Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was an American fiction writer who is famous for her short stories. She wrote more than a hundred short stories and two novels. Her short stories were received with great enthusiasm by the readers. They were published in famous magazines like Harper’s Young People, Vogue, Youth’s Companion, the Atlantic Monthly, etc. 

Chopin was a much-read writer, but some of her works faced censorship. Though her short stories were famous, her first novel was not received well by the readers. Her second novel even faced the worst; it was condemned by critics and readers. It was labeled vulgar, sordid, and disagreeable.

Her short stories remained in print and circulation after her death, but her novels were completely forgotten. The critical value of The Awakening was recognized in the 1950s, and since then her works are highly esteemed. This novel has been translated into more than ten languages, and her works have become international classics. 

Her works are considered graceful, sensitive, poetic depictions of women’s lives. She has portrayed strong, unconventional women who have adulterous affairs and this became the reason for scandal. In contrast to her heroines, she never flouted conventions in her life.

She had worked as a suffragist in her youth years, and this influence is seen in her works. Though her fiction writing is regional in character, it is universal in nature. Her novels carry Whitmanian influences. There are narcissistic, autoerotic echoes in her novels which are the impacts of Whitmanian readings. 

Her heroine isn’t aware of this narcissism, and this later becomes the reason for her destruction. This over-investment in oneself is not clearly seen by most of her heroines. There is an ecstatic celebration of rebirth in her works which locates her main concern.

Her works can’t be called American epic or American elegy; rather, these can be classed as an everyday domestic diary. There are fissures in her works, and these are characteristic of everyday life. Her work is more naturalistic than romantic. She can be classed with American transcendentalists because of her form and content. 

Not all Whitmanian influences are overt in the case of her novels, and these are frequently repressed. Chopin mixes Whitmanian aura with the ambivalence of motherhood. Like Whitman, her complaint against nature is represented by numbness and hardly equivocal.

Marriage is a recurrent theme in her stories, and she has represented it from an unconventional perspective. She also portrays the dilemma faced by most human beings. It is the misery of making choices between what a person likes and what others want them to choose. Her characters always choose what they like. These characters choose their own path instead of the following society. 

She explores the special problems faced by women; she subtly suggests that women want sex and independence. This expression of desire for sex is often labeled as immorality by her critics. Her work is celebrated for strong perspectives on sexuality and female independence.3

A Short Biography of Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty on February 8th, 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents were Thomas O’Flaherty and Eliza Faris. Her father was an Irish immigrant and successful businessman. Her mother belonged to the local French community and was Thomas’ second wife. Eliza was a well-connected member of the local French community. Kate’s parents had five children of whom she was third. 

The rest of her siblings didn’t survive and died before they had crossed the early twenties. She was sent to Sacred Heart Convent, St. Louis in 1855, from where she graduated in 1868. She was an avid reader, and this became the impetus for her writing.

Her father died when she was five years old. Her grandmother took the responsibility of educating her; she died in 1863. She faced other traumas as well. Her half-brother died in the captivity of Union forces during the Civil War. She developed an aversion for religion because the majority of her family members died on religious occasions. 

She had an interest in music and playing the piano. She met Oscar Chopin when she was about nineteen. He was a wealthy estate holder. He belonged to the local French creole; they got married in 1870. They visited Europe in 1870 and stayed in different places.

When they came back to the US, Oscar set his business of cotton and other commodities. She gave birth to six children from 1871 to 1879, of these five were boys while one girl. Oscar and Kate had a happy life together, but it didn’t last long. Due to hard financial time, Oscar closed his business, and they shifted to a small country house in Louisiana. 

There he bought a general store, and this continued for three years when it was closed due to his death from malaria in 1882. Kate widowed at the age of thirty-two and never remarried. She took the responsibility to raise her children.

Her biographer, Emily Toth, has suggested that she had an affair with a local planter. But this affair proved short-lived because she shifted from this county to her family residence. She was encouraged by her obstetrician and family friend, Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, to write. 

As a result of this motivation, her first short stories appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, in 1889. Her novel, At Fault, was published privately in 1890. She had an active social life and had to take care of her children. Despite this, she produced incredible works.

She kept an accurate record of her works. She kept a list of the works she produced, those which were published, and those which were rejected. She was an activist and a suffragist. She wrote nonfiction works as well, which were mainly intended to shed light on the conditions of women. She didn’t make much money from her writing, and for her expenses, she had to depend upon her investments and inheritance from her mother. 

She suffered a brain hemorrhage when she was visiting St. Louis World’s Fair on August 20th, 1904. She died two days later due to it at the age of fifty-four. She was buried in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis.

Kate Chopin’s Writing Style

She belonged to the creole French culture in America, and its impacts are clear in her works. The greatest literary influence on her style was Guy de Maupassant, who was her contemporary French short story writer. She was a revisionist mythmaker who transformed the myths to represent the people of her society. She is more clear in her style and technique than Maupassant. 

She has employed irony in her works which is too subtle to be observed by a non-observant reader. Her women characters seem unloving, cold, and unfeeling. She was a vocal feminist, and this is evident in her works where clear disapproval of men is expressed.

Feminism is one of the major themes of her works. In contrast to typical feminism, she is of the view that both male and female face problems to fit with their mate and this creates problems in individual life. The influence of Maupassant is clearly visible in the conclusion of her short stories which are sharp and ironic. 

She made stylistic and thematic experiments in her works. Her difference from Maupassant lies in her objective psychological realism. Her focus is more on the character instead of the plot.

Tradition and Female Talent: Solitary Thoughts

Chopin’s influences of personal life in the past are seen in her works. She has survived illusions of romance, friendship, marriage, motherhood, etc. She had the belief that these would provide her identity and companionship. But her disappointment is evident in Maupassant’s work which she translated. 

