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Kate Chopin Gives a Womans Voice to Realism
Kate Chopin succeeded in giving a woman's voice to realism. While doing this she sacrificed her career. This seems to be a "higher order of feminism than repeating the
story of a woman as victim...Kate Chopin gives her female protagonist the central role,
normally reserved for the man, in a meditation on identity and culture, consciousness, and art." (Robinson 3) "The role of woman in the society Chopin creates is of special interest and relevance. (Robinson 6)
Introduction to Kate Chopin
Before Kate Chopin came onto the writing scene, women had an insignificant role
in society. Women never did anything that would cause some sort of controversy. All
literature focused around a male main character as well. Most stories being written at the time were about male characters and their stories, not the women. Kate Chopin changed that.
Kate Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri
in 1851. Her father was an Irish immigrant and her mother was of French descent. They
introduced Kate to music and writing at an early age. (Elements of Literature 481)
At nineteen she married Oscar Chopin, who was a French Creole from New Orleans. They had six children together. After her husband's sudden death IN???, she moved back to ST. Louis and began to write. In 1890 she published her first novel. Her stories concerned the life of French Creole in Louisiana and were praised for their accurate
portrayal of the French. Her themes are a much more controversial matter: it was the
repression of women in Victorian America. This theme was presented in her famous novel
The Awakening. (Robinson 15)
The Awakening
Kate Chopin's most well...
... middle of paper ...
...s. She
accomplished her goals, and made a major impact on writing. Kate Chopin influenced
many other women writers today. She was "a pioneer of her own time, in her portrayal of
women's desires of independence and control of their own sexuality." (Toth 481)
Bibliography:
1. Allen, Priscilla. "Old Critics and New: The treatment of Chopin's The Awakening."
The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, eds. Arlyn Diamond and Lee
R. Edwards. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
2. Chopin, Kate. "A Pair of Silk Stockings" Elements of Literature. Orlando, Florida:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1993 481-484
3. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976
4. Q. Arpin, Susan Allen Toth. Elements of Literature, 5th Course. Orlando, Florida:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1993
During the nineteenth century, Chopin’s era, women were not allowed to vote, attend school or even hold some jobs. A woman’s role was to get married, have children
Her husband died in 1882 and she never got remarried. After her husband died, her and her children moved back to Saint Louis. In 1885, her mother died. She
Kate Chopin was a feminist American short story and novelist. She is known as an advocate of feminist authors of the 20th century. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Brontes influenced her writing. She grew up in a household full of women; including her mother, great-grandmother and the female maids her mother owned. Kate spent a lot of time up in her attack reading.
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
...ree for his problems and treats her with disrespect. The issues and problems in Kate Chopin?s stories also connect with issues in today?s society. There still exist many men in this world who hold low opinions of women, are hypocritical in their thoughts, dealings, and actions with women, and treat honorable, respectable women poorly, just as Charles and Armand did in Chopin?s stories. Women in ?Desiree?s Baby? and ?A Point at Issue? strive for personal freedom and equality which equates to modern times in that some women are still paid less for doing the same job as men and in some countries, women still cannot vote. The relationship between men and women in Chopin?s stories still, in some effect, directly apply to today?s world.
... of race, class, gender and culture were very important in that time and Chopin makes sure to address those issues. Whenever someone reads a book, they can look further into the story and find a great deal of the ideas and beliefs of people of that time.
Chopin’s use of symbolism throughout the text establishes a method of conveying the opposition of structural gender roles in Victorian society to readers in a magnificent way.
First, the identity issue of feminism is talked about in “Ain’t I a Woman” and “The Story of an Hour”. They both deal with how women were treated during the early 20th century and before. Women were expected to cook, clean the house, bear and raise children, and keep the house going while the husband was at work. We see Chopin in her story, “The Story of an Hour”, giving the main character, Mrs. Mallard, the “taste of freedom”, meaning that her marriage is a “prison” of sorts and that it is holding her back in life. This happens when she is told that her husband has been killed in a wreck. Her first reaction is one that any wife that has a loving husband would have, one of sorrow. But after a few moments when she has locked herself in a room and has been staring out of a window, she realizes that she is “free”. Free from being under the thumb of her husband and free from the status quo.
...ntury readers. "The Story of An Hour", "The Storm", and The Awakening, all held themes that were controversial in a male dominated society. Critics criticized her literary works based not on prejudice and shock, not on the quality of the writing.
This author was born Katherine (Kate) O’Flaherty Chopin in February of 1850 to a father of Irish descent and a Creole (French settlers of the southern United States, esp. Louisiana) mother (Guilds 293). Chopin was a bicultural mixture of strength. Due to measures beyond her control, she grows up in a life surrounded by strong willed women. These ladies were passionate women Chopin loved and respected; her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. They each added their individual spice of life to a brew of pure womanhood. Thus, seasoning a woman that would become one of the most influential, controversial female authors in American history. Kate Chopin created genuine works exposing the innermost conflicts women of the late 1800’s were experiencing. The heroines of her fictional stories were strong, yet confused, women searching for a meaning behind the spirit that penetrated their very souls.
Tragedy struck her in December of 1882, when her husband became ill from swamp fever and passed away (Inge, 3). Shortly after his death, Chopin became involved with a man by the name of Albert Sampite, a married man (Anderson, 1). A lot of inspiration is thought to have come from this relationship because so many of the characters in her stories are married individuals who become sexually involved with a single partner resulting in a relationship that ethically could never survive. She left Cloutierville in 1884, partly because of her relationship with Sampite, and moved back to St. Louis to be close to her mother (Inge, 3).
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” tries to shed light on the conflict between women and a society that assigns gender roles using a patriarchal approach. Specifically, Margaret Bauer highlights, that most of Chopin’s works revolve around exploring the “dynamic interrelation between women and men, women and patriarchy, even women and women” (146). Similarly, in “The Story of an Hour” Chopin depicts a society that oppresses women mostly through the institution of marriage, as women are expected to remain submissive regardless of whether they derive any happiness. The question of divorce is not welcome, and it is tragic that freedom for women can only be realized through death. According to Bauer, the society depicted in Chopin’s story judged women harshly as it expected women to play their domestic roles without question, while on the other hand men were free to follow their dreams and impose their will on their wives (149).
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 was a woman whose feminist viewpoints were far ahead of her time, which of course garnered her more than her share of criticism. In a time when women were expected to behave "properly" and sexual desire was considered to be something only experienced by men, Chopin spoke with exceptional openness about human sexuality. She lambasted society for its perpetual close-mindedness in a time when righteousness was considered to be an attribute, and she helped to generate more enlightened attitudes among both the women and men 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.