Kate Chopin

1
Kate Chopin
English III Mrs. Nelson
"I would give up the unessential I would give my
money, I would give my life for my children but
I wouldnt give myself." Edna Pontellier in The
Awakening.
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Lets get to know her better..

• About her life

• American author Kate Chopin (18501904) wrote two
  published novels and about a hundred short
  stories in the 1890s. Most of her fiction is set
  in Louisiana.
• Published by some of America's most prestigious
  magazines, including Vogue and the Atlantic
  Monthly.
• Her stories appeared in anthologies from the
  1920s.

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Lets get to know her better..

• About her life

• Catherine (Kate) O'Flaherty was born in St.
  Louis, Missouri, on February 8, 1850.
• Her father was Thomas O'Flaherty of County
  Galway, Ireland.
• Her mother was Eliza Faris of St. Louis. Kate's
  family on her mother's side was of French
  extraction.
• Kate grew up speaking both French and English.
• She was bilingual and bicultural.
• 1868 Kate attended the St. Louis Academy of the
  Sacred Heart.
• Mentored by woman--by her mother, her
  grandmother, great grandmother, as well as by the
  Sacred Heart nuns.

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Lets get to know her better..

• About her life

• At eighteen, Kate was an Irish Beauty, her
  friend Kitty later said, with a droll gift of
  mimicry and a passion for music. At about
  nineteen, through social events held at Oakland,
  a wealthy estate near St. Louis, Kate met Oscar
  Chopin of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, whose
  French father had taken the family to Europe
  during the Civil War. I am going to be married,
  Kate confided in her commonplace book, married
  to the right man. It does not seem strange as I
  had thought it wouldI feel perfectly calm,
  perfectly collected. And how surprised everyone
  was, for I had kept it so secret! Kate and Oscar
  were married in 1870.
• On her wedding trip the couple traveled to
  Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York, and then
  crossed the Atlantic and toured Germany,
  Switzerland, and France.
• Between 1871 and 1879 she gave birth to five sons
  and a daughter.
• In New Orleans, where she and her husband lived
  until 1879, Chopin was at the center of Southern
  aristocratic social life.
• 1882 her husband Oscar died of malaria, in 1885
  her mother died too.
• She became active in St. Louis literary and
  cultural circles, discussing the works of many
  writers, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
  Émile Zola, and George Sand.

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Lets get to know her better..

• About her life

• Kate spent the Civil War in St. Louis, a city
  where residents supported both the Union and the
  Confederacy.
• She was deeply responsive during the period just
  prior to her undertaking a literary career to the
  major new ideas and fiction of her time, reading
  fully in Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the
  French naturalists.
• From 1867 to 1870 Kate kept a "commonplace book"
  in which she recorded diary entries. Writing for
  her was a therapy against depression.
• Chopin's seemingly different writing style did in
  fact emerge from an admiration of Guy de
  Maupassant.
• ...I read his stories and marveled at them. Here
  was life, not fiction

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What does she tells us about herself?

• Kate Chopin In Her Own Words

• "Even as a child she had lived her own small life
  all within herself. At a very early period she
  had apprehended instinctively the dual lifethat
  outward existence which conforms, the inward life
  which questions." Description of Edna Pontellier
  in The Awakening.
• "She wanted to reach out her hand in the darkness
  and touch him with the sensitive tips of her
  fingers upon the face or the lips. She wanted to
  draw close to him and whisper against his
  cheekshe did not care whatas she might have
  done if she had not been a respectable woman."
  Description of Mrs. Baroda in "A Respectable
  Woman.

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What does she tells us about herself?

• Kate Chopin In Her Own Words

• "'It means,' he answered lightly, 'that the child
  is not white it means that you are not white.'"
  Armand Aubigny in "Désirée's Baby.
• Free, body and soul, free! she kept
  whispering. The Story of an Hour
• "I would give up the unessential I would give my
  money, I would give my life for my children but
  I wouldnt give myself." Edna Pontellier in The
  Awakening.

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Themes in her works Many focus on themes
related to womens search for selfhood, for
self-discovery or identity. Many also focus on
womens revolt against conformity, often against
gender conformity or against social norms that
limit womens possibilities in life. Some look
at themes revealed by Chopins literary
techniques, her use of imagery or parallel
sentence structures, her narrative control or
narrative stance or modes of disclosure. Some
study her use of regional dialects. Some write
about Chopins use of food in her works, or her
focus on walking, her interest in music and
painting, or her descriptions of characters
clothing. Some read Chopin through a specific
critical approachstylistic analysis,
psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism,
deconstruction, Foucauldian analysis, new
historicism, or reader-response analysis. And
some find themes related to economicsto women as
commodity, for example, or to Edna Pontelliers
expenditures, or to the extreme poverty in
Chopins two books of short stories, Bayou
Folk and A Night in Acadie.
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Some Of Her Works

• S t o r i e s
• Bayou Folk
• A Night In Acadie
• The Storm
• The Story of an Hour
• Désirée's Baby
• A Pair of Silk Stockings
• Athenaise
• At the Cadian Ball
• Lilacs
• A Respectable Woman
• The Unexpected
• The Kiss
• Beyond the Bayou
• Beauty of The Baby
• N o v e l s
• At Fault
• The Awakening

• Today Kate Chopin is best known for her sensitive
  treatment of women's lives.
• But in the 1890s she was praised mostly for her
  "local color," her pictures of Louisiana Creoles
  and Acadians.
• All topics are part of her Naturalism view.

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The Symbolic Use Of The Sea In The Awakening

It opens on Grand Isle in the Gulf of Mexico
where the Pontelliers are summering, and it
closes there. The very same sentence, about "the
voice of the sea," occurs twice in the book. The
first time, early in the story, is shortly after
the following passage Mrs. Pontellier was
beginning to realize her position in the universe
as a human being, and to recognize her relations
as an individual to the world within and about
her perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is
usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.
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I once heard a devotee of impressionism admit,
in looking at a picture by Monet, that, while he
himself had never seen in nature the peculiar
yellows and reds therein depicted, he was
convinced that Monet had painted them because he
saw them and because they were true. With
something of a kindred faith in the sincerity of
Mons. Zolas work, I am yet not at all times
ready to admit its truth, which is only
equivalent to saying that our points of view
differ, that truth rests upon a shifting basis
and is apt to be kaleidoscopic.Her 1894 comment
about the importance of describing human
existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning,
stripped of the veil with which ethical and
conventional standards have draped it and her
conviction that truth rests upon a shifting
basis and is apt to be kaleidoscopic are helpful
points of reference in approaching Kate Chopins
work.
Kate Chopins view on truth
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• In 1904 Chopin returned home from a fair, she was
  very tired. She died the day after, doctors
  thought that she had had a cerebral hemorrhage.
• In his 1969 biography, Per Seyersted summarizes
  what Kate Chopin accomplished. She "broke new
  ground in American literature," he says. "She was
  the first woman writer in her country to accept
  passion as a legitimate subject for serious,
  outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition
  and authority She was something of a pioneer in
  the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce,
  and of womans urge for an existential
  authenticity.

• The end