Biography of Katherine Chopin

Name: Katherine Chopin
Bith Date: February 8, 1851
Death Date: August 22, 1904
Place of Birth: St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Female
Occupations: author

Katherine Chopin

A popular local colorist during her lifetime, Katherine Chopin (1851-1904) is best known today for her psychological novel The Awakening (1899) and for such often-anthologized short stories as "Desiree's Baby" and "The Story of an Hour."

Chopin was born to a prominent St. Louis family. Her father died in a train accident when Chopin was four years old, and her childhood was most profoundly influenced by her mother and great-grandmother, who descended from French-Creole pioneers. Chopin also spent much time with her family's Creole and mulatto slaves, becoming familiar with their unique dialects. She read widely as a child, but was an undistinguished student at the convent school she attended. She graduated at age seventeen and spent two years as a belle of fashionable St. Louis society. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a wealthy Creole cotton factor, and moved with him to New Orleans. For the next decade, Chopin pursued the demanding social and domestic schedule of a Southern aristocrat, her recollections of which would later serve as material for her short stories. In 1880, financial difficulties forced Chopin's growing family to move to her father-in-law's home in Cloutierville, a small town in Natchitoches Parish located in Louisiana's Red River bayou region. There, Chopin's husband oversaw and subsequently inherited his father's plantations. Upon his death in 1883, Chopin insisted upon assuming his managerial responsibilities, which brought her into contact with almost every segment of the community, including the French-Acadian, Creole, and mulatto sharecroppers who worked the plantations. The impressions she gathered of these people and Natchitoches Parish life later influenced her fiction.

In the mid-1880s Chopin sold most of her property and left Louisiana to live with her mother in St. Louis. Family friends who found her letters entertaining encouraged Chopin to write professionally, and she began composing short stories. These early works evidence the influence of her favorite authors: the French writers Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Moliere. At this time Chopin also read the works of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spenser in order to keep abreast of trends in scientific thinking, and she began questioning her Roman Catholic faith as well as socially imposed mores and ethical restraints. After an apprenticeship marked by routine rejections, Chopin began having her stories published in the most popular American periodicals, including America, Vogue, and the Atlantic. The success of the collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) solidified her growing reputation as an important local colorist. Financially independent and encouraged by success, Chopin turned to longer works. Although she had published the novel At Fault in 1890, that work displays many of the shortcomings of an apprentice novel and failed to interest readers or critics. Publishers later rejected a novel and a short story collection on moral grounds, citing their promotion of female self-assertion and sexual liberation. Undaunted, Chopin completed The Awakening, the story of a conventional wife and mother who, after gaining spiritual freedom through an extramarital affair, commits suicide when she realizes that she cannot reconcile her new self to society's moral restrictions. The hostile critical and public reaction to the novel largely halted Chopin's career; she had difficulty finding publishers for later works and was ousted from local literary groups. Demoralized, she wrote little during her last years.

The stories in Bayou Folk, Chopin's first collection, largely reflect her skills as a local colorist and often center on the passionate loves of the Creoles and Acadians in her native Natchitoches Parish. For example, "A Lady of Bayou St. John" portrays a young widow who escapes the sexual demands of a suitor by immersing herself in memories of her dead husband, while "La Belle Zoraide" chronicles a mulatto slave's descent into madness after her mistress sells her lover and deprives her of their child. Recent critics occasionally detect in Bayou Folk the melodramatic conventions of popular magazine fiction. Nevertheless, they laud Chopin's meticulous description of setting, precise rendering of dialects, and objective point of view. In addition, commentators perceived in several stories universal themes that transcend the restrictions of regional fiction. One such story, the often-anthologized "Desiree's Baby," examines prejudice and miscegenation in its portrayal of Armand Aubigny, a proud aristocratic planter, and his wife Desiree. When she gives birth to a son possessing African characteristics, Aubigny assumes that Desiree is of mixed racial heritage and turns his wife and child out of his house. However, while burning his wife's possessions, Armand discovers a letter written by his mother, which reveals that she and therefore Armand belong to the race "cursed by the brand of slavery."

