Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (, <small>also</small> ; born Katherine O'Flaherty; February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904) was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and she is among the most frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage. She is best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening.

Of maternal French and paternal Irish descent, Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She married and moved with her husband to New Orleans. They later lived in the country in Cloutierville, Louisiana. From 1892 to 1895, Chopin wrote short stories for both children and adults that were published in national magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her stories aroused controversy because of her subjects and her approach; they were condemned as immoral by some critics.

Her major works were two short story collections and two novels. The collections are Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included "Désirée's Baby" (1893), a tale of an interracial relationship in antebellum Louisiana, "The Story of an Hour" (1894), and "The Storm" (written 1898, first published 1969). In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote "some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius."

At the age of five, she was sent to Sacred Heart Academy, where she learned how to handle her own money and make her own decisions. Upon her father's death, she was brought home to live with her grandmother and great-grandmother, comprising three generations of women who were widowed young and never remarried. For two years, she was tutored at home by her great-grandmother, Victoria (or Victoire) Charleville, who taught French, music, history, gossip, and the need to look on life without fear. After those two years, Kate went back to Sacred Heart Academy, which her best friend and neighbor, Kitty Garesche, also attended, and where her mentor, Mary O'Meara, taught. A gifted writer of both verse and prose, O'Meara guided her student to write regularly, to judge herself critically, and to conduct herself valiantly. Nine days after Kate and Kitty's first communions in May 1861, the American Civil War came to St. Louis. During the war, Kate's half-brother died of fever, and her great-grandmother died as well. After the war ended, Kitty and her family were banished from St. Louis for supporting the Confederacy.

right|thumb|[[Kate Chopin House (Cloutierville, Louisiana)|Chopin house in Cloutierville]]

In St. Louis, Missouri on June 8, 1870, she married Oscar Chopin and settled with him in his home town of New Orleans. The Chopins had six children between 1871 and 1879: in order of birth, Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza). In 1879, Oscar Chopin's cotton brokerage failed.

The family left the city and moved to Cloutierville in south Natchitoches Parish to manage several small plantations and a general store. They became active in the community, where Chopin found, in the local creole culture, much material for her future writing.

When Oscar Chopin died in 1882, he left Kate $42,000 in debt (approximately $ in ). The scholar Emily Toth noted that "for a while the widow Kate ran his [Oscar's] business and flirted outrageously with local men; (she even engaged in a relationship with a married farmer)." Although Chopin worked to make her late husband's plantation and general store succeed, she sold her Louisiana business two years later.

Chopin struggled with depression after the successive loss of her husband, her business, and her mother. Chopin's obstetrician and family friend Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer suggested that she start writing, believing that it could be therapeutic for her. He believed that writing could be a focus for her energy as well as a source of income.

By the early 1890s, Chopin's short stories, articles, and translations appeared in periodicals, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and in various literary magazines. During a period of considerable publishing of folk tales, works in dialect, and other elements of Southern folk life, she was considered a regional writer who provided local color. Her literary qualities were largely overlooked. the critical reception was largely negative. The critics considered the behavior of the novel's characters, especially the women, as well as Chopin's general treatment of female sexuality, motherhood, and marital infidelity, to be in conflict with prevailing standards of moral conduct and therefore offensive.

This novel, her best-known work, is the story of a woman trapped within the confines of an oppressive society. Out of print for several decades, it was rediscovered in the 1970s, when there was a wave of new studies and appreciation of women's writings. The novel has been reprinted and now is widely available. It has been critically acclaimed for its writing quality and importance as an example of early feminist literature of the South.

right|thumb|Kate Chopin's grave in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, MissouriCritics suggest that such works as The Awakening were scandalous and therefore not socially embraced. Chopin was discouraged by the lack of acceptance, but she continued to write, primarily writing short stories.

thumb|Kate Chopin in a riding habit, 1876

Kate Chopin is an example of a revisionist myth-maker because she revises myth more realistically about marriage and female sexuality of her time. The biggest myth Chopin focused on was the "Victorian notion of women's somewhat anemic sexuality" and "The Storm" is the best example of Kate Chopin using that myth through a character set on fulfilling her complete sexual potential. Kate Chopin's sympathies lay with the individual in the context of his and her personal life and society.