A sentence ‘I speak and you answer me, and still, each of us is alone, side by side but alone…’,  became the credo of her life and works. This is clearly seen in her novel, The Awakening, which is alternatively named A Solitary Soul. In her works, we see the evolution from the fantasies that a person can fuse with another becoming one.

In this novel, the protagonist is shown breaking from conventional beliefs and making her own destiny. She breaks from the conventional roles of a mother and wife. This can also be seen as a parable which represents the literary awakening of the author. There is an evident struggle seen in the lives of the protagonist and the author. They are caught between femininity and creativity. 

They have two choices before them, either to be part of tradition or to go against it, gaining emancipated womanhood and emancipated fiction. Both go for an autonomous life, going against female plots and feminine endings.

Chopin had come to believe in the writing of The Awakening that if a writer has to make her own place, they have to go against the tradition. She has expressed this in her protagonist’s life who frees herself from received opinions and social obligations. She has integrated the post-civil-war conflicts in the lives of women in this novel. 

The conflict between love and desire is the most significant of these. There is no grief for sanctuaries of past and female bonds which expresses women’s satisfaction with their current situation.  These women are the product of aesthetic sophistication and Darwinian skepticism.

Social Fiction

In her fictional work, Kate Chopin has encompassed nineteenth-century South and contemporary life there. She represents a period of transmogrification. There is a shift from slavery to industrialization and economic assimilation. This newly transformed society was based on a class system, and in every class, women had subordinate roles. Kate has addressed the myths of nostalgia and progress. 

Progress is an ironic term which only represents that of men, not women who are more suppressed in the class system. Through social stratification, she has depicted economic, social, and sexual segregation of Arcadians, Creole, frontiers people, poor whites, blacks, and new money southerners. This is treated as both the cause and effect of alienation, both collective and individual.  

Her treatment of the South is not romantic like her contemporary writers. She has used the metamorphosis taking place in her society as the touchstone. There are emergent women in her works who defy the social securities and strictures which were held in the old South. They reject being judged by the code of womanhood and the ideological parameters which were set in the past. 

She has used every Southern ‘type’ in her works, writing across color lines. Though her main focus is on her own class, the Creoles. Her works Emancipation: A Life Fable, and The Awakening can be directly linked. The former is an initial work that lays the foreground for defiance and the later marks the completion of the journey.

Semiotic Subversion

Chopin’s work Désirée’s Baby is one of the most anthologized works and the reason for it is not its twisty end; rather, its complexity is the reason behind it. To understand this short story, semiotic and political approaches need to be combined. This story and some others lie at the nexus of class, race, and sex concerns. From the semiotic analysis of this work, it is evident that despite its brevity the meaning there is a rich account of disruption of meaning. 

The main character who is responsible for this disruption is Désirée Aubigny. Though at the first reading, she seems unprepossessing, she is the major catalyst for subversion. From the political analysis, it is clear that she casts doubts on race, class, and gender and their meaning.

Her being the source of subversion is clarified when she gives birth to a partly black baby. Her husband rejects her, and she leaves home, but then it is clarified that her husband was black from his mother’s side. There is deciphering of the unruffled surface of the symbolic system. 

The characters are shown knowledgeable about what a signifier means and what signifies the membership of a specific community. Through the manipulation of a symbolic system, the hierarchical structures are subverted. An example is Armand, the protagonist’s husband. He believes that he is white, master, and a male. But the first two beliefs are subverted after the birth of a child.  

Desire and The Descent of Man

In her fiction, Chopin has extended her meditation of the meaning of human life and love. This is done in the light of Darwinian thought. From the study of the theory of sexual selection, she got the support of the life she had celebrated. It gave her a sense of liberation. She depicted the innocence of the woman during courtship in her upcoming works. 

In At Fault, the heroine is shown to recognize that she had wrongly sacrificed herself. She is committed to conventional morality, and for this reason, she doesn’t conform to the electric (in Whitmanian sense) attraction she felt towards a divorced man. This desire is fulfilled when the two get married.

In The Awakening references to sexual selection are more extensive and explicit where the complexity of this affair is explored. Though she agreed with the agencies of sexual selection in particular and natural selection in general, she shows her discontent with the analysis of the female role. This disappointing role has led to ultimate despair in her works. 

She has resisted the struggle between men for the possession of women and the passive, modest role of women. She has also challenged the superiority of men over women. She has depicted women in her works who are not submissive; they select according to their own choice. They select those whom they desire and on the basis of other reasons.

Ironist of Realism

Chopin had read the works of European realists, and this influence can be seen in her works. Realist impact led to her liberation of style and subject matter. It was an alternative for the writers who had idealized family, marriage, female dependence, and were disappointed. Though in Chopin’s works there is no bleakness and pessimism like the works of colorists like Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, etc. 

Chopin’s works are characterized by symbolism, sensuality, and eroticism. She has used metaphors of light and warmth, colorful surroundings, etc. which characterize ordinary life and poverty. In her last novel, we see the struggle for identity and realization, which is a revolt against male oppression.

She has used Sophoclean irony, which is used to undercut the realist authority. Her narrative stance is ironic, which is characteristic of a writer challenging tradition and authority. She has given exquisite, liberating touch to her novel in the end when she conveys the message to refuse any finality. This is done on both a literal and figurative level. 

There is an uncertainty in the meaning of the action of the protagonist, which reinforces the metaphorical and symbolic implications of the journey. This work can also be treated as a literary biography that portrays the awakening of the author from a submissive role.

It was European Realism which gave Chopin freedom from sentimentality to get rid of the idealization influence of nineteenth-century writing. She turned realism against itself and ironized its own limitations.