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No Longer Silent
Kate Chopin was a female writer whose sense of self was deeply rooted in the south. Chopin would create worlds for her characters to live in; her inspiration for these worlds was her own experiences in her life which she gained from living in the south during the second half of the nineteenth century. Chopin’s roots and the time in which she lived had historical significance and great impact on her style of writing and themes within her stories. She was also one of the first American authors to write truthfully about woman’s hidden lives, their sexuality, and about woman’s complex relationships they had with their husbands. The critic Per Seyersted said that [Kate Chopin] “Broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction” (“Kate Chopin: Overview”). Chopin was one writer who would test the boundaries with her stories.
One of the first books Chopin published was Bayou Folk, a collection of Louisiana stories, in 1894. It was very well accepted by the public and marked her as a great local color writer. Chopin was well-known for her work as a local colorist, but to describe Kate Chopin’s writing one has to look at many types of styles. There are elements of romanticism, transcendentalism, realism, naturalism, existentialism, feminism as well as local color.
Chopin’s feminist point of view was not what one would consider as a dictionary term feminist; she never joined any feminist groups to seek equal rights for women. Rather “Chopin saw that the problems confronting her sex were too complicated to admit of easy solutions…… In a society where man makes the rules, woman is often kept in a state of tutelage a...
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.... Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 May. 2014.
Seyersted, Per. "An excerpt from Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography." Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Per Seyersted. Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Rpt. in World Literature Criticism, Supplement 1-2: A Selection of Major Authors from Gale's Literary Criticism Series. Ed. Polly Vedder. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 May 2014.
Seyersted, Per. "Kate Chopin: Overview." Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd Ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994.Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 May. 2014.
Toth, Emily. "Kate Chopin and Literary Convention: 'Désirée's Baby,'." in Southern Studies 20.2 (Summer 1981): 201-208. Rpt. in Short Stories for Students. Ed. Jennifer Smith. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 May 2014.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Short Stories of Kate Chopin. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition: Kate Chopin: The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. 3-109.
Davis, Sara de Saussure. "Kate Chopin." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 12 pp. 59-71. Literature Resource Center. Gale Group Databases. Central Lib. Fort Worth, TX. 11 Feb. 2003
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 535-625. Print.
Cambridge UP, 1988. Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography.
Harris, Sharon M. "Kate Chopin." Magill’S Survey Of American Literature, Revised Edition (2006): 1-5. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
Wyatt, Neal "Biography of Kate Chopin" English 384: Women Writers. Ed. Ann M. Woodlief Copyright: 1998, Virginia Commonwealth University. (26 Jan. 1999) http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/katebio.htm
The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5th Ed. -. W.W. Norton & Co., NY. 1998. The. Chopin, Kate.
Kate Chopin was born February 8, 1850 in St. Louis. She was raised by a single woman; this impacted her views in the family at an early age. She began her own family at a young age; Kate had a different method compare too many women in her time. As time progressed, she developed a bad habit of dressing inappropriately. Soon she started to publish stories about the experiences and stories of her interests such as women’s individuality and miserable
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." Literature: Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Boston:
Chopin, Kate. Complete Novels and Stories. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert. New York: Library of America, 2002. Print.
When Howard asserts that “it is the woman who demands her own direction and chooses her own freedom that interests Chopin most” (1) she is right on target. Howard only fails when she chooses not to expand that vision to include the truly feminist perspectives that differentiate Chopin as a woman far ahead of her time.
Kenneth Eble states, “…She undertook to give the unsparing truth about women’s submerged life” (2). Speaking solely about Kate Chopin, this quote puts emphasis upon Chopin’s disputes with her society. She used her writing as a technique to indirectly explicate her life by the means of narrating her stories through the characters she created. Kate Chopin was one of the modern writers of her time, one who wrote novels concentrating on the common social matters related to women. Her time period consisted of other female authors that focused on the same central theme during the era: exposing the unfairness of the patriarchal society, and women’s search for selfhood, and their search for identity. In Chopin’s novel The Awakening, she incorporates the themes mentioned above to illustrate the veracity of life as she understood it. A literary work approached by the feminist critique seeks to raise awareness of the importance and higher qualities of women. Women in literature may uncover their strengths or find their independence, raising their own self recognition. Several critics deem Chopin as one of the leading feminists of her age because she was willing to publish stories that dealt with women becoming self-governing, who stood up for themselves and novels that explored the difficulties that they faced during the time. Chopin scrutinized sole problems and was not frightened to suggest that women desired something that they were not normally permitted to have: independence. Chopin’s decision to focus on and emphasize the imbalances between the sexes is heavily influenced by her upbringing, her feelings towards society, and the era she subsisted in.
Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. “Kate Chopin.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, Sep2013. Academic Research Database. 1 Nov. 2013