Through her stories, Chopin wrote a kind of autobiography and described her societies; she had grown up in a time when her surroundings included the abolitionist movements before the American Civil War, and their influence on freedmen education and rights afterward, as well as the emergence of feminism. Her ideas and descriptions were not reporting, but her stories expressed the reality of her world. By the early 1890s, Chopin forged a successful writing career, contributing short stories and articles to local publications and literary journals. She also initially wrote a number of short stories such as "A Point at Issue!", "A No-Account Creole", "Beyond the Bayou", which were published in various magazines.

"Desiree's Baby" was first published in an 1893 issue of Vogue, alongside "A Visit to Avoyelles", another of Chopin's short stories, under the heading "Character Studies: The Father of Desiree's Baby – The Lover of Mentine". "A Visit to Avoyelles" typifies the local color writing that Chopin was known, and it is one of her stories that shows a couple in a completely fulfilled marriage. While Doudouce is hoping otherwise, he sees ample evidence that Mentine and Jules' marriage is a happy and fulfilling one, despite the poverty-stricken circumstances in which they live. In contrast, "Desiree's Baby", which is much more controversial due to the topic of interracial relationships, portrays a marriage in trouble. The other contrasts to "A Visit to Avoyelles" are clear, but some are more subtle than others. Unlike Mentine and Jules, Armand and Desiree are rich and own slaves and a plantation. Mentine and Jules' marriage has weathered many hard times, while Armand and Desiree's falls apart at the first sign of trouble. Kate Chopin was talented at showing various sides of marriages and local people and their lives, making her writing very broad and sweeping in topic, even as she had many common themes in her work.

Martha Cutter argues that Kate Chopin demonstrates feminine resistance to patriarchal society through her short stories. Cutter claims that Chopin's resistance can be traced through the timeline of her work, with Chopin becoming more and more understanding of how women can fight back suppression as time progresses. The female characters in The Awakening went beyond the standards of social norms of the time. The protagonist has sexual desires and questions the sanctity of motherhood.

Reception and legacy

Legacy

Kate Chopin has been credited by some as a pioneer of the early feminist movement despite not achieving any literary rewards for her works. A large number of her short stories were published in national magazines, such as Youth's Companion and Harper's Young People. Bayou Folk was well-reviewed, with Chopin's writing about how she had seen 100 press notices about it. Those stories were published in The New York Times and The Atlantic. Readers particularly liked how she used local dialects to give her characters a more authentic and relatable feel. Local and national newspapers published mixed reviews of Chopin's novel with one calling it "poison" and "unpleasant", going on to say it was "too strong a drink for moral babes", while another newspaper published a review calling Choppn, "A St. Louis Woman Who Has Turned Fame Into Literature". The majority of the early reviews for The Awakening were largely negative. Emily Toth, one of Chopin's most well known biographers, thought she had gone too far with this novel. She argued that the protagonist Edna's blatant sensuality was too much for the male gatekeepers. So much so that publication of her next novel was cancelled.

The poet Orrick Johns was at least one strong advocate of Chopin and The Awakening, calling her "an influential modernist poet and progressive journalist originally from St. Louis who was popular in Greenwich Village literary circles". in 1911 he wrote in Reedy's Mirror: "To one who has read her as a boy and come back to her again with powers of appreciation more subtly developed, she breathes the magic of a whole chapter in his life." Through Johns's personal friendship with Kelley and his fierce advocacy for The Awakening, it has been argued These two books formed the scholarly support for a rediscovery of Chopin.

It took a brief commentary by novelist Linda Wolfe in the September 22, 1972, issue of The New York Times to kickstart the rediscovery of Chopin by the general public. In "There's Someone You Should Know – Kate Chopin", she described how she encouraged friends disappointed with contemporary fiction to discover Chopin and how The Awakening spoke to her today. The last step required to bring the novel to general awareness happened almost immediately. Before the year was out, a major mass-market paperback publisher, Avon Books, had the first mass-market paperback publication of the book heading to drug stores, supermarkets, and bookstores. A blurb from Wolfe's comments was featured prominently below the title and author's name at the top of the cover: "'Speaks to me as pertinently as any fiction published this year or last. It is uncanny, nothing else . . . A masterpiece.' Linda Wolfe, The New York Times". Within a few years, all of the major mass-market paperback publishers had editions of The Awakening in print, making it widely available for anyone to buy.