In A Night in Acadie Chopin continued to utilize the Louisiana settings that figured in Bayou Folk. However, the romanticism of the earlier collection is replaced by a greater moral ambivalence concerning such issues as female sexuality, personal freedom, and social propriety. Bert Bender observed that Chopin's "characters transcend their socially limited selves by awakening to and affirming impulses that are unacceptable by convention. Unburdened of restricting social conventions, her characters come to experience the suffering and loneliness, as well as the joy, of their freedom; for the impulses that they heed are a mere part of a world in which change and natural selection are first principles." For example, in "A Respectable Woman" a happily married woman becomes sexually attracted to Gouvernail, a family friend invited by her husband to visit their home for a week. Disturbed by her feelings, she is relieved when Gouvernail leaves, but as the following summer approaches, she encourages her husband to contact him again, ambiguously promising that "this time I shall be very nice to him." Chopin later expanded upon this essentially amoral perception of adultery in "The Storm," a story written near the end of her career, which portrays a woman's extra-marital affair as a natural impulse devoid of moral significance.

Chopin also explored the connection between selfhood and marriage in A Night in Acadie. Several stories reflect her contention that security and love cannot compensate for a lack of control over one's destiny. In "Athenaise," for instance, the title character, a naive young bride, leaves Cazeau, her devoted yet insensitive husband, twice; first returning home to her parents, then traveling to New Orleans. Although Cazeau retrieves her from her parents, he refuses to follow her to the city after drawing an unsettling parallel between his actions toward her and his father's treatment of a runaway slave. A month after arriving in New Orleans, however, Athenaise learns that she is pregnant, and, thinking of her husband, experiences "the first purely sensuous tremor of her life." Now accepting her role as wife and mother, she reconciles with Cazeau. While some critics contend that Chopin likely formulated this conclusion, like other happy endings to her stories, to appease the moral sensibilities of her editors and publishers, most regard it as an appropriate ending to an incisive portrait of the limitations and rewards of marriage.

Early reviewers of A Night in Acadie objected to the volume's sensuous themes. Similar concerns were later raised by publishers who rejected Chopin's next volume, A Vocation and a Voice. Although Chopin continuously pursued its publication until her death, the volume did not appear as a single work until 1991. In these stories Chopin largely abandons local setting to focus upon the psychological complexity of her characters. Tales such as "Two Portraits," "Lilacs," and "A Vocation and a Voice," examine contrary states of innocence and experience and ways that society divides rather than unites the two. In "The Story of an Hour," the best known work in the collection, Chopin returns to the issue of marriage and selfhood in her portrayal of Mrs. Mallard, a woman who learns that her husband has died in a train accident. Initially overcome by grief, she gradually realizes that his "powerful will" no longer restricts her and that she may live as she wishes. While she joyfully anticipates her newfound freedom, however, her husband returns, the report of his death a mistake, and Mrs. Mallard collapses upon seeing him. Doctors then ironically conclude that she died of "heart failure--of the joy that kills." In evaluating A Vocation and a Voice, Barbara C. Ewell observed: "[The] collection, which includes some of Chopin's most experimental stories, reveals how intently she had come to focus her fiction on human interiority, on the interplay of consciousness and circumstance, of unconscious motive and reflexive action. Such psychological elements, combined with technical control, indicate a writer not only in command of her craft but fully in tune with the intellectual currents of her time. In many ways, A Vocation and a Voice represents the culmination of Chopin's talents as a writer of the short story."

