| Home |
 |
Fiction |
|
Kate Chopin |
|
 |  |  |  |
With a novel and two collections of well-received short stories, Kate Chopin gained a national reputation as an author, but that reputation turned to notoriety with The Awakening (1899), a novel that dealt frankly—too frankly for the taste of the time—with a woman's emerging romantic and sexual passion. The adverse and even hostile reaction to this book numbed Chopin's creativity for years, and she was only beginning to regain her artistic confidence at the time of her sudden and early death. Although the occasional critic referred in passing to the excellence of The Awakening, Chopin's name was kept alive for decades by the frequent anthologizing of a handful of short stories, typecasting her as a local colorist of largely historical importance. But with the rediscovery of The Awakening in the 1960s and the restoration of all of her work to print, she has at last taken her rightful place as a serious artist who made a permanent contribution to American literature.
Catherine (or Katherine) O'Flaherty was born on February 8, 1850 (not 1851, as it is customarily given), in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the second child and first daughter of Thomas O'Flaherty, a forty-four-year-old Irish immigrant, and Eliza (Faris) O'Flaherty, his twenty-one-year-old second wife, who was of French descent. In 1855, Kate was enrolled at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis. In November of that year, her father, a successful merchant and real-estate investor, was killed in a train wreck. She suffered two other losses of beloved family members at the beginning of 1863, with the deaths of her great-grandmother and her half-brother George, a Confederate soldier who succumbed to typhoid fever he had contracted while a prisoner of war. The Civil War directly affected her in other ways as well: her classmate and closest friend Kitty Gareschè was, with her family, banished from Union-held St. Louis after her father had joined the Confederate army, and Kate herself was nearly arrested after tearing down a Union flag that someone had posted on her front porch.
In her teens, Kate O'Flaherty began keeping a diary and a commonplace book, as well as writing poetry. In June 1868, she graduated from the Academy of the Sacred Heart, which had been forced to close periodically during the war. On June 9, 1870, in St. Louis, she married Oscar Chopin, the twenty-five-year-old son of a French-born physician from Louisiana. The couple took an extended honeymoon tour through Europe, and then settled in New Orleans, where Oscar worked as a cotton factor, a middleman between growers and buyers. Perhaps because of his painful memories of his father's abuse of his mother, Oscar was a more indulgent husband than was customary by the rigid and controlling standards of the time. Nonetheless, between May 1871 and December 1879, Kate bore him five sons and a daughter. In 1879, for reasons of economy, the Chopins moved from New Orleans to the rural town of Cloutierville, Louisiana. Thus, not yet thirty and with six small children to raise, Kate Chopin found herself living, for the first time in her life, in a small town rather than a cosmopolitan city.
In the fall of 1882, Oscar Chopin caught malaria in the swamps of rural Louisiana, and died on December 10 of that year at the age of thirty-eight. Kate remained in Cloutierville for another year and a half, managing her husband's store and plantation. The attractive young widow excited a fair amount of gossip, jealousy, and interest in the small community, especially after she began an affair with a married plantation owner named Albert Sampite, who would be the prototype for a series of dashing and sensual men in her fiction. Even if he were to leave his wife, Chopin, as a Catholic (though she would later leave the church), could not have married a divorced man. Besides, he had an ugly temper when drunk, and was known to beat his wife. For whatever reasons, after her husband's estate had been settled in early 1884, she broke off the relationship with Sampite and returned to St. Louis to live with her mother. Mrs. O'Flaherty died on June 28, 1885, leaving Kate and her children with no close relatives. She met regularly with a group of friends who were intellectuals and freethinkers, including Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer. It was at his prompting that she began to write seriously in 1887; he had been struck by the vividness and skill of the letters she had written him during her time in Louisiana—a period of her life that had obviously had a great effect on her, since most of her fiction would be drawn from her experiences and observations of those years.
Kate Chopin's first published stories appeared in 1889, when she was thirty-nine years old. The following year, she published At Fault, her first novel. Its settings are St. Louis and the Louisiana bayou, and its principal characters are kept from acting upon their attraction to one another by the fact that one of them is married. Although the novel ends well for its protagonists, it raises complex issues about the nature of personal responsibility, moral problems that are not as easily resolved as the narrative's plot problems. In March 1894 appeared Bayou Folk, Chopin's first collection of short stories. The brevity and psychological penetration of many of these tales make clear that the greatest influence on her writing was her French contemporary Guy de Maupassant. On April 19, within a month of the volume's publication, she wrote a story called "The Dream of an Hour" (it would later come to be known as "The Story of an Hour"), which was published in Vogue in December of that year. Although its Maupassant-like plot twists, in the space of only a thousand words, may help explain this story's extraordinary popularity, it is even more notable for its shrewd and in places quite surprising insight into the mind and feelings of its central character, feelings that she has never allowed herself to acknowledge, even to herself. A Night in Acadie (1897) was a second collection, whose stories portrayed even more directly than the earlier ones the sensual natures of their female protagonists. In 1898 she wrote "The Storm." It is not surprising that she never published this work: in the context of the time in which it was written, its sexual directness and complete lack of moralizing are nothing less than astonishing.
The Awakening (1899) is the fullest and the finest treatment of many of Chopin's recurring themes, among them the dilemma of an individual's conflicting responsibilities to others and to herself, a wife's impatience and frustration with the constraints of marriage (especially in terms of her husband's expectations of her), and a woman's frank acknowledgment and indulgence of her sexual urges, with the subsequent recognition that acting upon the promptings of her nature does not necessarily make her happier or more fulfilled than she was when she suppressed those feelings. Despite the frankness of its material and the calm rejection of the traditional roles assigned to women, Chopin was stunned by the novel's reception. Although there is no evidence to support the frequent contention that the book was banned, it was nonetheless greeted, especially by male reviewers, with disapproval and even outrage over its "unwholesomeness." In February 1900, her publishers reversed their earlier acceptance of A Vocation and a Voice, her third collection of stories. Since they were cutting back on their commitments, it is unclear whether this decision was to any degree motivated by the adverse response to The Awakening. Although all but one of the stories intended for this book appeared in the 1969 two-volume edition of Chopin's complete works, it was not until 1991 that the collection was published in the form that she had intended for it.
Chopin continued to write and to print her work in magazines, but at a slower pace than before the furor over The Awakening, and she did not bring out another book. On Saturday, August 20, 1904, a particularly hot and humid day, she came home from visiting the St. Louis World's Fair and complained of a severe headache. She slipped into a coma that night and, after drifting in and out of consciousness for a day and a half, died of a brain hemorrhage at noon on Monday, August 22. She was fifty-four years old.
After decades of obscurity and neglect, in the past thirty years she has achieved a secure position among American fiction writers. Her contemporary fame may be based principally on her pioneering feminist sensibility, which is marked by her honest depiction of women's true natures and her indifference to hypocritical moralizing. But she is also recognized as a literary artist notable for her descriptive skills, her beautifully crafted prose, and above all for her insight into the subtleties of human nature.
|