate Chopin introduces her heroin into the spotlight with great care. First, the reader meets Mr. Pontellier, her husband, a forty-year-old businessman relaxing in one of Madame Lebrun's vacation rental properties at the beach, a summer vacation retreat for prominent families of New Orleans. The author chooses to introduce her main characters, Edna Pontellier, alongside another man, Robert Lebrun. He is the one who will induce the beginning of the "awakening" process.
Knowing more about Kate Chopin's biography makes one better understand her characters in The Awakening as well as their trajectory. Chopin does not come across as one of those extremist feminists who blame men for every wrong done to women in every stage in the history of human kind. She is a woman living in the South, in the second half of the nineteenth century. As fortunate as she may be in her freedom to live her life the way she sees it proper, she is not living in an ivory tower. On the contrary, her keen sense of observance makes her respond strongly to what she senses as a series of injustices in the way society treats women of her time. Furthermore, the women's passivity in this case makes Chopin tremble and her creative juices flow onto the pages of The Awakening, an elegant cry of revolt against any type of restraining means women have ever accepted.
That does not mean that men's lives were In the middle of the nineteenth century. They were expected to work hard to provide for their entire families. Like in the case of Chopin's father, Thomas O'Flaherty, they not only had to produce enough income to provide for their immediate family, but also for their relatives, who in his case, were numerous.
It is rather the type of relationship between husband and wife that bothers the artist. Consequently, the role the respective wife plays in her new family and in society comes into Chopin's focus when she writes The Awakening. In a sense, it is ironic that the novel seems to allude to a fairytale full of male and female stereotypes such as "Sleeping Beauty." It is Robert Lebrun, after all, the one who kisses the "sleeping" Mrs. Pontellier. Unlike the fairytale, in Mrs. Pontelliers' case, her brief encounter with Robert is just the beginning of a long process of awakening. The adult Kate Chopin knows what a woman needs in order to find her own identity and be able to live with it.
While men had no other choice but work to financially sustain their whole families and give their daughters enough dowry, they still had the chance to affirm their own personalities, to fill proud of their professional...
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850. She didn't begin her writing career until after 1882, the year in which her husband, Oscar Chopin died (Toth). She spent several years publishing short stories, based on the Creole and Cajun cultures of Louisiana, where she and Oscar had lived. Her first novel, At Fault, was published in 1890. It was her second novel The Awakening
Kate Chopin & Ernest Hemingway Women Repression and Empowerment in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain" Nineteenth century literature gave birth to a preponderance of works that centered on themes about women and their subjugation and struggle for power in the rigidly conservative society. Through literature, writers, men and women alike, pushed forth the program of inflicting change, as the 20th century began to
Chopin's life. Kate Chopin wrote for women at a time when women were to be "seen and not heard." She wrote of their lives, their fears, and the secrets that they kept from everyone but themselves. He stories still touch women today, because they bring out the underlying emotions so common in everyday events. After being sent off to boarding school at the tender age of five, partly for her
Devoted as she was to her husband, their intimate conjugal life was something which she was more than willing to forego for a while" (Chopin 1889). In Chopin's wording there is the implication that Clarisse is not as sexual as her husband. Still, like "The Storm" itself, the consequences of the illegitimate passion are minor: "So the storm passed and every one was happy" (Chopin 1889). "The Story of an
Story Of an Hour Kate Chopin was an American writer whose deeply feminist views often influenced her writing. In "The Story of an Hour," Chopin (1894) explores Mrs. Mallard's reaction to the news of her husband's death and the emotional rollercoaster that she experiences during the brief hour after she hears her husband has died and before she learns her husband is actually still alive. Chopin's (1894) "The Story of an
Desiree's Baby is an 1892 story by Kate Chopin that examines how the Aubigny family falls apart due to assumptions and misunderstandings. In the story, Desiree, an orphan whose parentage is unknown and whom the Valmonde family lovingly raises, marries Armand Aubigny, a man whose father comes from a prominent family. Desiree eventually gets pregnant by and gives birth to Armand's son, who later is the cause for Armand to
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