The Awakening is considered Chopin's best work as well as a remarkable novel to have been written during the morally uncompromising America of the 1890s. Psychologically realistic, The Awakening is the story of Edna Pontellier, a conventional wife and mother who experiences a spiritual epiphany and an awakened sense of independence that change her life. The theme of sexual freedom and the consequences one must face to attain it is supported by sensual imagery that acquires symbolic meanings as the story progresses. This symbolism emphasizes the conflict within Pontellier, who realizes that she can neither exercise her new-found sense of independence nor return to life as it was before her spiritual awakening: the candor of the Creole community on Grand Isle, for example, is contrasted with the conventional mores of New Orleans; birds in gilded cages and strong, free-flying birds are juxtaposed; and the protagonist selects for her confidants both the domesticated, devoted Adele Ratignolle and the passionate Madame Reisz, a lonely, unattractive pianist. The central symbol of the novel, the sea, also provides the frame for the main action. As a symbol, the sea embodies multiple pairs of polarities, the most prominent being that it is the site of both Edna Pontellier's awakening and suicide.

After the initial furor over morality and sexuality in The Awakening had passed, the novel was largely ignored until the 1930s, when Daniel S. Rankin published a study of Chopin's works that included a sober assessment of The Awakening's high literary quality and artistic aims. During the succeeding decades, critical debate surrounding The Awakening has focused on Chopin's view of women's roles in society, the significance of Pontellier's awakening, her subsequent suicide, and the possibility of parallels between the lives of Chopin and her protagonist. George Arms, for example, has contended that Chopin was a happily married woman and devoted mother whose emotional life bore no resemblance to Pontellier's, while Per Seyersted has noted her compelling secretive, individualistic nature and her evident enjoyment of living alone as an independent writer. Priscilla Allen has posited that male critics allow their preconceptions about "good" and "bad" women to influence their interpretations of Chopin's novel, arguing that they too often assume that Edna's first priority should have been to her family and not to herself. Like Allen, Seyersted brings a feminist interpretation to The Awakening, and points out that the increasing depiction of passionate, independent women in Chopin's other fiction supports the theory that she was in fact concerned about the incompatibility of motherhood and a career for women living during the late nineteenth century. These questions about Chopin's depictions of women's roles in society have led to a debate about the significance of Pontellier's suicide. The ambivalence of the character as she wrestles with the new choices that confront her has left the suicide open to many interpretations. Carol P. Christ, like Seyersted, interprets the death as a moral victory and a social defeat--the act of a brave woman who cannot sacrifice her life to her family, but will not cause her children disgrace by pursuing a scandalous course. In a contrasting assessment of Pontellier's choice to die, James H. Justus likens the protagonist's gradual withdrawal from society and responsibility to a regression into childhood selfishness because she refuses to compromise and cannot control her urge for self-assertion. Often compared to the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Pontellier differs primarily in her desire for selfhood, even at the risk of loneliness, while Madame Bovary seeks romantic fulfillment.

Once considered merely an author of local-color fiction, Chopin is today recognized for her pioneering examination of sexuality, individual freedom, and the consequences of action--themes and concerns important to many later twentieth-century writers. While their psychological examinations of female protagonists have made Chopin's short stories formative works in the historical development of feminist literature, they also provide a broad discussion of a society that denied the value of sensuality and female independence. Per Seyersted asserted that Chopin "was the first woman writer in America to accept sex with its profound repercussions as a legitimate subject of serious fiction. In her attitude towards passion, she represented a healthy, matter-of-fact acceptance of the whole of man. She was familiar with the newest developments in science and in world literature, and her aim was to describe--unhampered by tradition and authority--man's immutable impulses. Because she was vigorous, intelligent, and eminently sane, and because her background had made her morally tolerant, and socially secure, she could write with a balance and maturity, a warmth and humor not often found in her contemporaries."

Kate Chopin is considered among the most important women in nineteenth-century American fiction. She is best known for her 1899 novel, The Awakening, a once-scandalous account of one woman's growing sexuality in the American South during the Victorian era. For this novel Chopin faced critical abuse and public denunciation as an immoralist, and she consequently abandoned writing. In more recent years, however, The Awakening has grown in stature, and it is now recognized as a masterpiece of its time. Critics such as Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson have commended the novel, and numerous others, including Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Anne Goodwyn Jones, and Elaine Gardiner, have subsequently elucidated its social and psychological themes. The efforts of these and other critics have helped establish Chopin as a significant figure in American, particularly feminist, literature.

Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1851. Her mother, Eliza Faris O'Flaherty, was a member of the prominent French-Creole community and was thus a familiar figure in exclusive social circles. Chopin's father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was an Irish immigrant who had successfully established himself as a merchant and subsequently participated in various business ventures. Chopin was only a child when her father died. He had been a founder of the Pacific Railroad, and he was aboard the train on its inaugural journey when it plunged into the Gasconade River after a bridge collapsed.

After the train disaster, Chopin established a more intimate relationship with her mother, who had grown increasingly religious. Chopin also developed a strong tie to her great-grandmother, who guided her studies at the piano and in French and offered moral counseling. The older woman also regaled young Chopin with tales of French settlers from St. Louis's past. Among these stories, however, were accounts of notorious infidels, and more than one scholar has suggested that these tales made a vivid impression on Chopin.

During her school years Chopin read voraciously, showing an appetite for fairy tales, religious allegory, poetry, and novelists ranging from Walter Scott to Charles Dickens. Around age eleven she endured further heartache when her great-grandmother died. Soon afterwards, Chopin's half-brother, who had been captured as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, contracted typhoid fever and died. These losses compelled Chopin to delve more intensely into literature, and for the next two years she secluded herself in the family attic--even missing school--and pored over more books. When she resumed her formal studies at a Catholic school, she worked diligently, though without great scholastic distinction. She did, however, gain repute as a proficient and creative storyteller.

Chopin graduated from the Catholic school in 1868, and for the next two years she enjoyed life as a belle in St. Louis's high society, earning admiration for both her beauty and her wit. She continued to read extensively, but her interests were not limited to the classics, and she showed familiarity with the works of many contemporary writers. In addition, Chopin devoted herself to music--practicing at the piano and patronizing the city's symphony and its opera companies.

But as she revelled in St. Louis society Chopin became increasingly independent. She began questioning Catholicism's implicit authoritarianism, which dictated subservience for women to male domination, and she showed heightened awareness of the inanities involved in socializing. In the spring of 1869 she traveled to New Orleans and befriended a charismatic, independent--though married--German singer and actress. Chopin was impressed with the woman, who seemed to maintain her individuality despite marriage. After returning to St. Louis, Chopin made another acquaintance, Louisiana native Oscar Chopin, who had arrived in the city to work in a bank. A year later the two were married.

The Chopins honeymooned in Europe, where they visited renowned cities and attended plays and musical performances. Their travels, though, were abbreviated by commencement of the Franco-Prussian War, and they returned briefly to St. Louis before establishing themselves in New Orleans. Although Oscar Chopin was French-Creole, the couple settled in the city's American district, thereby incurring the wrath of Oscar's father, who owned plantations in northern Louisiana and expected his son to maintain his Creole ties and perhaps even join him in operating the properties. But Oscar's father was a tyrant who had been known to violently abuse both slaves and his son. Oscar therefore opted for a less troubling career as a cotton factor and began handling sales, finances, and supplies for other plantation owners.

While her husband worked, Kate Chopin continued her relatively iconoclastic life. She pursued her interest in the performing arts, developing a preference for the operas of Richard Wagner, and she persisted in her habit, then considered highly unusual for women, of smoking cigarettes. She became familiar with her surroundings by adopting another habit, also unusual for young women, of walking unaccompanied through the city.

But like St. Louis, where Chopin had occasionally witnessed slave auctions, New Orleans hosted numerous racists. Following the South's defeat in the Civil War, racists there resorted to organized terrorism against blacks. Oscar Chopin was a member of the White League, which clashed violently with Republicans sympathetic to blacks--one conflict claimed forty lives. Racial confrontations, however, were not the only cause for concern in New Orleans. Yellow fever spread rampantly, killing four thousand citizens in 1878 alone. Per Seyersted, author of the critical biography Kate Chopin, speculates that Chopin--who had six children, including five sons, by 1879--may have been motivated by health considerations in making several trips to St. Louis with her offspring.

