Kate Chopin
(February 8, 1850
— August 22, 1904)
An American author of short stories and novels.
Kate
Chopin is one of the earliest examples of modernism in the United States. She was interested
in the “perspective, point of view, craft, use of imagery, multiple
perspectives” just as much as the story it’s self.
Her major works
were two short story collections, Bayou
Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories
included "Desiree's Baby," a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana (published in 1893), "The Story of an Hour" (1894), and "The Storm"(1898). "The
Storm" is a sequel to "The 'Cadian Ball," which appeared in her
first collection of short stories, Bayou
Folk. Chopin also wrote two
novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively.
From a young age,
Kate was a curious person. She was the third of
five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her brothers (from her father's
first marriage) in their early twenties. She was the only child to live past
the age of twenty-five.
After her father’s
death Kate grew up surrounded by smart, independent, single women.
At
the age of twenty, she married Oscar Chopin, twenty-five, and the son of a
wealthy cotton-growing family in Louisiana.
By all accounts he adored his wife, admired her independence and intelligence,
and "allowed" her unheard of freedom. After their marriage they lived
in New Orleans
where she had five boys and two girls, all before she was twenty-eight. Oscar
was not an able business man, and they were forced to move to his old home in a
small Louisiana
parish. Oscar died of swamp fever there in 1882 and Kate took over the running
of his general store and plantation for over a year.
Chopin's writing career began after her husband died on their Louisiana plantation in
1882 and she was struggling financially. Her mother convinced Kate to move back
to St. Louis,
but died shortly thereafter leaving her alone. Now Chopin, suffering from the
loss of her husband and mother, was advised by her obstetrician and family
friend to fight her state of depression by taking up writing as a source of
therapeutic healing, a way to focus her energy and provide Chopin with a source
of income. She took the advice to heart.
Each authors' writing is unique. Kate
Chopin, a writer of the late 19th Century, wrote about feelings. She insinuated
that women had craved independence. Which made her stories taboo in her time
period. She was one of the first feminist writers though that wasn’t her
intention. She just wrote life as she saw it.
Chopin embraced a number of writing styles, taking into account her
ancestry of Irish and French descent, and her years with Creole and Cajun
influences in Louisiana.
Slavery and women's rights were realities that she incorporated in many of her
stories and sketches, portraying women in a less than conventional manner, with
individual wants and needs. Perhaps in many ways autobiographical, her
exploration of women's independence was not celebrated until many years later.
Chopin was in many ways, a woman before her time.
“It was a sad looking place, which for many
years had not known the gentle presence of a mistress… The roof came down steep
and black like a cowl, reaching out beyond the wide galleries that encircled
the yellow stuccoed house. Big, solemn oaks grew close to it, and their
thick-leaved, far-reaching branches shadowed it like a pall.”