Per Seyersted's rediscovery of Chopin caused her work to be seen as essential feminist and Southern literature from the 19th century. Seyersted wrote that she "broke new ground in American Literature". According to Emily Toth, author of a recent Chopin biography, Kate Chopin's work rose in popularity and recognition during the 1970s due to themes of women venturing outside of the constraints set upon them by society, which appealed to people participating in feminist activism and the sexual revolution. She also argues that the works appealed to women in the 1960s, "a time when American women yearned to know about our feisty foremothers". A reviewer for Choice Reviews stated that it was ultimately a struggle doomed to failure because the patriarchal conventions of her society restricted her freedom. Karen Simons felt that this failed struggle was perfectly captured by the ending of the novel, where Edna Pontellier realizes that she cannot truly be both the traditional mother and have a sense of herself as an individual at the same time.

Representation in other media

Louisiana Public Broadcasting, under president Beth Courtney, produced Kate Chopin: A Reawakening, a documentary on Chopin's life.

In the penultimate episode of the first season of HBO's Treme, set in New Orleans, the teacher Creighton (played by John Goodman) assigns Chopin's The Awakening to his freshman class at Tulane University in New Orleans, and warns them:

<blockquote>"I want you to take your time with it," he cautions. "Pay attention to the language itself. The ideas. Don't think in terms of a beginning and an end. Because unlike some plot-driven entertainments, there is no closure in real life. Not really."</blockquote>

Works

Short story collections

Bayou Folk (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1894)
A Night in Acadie (Way & Williams, 1897)

Novels

At Fault (Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1890)
The Awakening (H. S. Stone & Co., 1899)

Posthumously published

The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Louisiana State University Press, 1969)
A Kate Chopin Miscellany, ed. Per Seyersted and Emily Toth (Northwestern State University Press, 1979)
Complete Novels and Stories (Library of America, 2002)

Individual stories

"Emancipation: A Life Fable" (undated, written c. 1869–70), included in The Complete Works
"A Point at Issue!" (1889), included in The Complete Works
"A No-Account Creole" (written 1888/1891, published 1894), included in Bayou Folk
"Beyond the Bayou" (written 1891, published 1893), included in Bayou Folk
"Ripe Figs" (written 1892, published 1893), included in A Night in Acadie
"At the 'Cadian Ball" (1892), included in Bayou Folk
"Désirée's Baby" (1893), included in Bayou Folk
"Madame Célestin's Divorce" (1893), included in Bayou Folk
"At Chênière Caminada" (1894), included in A Night in Acadie
"A Respectable Woman" (1894), included in A Night in Acadie
"The Story of an Hour" (1894), included in The Complete Works
"Lilacs" (written 1894, published 1896), included in The Complete Works
"Regret" (1894), included in A Night in Acadie
"The Kiss" (written 1894, published 1895), included in The Complete Works
"Ozème's Holiday" (written 1894, published 1896), included in The Complete Works
"Her Letters" (written 1894, published 1895), included in The Complete Works
"Athénaïse" (written 1895, published 1896), included in A Night in Acadie
"The Unexpected" (1895), included in The Complete Works
"Fedora" (written 1895, published 1897), included in The Complete Works
"A Vocation and a Voice" (written 1896, published 1902), included in The Complete Works
"A Pair of Silk Stockings" (1897), included in The Complete Works
"The Locket" (written 1897), included in The Complete Works
"An Egyptian Cigarette" (written 1897, published 1900), included in The Complete Works
"The Storm" (written 1898), included in The Complete Works
"Charlie" (written 1900), included in The Complete Works

Honors and awards

Her home with Oscar Chopin in Cloutierville was built by Alexis Cloutier in the early part of the 19th century. In the late 20th century, the house was designated as the Kate Chopin House, a National Historic Landmark (NHL), because of her literary significance. The house was adapted for use as the Bayou Folk Museum. On October 1, 2008, the house was destroyed by a fire, with little left but the chimney.
In 1990, Chopin was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
In 2012, she was commemorated with an iron bust of her head at the Writer's Corner in the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis, across the street from Left Bank Books.

Notes

External links

Kate Chopin, Novelist And Short Story Writer
Kate Chopin at American Literature
Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening, PBS documentary