Also by 1879 Oscar Chopin's factoring business had collapsed, whereupon the family moved north to the family plantations in Natchitoches Parish. There the Chopins became active members of the revived Creole community, and Kate Chopin won admiration for her convivial nature and superior intellect. But Oscar Chopin, whose health seemed consistently weak, contracted swamp fever during the winter, and in January of 1883 he died. Kate Chopin remained in Natchitoches Parish for nearly one year and continued operating the plantations, but with little success. In 1884 she finally acceded to her mother's frequent requests to move with the children to St. Louis. The next year, Chopin's mother also died. In her critical volume Kate Chopin, Peggy Skaggs observes that Chopin's self-perception must have been affected by the various family deaths, and Skaggs adds that the consequent tension may have resulted in the "search for self-understanding" that motivates so many characters in Chopin's fiction.

Following her husband's death, Chopin was consoled by the family physician, Frederick Kolbenheyer. With Kolbenheyer's encouragement, Chopin began writing about the Louisiana of her past. Her efforts resulted in "If It Might Be," a poem that Seyersted suggests may express Chopin's desire to join her late husband in death. "If It Might Be" appeared in the Chicago periodical America in early 1889, thus affording Chopin the rare luxury of publishing her first submitted work. But she then encountered technical difficulties in writing a pair of short stories, and only after reading a small collection of French writer Guy de Maupassant's tales did she believe herself capable of producing fiction. After this realization Chopin published the short stories "Wiser Than a God," which concerns a pianist who forsakes marriage for a music career, and "A Point at Issue," which chronicles the decline of an emancipated marriage into a conventionally restrictive, male-dominated union.

Chopin next produced a novel, At Fault, about morally complex--and unintentionally preposterous--romantic considerations. In this novel, a young widow, Therese, discovers that a prospective second husband, the Creole David Hosmer, had divorced his first wife after learning that she was an alcoholic. Therese's moral absolutism prompts her, despite her love for David, to promote his re-marriage to his ex-wife. Incredibly, he heeds her counseling and rejoins his former spouse, who eventually succumbs once more to alcoholism. Therese and David seem fated for more suffering until the alcoholic accidently, but conveniently, drowns, thus allowing the lovers to unite without moral compromise.

At Fault addressed many of the themes, including women's emancipation and marital discord, that Chopin rendered more subtly in subsequent works. Upon its publication in 1890, the novel earned mixed reviews for its daring portrayal of a female alcoholic and its ambivalent perspective on divorce. Chopin had assumed financial responsibility for the book's publication and had sent copies to leading magazines and newspapers, including the local St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose critic complained of At Fault's allegedly immoral tenor but praised Chopin's skill in avoiding a moralistic tone. Similarly, Nation's reviewer noted that the novel's plethora of characters--in sub-plots involving arson and violence--all shared a lack of admirable traits. But a Nation reviewer added that Chopin possessed an "aptitude for seizing dialects of whites and blacks alike" and commended her "skill in perceiving and defining character."

Chopin followed At Fault with another novel, Young Dr. Gosse, for which she was unable to procure a publisher. Undaunted, she returned to writing shorter works, and in the next few years she produced more than three dozen stories and sketches. She first found steady publication in children's magazines such as Youth's Companion and Harper's Young People. In 1893 she appealed to adult readers with two tales in Vogue. These stories apparently proved popular, for in the next seven years the magazine published an additional sixteen pieces by Chopin.

