Author Kate Chopin, who is considered one of the Great American authors, wrote during the Realism period. Particularly, in her work titled “The Blind Man”, written in 1897 we can evidence of the characteristics, themes and style identified with the Realist movement which was extant in American letters between 1850 and 1900. As a representative of such a movement, Kate Chopin then remains one of the most identifiable and iconic writers of her time. Kate Chopin was born on February 8, 1850 in St. Louis Missouri. She died August 22, 1904 in St. Louis Missouri. Her parents were Eliza and Thomas O’Flaherty. She was the third child of five. Her sisters died and infancy. And her step brothers from her father’s first marriage died in their early twenties. …show more content…
She was the only one of her siblings to live past 25 years old. When she was five years old in 1855 her parents sent her to The Sacred Heart Academy a catholic boarding school.
Her father died two months after she was sent to the boarding school in a train accident. After her father died she lived with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother at home which were all widows. During this time her great grandmother taught her French, Music, and the gossip on St. Louis. After the two years passed she returned to The Sacred Heart Academy. She was top of her class; she won medals, she was elected into the elite Children of Mary Society, and delivered the commencement address. She had one close female friend named Kitty Garesche. She grew up during the civil war, which separated her and her friend Kitty. After the war was over they reunited again until Kitty became a nun in The Sacred Hearts Academy. Her half-brother died in the war of typhoid fever and in 1863 her grandmother died three days before Christmas. These Rebecca Gutierrez 1 st Block experiences combined with her father’s death 8 years ago created a strong doubt of religion in Kate. When she turned twenty in 1870 she married a twenty-five year old man named Oscar Chopin. They lived in New Orleans where they had five boys and two girls. She had all her children before she was 28 years old. Her husband Oscar was the son of a wealthy
family. Oscar’s family was a cotton growing family in Louisiana. Oscar ran a business. Mr. Chopin died of Swamp fever in 1882. When Kate’s husband died she took over the business for over a year. Then after she sold the business in 1884 she moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother. Sadly, her mother Eliza died the next year, leaving Kate alone with her children. To support herself and her young family she began to write. Immediately she became successful she wrote short stories about people she knew in Louisiana. In 1899 she published her second novel The Awakening which is one of her most famous novels. Her novel received a lot of negativity because it regarded female sexuality, motherhood, and marital infidelity. By this time she had already published over one hundred different types of works. On August 22 nd 1904 in St. Louis Missouri she suffered from a brain hemorrhage and she passed away at the age of fifty-four. Kate Chopin Wrote during the Realist time period. This Literary Movement is characterized by: Descriptions based on the person's knowledge or experience. Characters motivated by real-life urges like greed, lust, confusion more than honor, chivalry, services, and more. Characters are more complex mixes of good and bad than in extreme romance narratives, Rebecca Gutierrez 1 st Block where characters are more symbolic types, like heroes, villains, innocent and helpless women, faithful servants. Another one is the many conflicts and complications that inherent in everyday reality. Realistic fiction or writing may devote more description to work or labor compared to Romanticism, which does not typically represent toil or everyday labor, and elevates conflicts to issues of honor, heart, dignity, responsibility, or heroism rather than to the everyday encounter and solution to difficulties. Romantic rhetoric often strains to be more elevated or universal and tends to extremes of intimacy or excess. Particularly in her work titled “The Blind Man”, we can see these characteristics. For example, The Blind Man short story shows how the lower class and upper class see each other. In the story nobody cares about the lower class people but everyone cares about what happens to the upper class people. Which ties back to the characteristics of realism because it is realistic and this happens in the real world. Another example would be when the blind man in the story goes from door to door trying to sell pencils. He is blind and yet is still trying to make a living of pencils. This is part of everyday reality some people go through similar situations where they are trying to make a living by the way this man is. The final example is when the police officer immediately went to the blind man and yanked his collar. The police was not there and didn’t know exactly what had happened but because the man looked a certain way he assumed it was him that was causing trouble. In this way, the works of Kate Chopin exemplify the best of American Literature.
She realized she would never have to depend on a man for financial stability. A habit she might have learned growing up without her real father. She remarried in 1921 to Willie Baker, whose last name she decided to keep. She remarried again in 1937 to Frenchman Jean Lion, from which she obtained French citizenship. Then a last time in 1947 to a French orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, who helped to raise her 12 adopted children.
closest to her. After her only brother died she tried to please her father by
left China in 1944. Her mother was married to another man at the time and had two twin
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
On February 8, 1851, Katherine O’Flaherty was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Kate was born to the parents of Thomas O’Flaherty and Eliza Faris. Her father was a wealthy Irish immigrant and a successful businessman. Sadly, Kate’s father died in a railway accident when she was only four years old. Kate’s childhood was influenced mostly by her mother and great-grandmother. Kate spent much time with her family’s Creole and mulatto slaves, becoming familiar with their dialects. She attended Sacred Heart convent where she was a very poor student, but an avid reader. At the age of eleven Kate’s great-grandmother as well as her half-brother died. These two deaths caused Kat...
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
University of Paris). The only problem now was that she had no money to get
Once she was of age to leave her home she did. Her mother was ok with her decision to join the sisterhood for she was very much into the church and believed in helping others. In 1928 she finally decided to leave her home to join the Sisters of Loreto, in Ireland, she was eighteen years old(“Mother”). Sisters of Loreto mission was in Ireland but had other missions in other parts of the world. W...
the school she then returned to it a few years later as a teacher. She
Kate Chopin was a woman and a writer far ahead of her time. She was a realistic fiction writer and one of the leaders and inspirational people in feminism. Her life was tragic and full of irregular events. In fact, this unusual life had an enormous effect on her writings and career. She depicted the lifestyle of her time in her works. In most of her stories, people would find an expansion of her life’s events. In her two stories “The Storm” and “The Story of One Hour” and some of her other works she denoted a lot of her life’s events. Kate Chopin is one of those writers who were influenced by their life and surrounded environment in their fiction writing, and this was very clear in most of her works.
Kate Chopin, a prolific writer of the late 1800’s, was actually not a native of the culture of which she’s famous for depicting. Born and raised in Missouri, she married a native of Louisiana, Cajun-born Oscar Chopin, who whisked her away to Natchitoches, Louisiana, where she became engrossed in southern life and living. This inspired much of the literature she produced throughout her career, even though she wrote most of it while living is St. Louis, Missouri, following the death of her dear husband in 1882. She began writing as a way to support her family, and was successful in publishing a myriad of literature, including short stories, novels, and magazine scripts (Wyatt).
Kate O'Flaherty Chopin was born 8 February 1851 into a prominent family in St.Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, an Irish immigrant, was a successful St. Louis merchant who was killed in a railroad accident when Kate was only five years old. Kate's mother, Eliza was left a wealthy widow and raised Kate in a household "run by vigorous widows: her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother . . . a community of women who stressed learning, curiosity, and financial independence" (Toth, 187). Kate was formally educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis where she kept a commonplace book "in which the thoughtful adolescent recorded themes that appear in her later fiction, among them women's roles and the conflict between desire and duty" (Toth, 187).
Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. “Kate Chopin.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, Sep2013. Academic Research Database. 1 Nov. 2013
Alabama. She spent her next 4 years of college at the University of Alabama, one of
schools yet again to St. Margaret Mary Catholic School, where she spent three years. Her first