Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin: 1851-1904

Biography and Career:

• Born in St. Louis
• Father was a successful Irish immigrant who was killed in a train accident when Kate was 4
• Mother came from a wealthy, Roman-Catholic, slaveholding family with French roots
• Educated at the Academy of the Scared Heart, where she was well-schooled in English and European writers (especially French)
• As a young woman, she showed her independent streak, smoking in company and walking the streets alone (both daring acts for her time) (Baym 620).
• 1870: Marries Oscar Chopin, a French Creole businessman from Louisiana
• She gives birth to six children over the next nine years and “fulfilled the heavy social obligations of the wife of a seemingly successful cotton broker” (McCullough 357).
• 1879: Oscar’s business fails and the family moves from New Orleans to Crouterville, LA
• There they run a small plantation and general store
• 1882: Oscar dies, leaving Kate a 32 year-old widow with 6 children and limited financial resources
• 1884: Moves back to St. Louis where she will live the rest of her life
• 1889: Begins writing career in earnest: within a decade she will produce and publish the bulk of her work
• Works include poetry, over 150 stories and sketches, two novels, a play, and some literary criticism
• At Fault (1890): Novel about a young, strong widow, also addresses alcoholism and divorce
• Bayou Folk (1894), A Night in Acadie (1897), A Vocation and A Voice (not published until 1991): Collections of short stories
• The Awakening (1899): Considered her masterpiece; condemned by many critics because it did not criticize the main character’s actions

Criticism and Important Themes:

• She once wrote of Maupassant a statement that might apply to her own writing: “Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw” (qtd. in Baym 621).
• Her “exploration of female identity—especially the focus on the erotic and the maternal—put her in the midst of turn-of-the-century debates about gender roles” (McCullough 357).
• Often writes of the tension between individual desire and containment of those desires by social mores.
• Best known for her fiction on the complexities of Louisiana culture in the second half of the 19th century
• Critics initially read her as simply a local-color writer, yet she does not “consolidate simplified notions of a unified nation,” but rather complicates them (357).
• Her characters are from diverse races, ethnicities, religions, and economic classes
• They are “economically, racially, ethnically, geographically, and religiously marked, both to the reader and to other characters in the story” allowing Chopin to “disrupt hegemonic notions of the ‘South’” (357).
• She also reveals “links among gendered identity, regional identity, and national identity” (357).
• “What she told directly—and without moral judgment—was how certain women were beginning to challenge the patriarchal rules that had sought not only to confine them to well-defined social and vocational domains but to control their inner life as well” (Baym 621).
• “In The Awakening, more impressively because on a grander scale than in a number of her shorter fictions, Chopin demonstrates her unusual capacity to make the alien, somewhat exotic world of New Orleans and the Gulf islands real and to people it with complex and often baffled men and women whose humanity she confirms by refusing either to judge it or use it to support a thesis” (Baym 621).

Works Cited and Consulted

Baym, Nina, editor.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume C.  NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
McCullough, Kate.  “Kate Chopin.”  The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume C.  Ed. Paul Lauter.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.  357-9.