Chopin collected twenty-three of these stories and brief sketches and published them in 1894 as Bayou Folk. In this collection she established herself--at least to her contemporaries--as primarily a masterful colorist of Louisiana life. An Atlantic Monthly reviewer, for instance, cited Chopin's reproductions of Southern speech and lauded the simplicity and concision of the tales, while a writer for the Critic praised Chopin for her sincere, simple portraits of bayou life. The Critic's reader called Bayou Folk an "unpretentious, unheralded little book" and commended Chopin's "shrewdness of observation and... fine eye for picturesque situations."

But Bayou Folk, despite the contentions of its initial readers, transcends mere portraiture in addressing such controversial subjects as infidelity and racial purity. Among the most famous tales in this collection is "Desiree's Baby," in which a woman disappears into the Louisiana bayou with her baby after her husband, distressed by the infant's features, accuses the woman of possessing Negro blood. This story offers chilling commentary on human behavior and fate, for no sooner has his wife vanished than the husband discovers that he is the parent with black ancestry. In another famous tale, "A Lady of Bayou St. John," a naive young wife falls in love with a visiting Frenchman while her husband is fighting in the Civil War. Before fleeing to Paris with her new love, the woman learns of her husband's death, whereupon she rejects the Frenchman and pledges herself to the dead man's memory. In this and other tales Chopin proved herself an artist of great insight into human behavior. Her work's profundity, however, eluded critics until long after her death.

Although reviews of Bayou Folk were superficial and relatively unperceptive, they were nonetheless favorable and afforded Chopin sufficient motivation to continue writing. She still circulated her novel Young Dr. Gosse, but the manuscript met with further rejection, and in 1896 she finally destroyed it. She found greater acceptance for her shorter fiction, and by 1897 she had completed enough to form another collection, A Night in Acadie. This volume marked Chopin's growing interest in sexuality, passion, and the stasis of conventional marriage. Among the many acclaimed stories in this collection is "A Sentimental Soul," in which a devout, unmarried woman, Mamzelle Fleurette, falls in love with a married man. She confesses her feelings to a priest, who unsympathetically counsels discipline. After the married man dies from fever, the woman continues to love, but the priest warns her not to attend the funeral. Finally, Fleurette consults another priest, to whom she confesses only insignificant sins and not her profane love. Walking home afterwards, Fleurette experiences an exhilaration as she realizes that she must henceforth hold herself in confidence. A Night in Acadie also includes the celebrated tale "Athenaise," where a young bride twice flees her husband due to her diminished sense of self, and "A Respectable Woman," in which a wife represses her passion for her husband's friend. The best of A Night in Acadie thus indicates Chopin's increased concern for the plight of women in Victorian-era America.

Chopin produced the stories in A Night in Acadie despite a seemingly disadvantageous regimen. She wrote only one or two days each week, and even then she only wrote in her living room amid her playing children. With so little time for writing, Chopin considered most tales to be complete after an initial draft, which Chopin would then submit for publication. Aside from her strictly literary pursuits, Chopin presided over a modest salon that hosted prominent St. Louis intellectuals and celebrities. They convened at her home on Thursdays and debated timely philosophical and literary subjects. In addition, Chopin had been a member of the Wednesday Club, a women's organization co-founded by poet T. S. Eliot's mother, devoted to both social and cultural issues, but she resigned from this group after two years due to dissatisfaction, reports biographer Per Seyersted in Kate Chopin, with the club's ideals and pretentions.

When A Night in Acadie appeared in 1894 it too received critical praise for its convincing portraits of Louisiana life. Although it was not reviewed as extensively as was Bayou Folk, it nonetheless confirmed Chopin's reputation as an adept colorist. Nation's critic, for instance, declared that Chopin "reproduces the spirit of a landscape like a painter," and the writer noted Chopin's skill in "seizing the heart of her people and showing the traits that come from their surroundings." Likewise, the Critic's reviewer cited Chopin's ability to write about "the simple, childlike southern people who are the subjects of her brief romances." The Critic's writer deemed Chopin's tales delicate and evocative.

