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Kate Chopin

1851-1904


Writer, translator

Evelyn Sung/§º©y½o
 The Loss of Father

 Great-grandmother's Influence

 The Rebound of Deaths

 Marriage

 The Encouragement and the Beginning

 Short Stories

 Novels

 The Dual Reaction of The Awakening

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 The Loss of Father
¡@ Kate Chopin was born on Feb. 8, 1951, in St. Louis , Missouri . Her mother was a member of the prominent French-Creole community and was thus a familiar figure in exclusive social circles. Chopin's father was an Irish immigrant who had successfully established himself as a merchant and subsequently participated in various business ventures. Chopin was only a child when her father died. He had been a founder of the Pacific Railroad, and was aboard the train on its inaugural journey when it plunged into the Gasconade River after a bridge collapsed.

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 Great-grandmother's Influence
¡@ After her father died, Chopin grew more intimate with her mother and a strong tie to her great-grandmother, who lived in their household and directed Chopin mental and artistic growth until her death (she died when Chopin was eleven). Under her great-grandmother's cultivation, Chopin developed a taste for storytelling, a relish for the intimate details about historical figures such as the earliest settlers of the Louisiana Territory , and an unabashed, unhesitant curiosity about life. Additionally, she superintended the Chopin's piano lessons and her French. Chopin's interest in music was lifelong; so was her willingness to explore unconventional ideas.

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 The Rebound of Deaths
¡@ During her childhood, Chopin endured the death of her father, as well as several other family deaths. Although she always recovered, the depth of her grief may be sensed by her reaction as an eleven-year-old to the deaths (that occurred within a month) of both her great-grandmother and her half brother, who fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War. For about two years Chopin withdrew from school, from friends, even somewhat from her family, and spent much of the time reading in the attic, where she read voraciously over the works of Scott, Fielding, and Spenser. Peggy Skaggs observes that "Chopin's self-perception must have been affected by the various family deaths, and that the consequent tension may have resulted in the ‘search for self-understanding' that motivates so many characters in Chopin's fiction."

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 Marriage
¡@ Chopin graduated from the Catholic school in 1868, and for the next two years she enjoyed life as a belle in St. Louis 's high society, earning admiration for both her beauty and her wit. Her independence and uniqueness were revealed through her doubts toward Catholicism's implicit authoritarianism, which dictated subservience for women to male domination, and her awareness of the inanities involved in socializing. In 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, a wealthy Creole cotton factor, and moved with him to New Orleans. In 1880, financial difficulties forced their family to move to her father-in-law's home in Cloutierville, a small town in Natchitoches Parish located in Louisiana 's Red River bayou region. There, Chopin's husband oversaw and subsequently inherited his father's plantations. When her husband died of swamp fever in 1883, Chopin insisted on taking the managerial responsibilities, which brought her into contact with almost every segment of the community, including the French-Acadian, Creole, and mulatto sharecroppers who worked the plantations. She was rather at home in New Orleans and Cloutierville society, partly because of her personal charisma but also because of her fluent French and her Southern sympathies. The impressions she gathered from the people and life experiences both from New Orleans and the Natchitoches Parish later influenced her fiction.

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 The Encouragement and the Beginning
¡@ n 1884, she sold out the property in Louisiana and moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother, who died shortly afterward in 1885, leaving Chopin with her six children and with a small, diminishing income. Her only close friend during this time was Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, her physician and a learned man whose encouragement influenced her to study contemporary science, to give up her religious beliefs, and to start writing professionally. Chopin thus began to write short stories. Her early works revealed the influence her favorite writers such as Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Moliere.

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 Short Stories
¡@ In her first collection, Bayou Folk (1894), Chopin establishes herself as a masterful colorist of Louisiana life, in which the vivid portrayal of farms, cabins, and houses reflects the local peoples lifestyle. The theme of this collection is love, whether loyal devotion, romantic love, love of honor, sexual passion, or some combination of these. From Chopins ironic perspective, love and devotion takes many forms and are full of complexity. Her second collection of tales, A Night in Acadie (1897), depicts similar characters and milieu as the first collection, but the theme becomes more diverse, moving from romantic love to the exploration of the connection between selfhood and marriage. Several stories reflect her contention that security and love cannot compensate for a lack of control over ones destiny. From 1897 to 1900 or 1901, Chopin tried unsuccessfully to market a third collection of stories, called A Vocation and A Voice. In this collection Chopin moves away from the Louisianan setting to focus more on the psychological complexity of her characters. At the same time the ironic tone of her writing reached a certain stage that was close to Stephen Cranes irony. In evaluating A Vocation and a Voice, Barbara C. Ewell observed, this collection "includes some of Chopins most experimental stories, reveals how intently she had come to focus her fiction on human interiority, on the interplay of consciousness and circumstance, of unconscious motive and reflexive action. Such psychological elements, combined with technical control, indicate a writer not only in command of her craft but fully in tune with the intellectual currents of her time. In many ways, A Vocation and a Voice represents the culmination of Chopins talents as a writer of the short story."

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 Novels
¡@

Among her collection of tales, extramarital sex is treated as a subject of interest rather than a subject of lament or moralizing. Such ambivalent attitude toward extramarital sex also appears in her novel At Fault (1890), which looks at women's emancipation and the issue of marriage discord. It is the first novel that refused to condemn divorce and it also earned mixed reviews for its daring portrayal of a female alcoholic and its ambivalent perspective on divorce.

The Awakening (1899), her second novel, is considered Chopin's best work as well as a remarkable novel ahead of its time. Its protagonist is a conventional wife and mother who experiences a spiritual epiphany and an awakened sense of independence that changed her life. It accentuates the theme of sexual freedom and the consequences one must face to attain it. Chopin in The Awakening , along with A Vocation and a Voice , attempted to suggest that obeying erotic impulses was a way to participate in the natural rhythms of life itself. She allowed herself to move beyond the social mores, exploring the different consequences within society of such sexuality. The consequences might be painful, tragic, humorous, dangerous, joyous, or pleasurable, but they were not wrong.

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 The Dual Reaction of The Awakening
¡@ The publication of The Awakening aroused a uproar among the critics. It caused rejections of Chopin's later stories, and the heavy criticism it gained somehow paralyzed Chopin's creativity. This public condemnation, coupled with the continued rejection of A Vocation and a Voice , was believed to shorten Chopin's literary career. Such a strong reaction revealed the public was simply not ready for such an honest exploration of female independence, a frank declaration of a woman's desires and her search for fulfillment outside marriage. However, in the ensuing years Chopin's notoriety for The Awakening faded, and her literary reputation became attached to a colorist, or a re-creator of Louisiana life, particularly that of the bayou. In more recent decades, Chopin and her work have become favored subjects among women critics, who lauded her perception of women's plight, women's sexual repression, and its effects on both individuals and their society.

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Reference

¡@

Dondore, Dorothy Anne. "Flaherty Chopin." Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.

"Kate Chopin." Authors and Artists for Young Adults , Volume 33. Gale Group, 2000.

"Katherine Chopin." Encyclopedia of World Biography , 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.

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