By the time A Night in Acadie appeared Chopin was already preparing a third collection, A Vocation and a Voice. But this volume, which included tales previously rejected by magazines, was declined by publishers uncomfortable with Chopin's increasingly radical perspective on love, sex, and marriage. In some tales she equated sexual passion with religious devotion, and in others she explored the power of passion. She also explicitly denounced conventional marriage and its restrictive role for women. In this collection's most popular work, the often-anthologized "Story of an Hour," a semi-invalid learns of her husband's death and begins anticipating her newfound independence. Like "Desiree's Baby," however, this story ends in sudden, pessimistic fashion when the wife discovers that her husband is actually alive. She then dies of heart disease.

Chopin was undeterred by the rejection of her third collection and continued writing at an impressive pace. Aside from her short stories, she produced dozens of poems, translated several tales by de Maupassant, and contributed critical essays to various St. Louis periodicals. Fiction, however, was her greatest strength, and even as she vainly submitted A Vocation and a Voice for publication she was writing a second novel, The Awakening. This work, which would eventually be recognized as her masterpiece and a seminal work in American feminist fiction, first proved her most notorious publication and her literary undoing.

Like much of Chopin's fiction, The Awakening is about a dissatisfied wife in Louisiana. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, is a reserved, sensitive young woman who first appears in the novel while vacationing at a summer resort with her children. On weekends she is met by her husband, a New Orleans broker. Otherwise she has only a few adult companions, including a young Creole named Robert Lebrun. Edna first responds cordially to Robert's constant attention. Early in the novel, however, she gains a greater sense of boredom with her life and becomes increasingly aware of passionate feelings for her male friend. But at dinner one evening, Edna is stunned to discover that Robert has hastily arranged his departure for Mexico, an arrangement doubtless intended to abbreviate their romance. Edna is consequently unnerved, but she understands that her life has been irrevocably changed: she has been awakened to her thoughts, her feelings, her potential.

After she and her family have returned to New Orleans, Edna begins neglecting her duties as wife and mother. She abandons housekeeping, refuses guests, denies her husband his conjugal privilege, and eventually moves from their home to a nearby cottage. With his life drastically disrupted, Edna's husband strives to maintain his social stature. Edna understands that, in his own way, her husband actually loves her, but she also knows that his own way involves perceiving her more as property than as a separate human entity with thoughts and feelings.

Edna eventually adopts a fairly Bohemian existence--painting and circulating among musicians and others who accept her independence. She also enters into a sexual relationship with a notorious philanderer, but she longs for Robert. Edna does not find fulfillment in her new life. Her art work is only mediocre, and her love affair is only satisfactory sexually. When Robert returns from Mexico, she seduces him and declares her devotion. While revelling in her love and her freedom, however, she is rushed away to assist a friend giving birth. When Edna returns home she discovers that Robert has once again fled from her affection. "Good-by--because I love you," is all he has written as a farewell note. Despondent at her lover's desertion and her friend's anguished birthing experience, Edna returns to the seaside resort where she had first fallen in love with Robert. There she disrobes and drowns herself.

The Awakening was received with indignation when it appeared in 1899. Critics averred that Chopin was a pornographer and that her novel was immoral and even perverse. Among her many detractors was a reviewer for Public Opinion, who was "well satisfied" by Edna's suicide, and a critic for Nation, who noted the "unpleasantness" of reading about the allegedly headstrong protagonist. Willa Cather was also among the legion of readers who denounced The Awakening, complaining that Chopin had wasted herself on a "trite and sordid" theme. Of course, Chopin's novel was not entirely without its supporters. A critic for the New York Times Book Review, for example, noted Chopin's skill in exploring her subject and confessed "pity for the most unfortunate of her sex." But reviews such as this were rare in the overwhelmingly negative dismissal of the novel.

Chopin was understandably despondent over the reception accorded The Awakening. This public condemnation, coupled with the continued rejection of A Vocation and a Voice, is believed to have precipitated the end of her literary career. Contrary to popular belief, however, she did not immediately cease writing in the wake of continued abuse. In the next year she wrote several stories, including "The Storm," which anticipated the work of English writer D. H. Lawrence with its frank depiction of two lovers' infidelity during a thunderstorm. Gradually, then, Chopin abandoned her career. By 1904 her health was also in decline. Fascinated, however, by the World's Fair in St. Louis, Chopin made daily excursions. After a particularly exhausting day, she collapsed with a cerebral hemorrhage. Two days later, on August 22, she died.

In the ensuing years Chopin's notoriety for The Awakening faded, and her literary reputation became dependent on critics who considered her essentially a colorist. For many years it was thus commonly held that Chopin was foremost a recreator of Louisiana life, particularly that of the bayou. But by the 1930's critical opinion began to change. Daniel S. Rankin, in his important study Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories, hailed her as a masterful realist, and Shields Mcllwaine wrote in The Southern Poor-White that Chopin was gifted at expressing "the emotional values" of her characters. By 1952, literary historian Van Wyck Brooks had even acknowledged The Awakening as an undeservedly slighted work. He called the book "one novel of the nineties in the South that should have been remembered, one small perfect book that mattered more than the whole life of many a prolific writer," and he commended the novel for its "naturalness and grace." Critics such as Robert Cantwell and Kenneth Eble followed Brooks's comments in the mid-1950's by hailing The Awakening as profound as well as evocative. Cantwell, writing in the Georgia Review, praised Chopin's "heightened sensuous awareness" and deemed The Awakening "a great novel," while Eble wrote in Western Humanities Review that Chopin was superb at characterization and that she had created a "first-rate novel." And in his 1962 volume Patriotic Gore, noted literary authority Edmund Wilson commended The Awakening as "quite uninhibited and beautifully written."

In more recent years Chopin and her work have become favored subjects among women critics. Priscilla Allen, in an essay included in the volume Authority of Experience, charged that the preponderance of male criticism had even served to distort the characterization of The Awakening's Edna Pontellier and ignored her role as a representative of the oppressed. Also taking a more sociological approach was Anne Goodwyn Jones, who wrote in Tomorrow Is Another Day that the plight of women in Chopin's fiction is not unlike that of black slaves. In her book Jones analyzed Chopin's perception of sexual repression and its effect on both individuals and their society. Still other women, including Cynthia Griffin Wolff in "Thanatos and Eros," an article for American Quarterly, contested these sociological interpretations of Chopin's work and argued for a more psychological approach, while critics such as Carol P. Christ, who wrote of women writers in Diving Deep and Surfacing, viewed Chopin's writing in largely spiritual terms.

But Chopin's work is not exclusively a subject of study for American women. It has exerted appeal in countries ranging from France to Japan. Indeed, the world's foremost authority on Chopin and her work is probably Per Seyersted, a Norwegian male. Thus Chopin's work, like that of any great writer, transcends specifics of time and place and holds relevance for readers regardless of gender or nationality.

Associated Works

The Awakening (Book)

Historical Context

The Life and Times of Kate Chopin (1851-1904)
At the time of Chopin's birth:
Millard Fillmore is president of the United States
The New York Times begins publication
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables published
At the time of Chopin's death:
Theodore Roosevelt is president of the United States
Novel The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello published
Helen Keller graduates magna cum laude from Radcliffe college
The times:
1861-1865: American Civil War
1898: Spanish-American War
Chopin's contemporaries:
Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) American labor leader
Calamity Jane (1852-1903) frontierswoman
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) Dutch painter
Selected world events:
1853: George Crum invents the potato chip
1869: Suez Canal opens to traffic
1872: Susan Anthony and other suffragists arrested for trying to vote
1877: Thomas Edison invents phonograph
1880: Van Gogh begins painting
1888: Jack the Ripper terrorizes London
1894: French officer Alfred Dreyfus is convicted of treason
1898: U.S. annexes Hawaii
1900: Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim published