1. A well-educated woman with Irish-French inheritance, anti-Yankee feelings.
Kate Chopin was born Catherine
O'Flaherty in St Louis, Missouri, on 8 February 1850. Her parents were
Irish-born merchant Thomas O'Flaherty and Eliza Faris, daughter of a prominent
St Louis French family. Thomas was a widower with a son, George, who died
whilst serving as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War; Kate was the
second child of this second marriage. A defining influence on her childhood was
her French great-grandmother, who taught her to play the piano and speak
French, as well as the art of storytelling. The old lady oversaw her education
for over a year, after her father's death in a railway accident in 1855
necessitated her temporary withdrawal from the convent school, the Academy of
the Sacred Heart, where she studied from 1855 to 1868. At the age of thirteen,
Kate O'Flaherty became a minor local celebrity after tearing down a Union flag
attached to her house by Yankee soldiers.
2. A happy marriage with a degree of liberty for a 19th century woman.
Mrs Mallard, the protagonist in her "The
Story of an Hour," being wrongly informed of her
husband's death feels herself 'free, free, free!' and anticipates a future
where 'there would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence
with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will
upon a fellow creature'. It was only after her husband died that she began to commit herself to a serious writing.
3. The Awakening, her major achievement as a novelist.
The Awakening, the work on
which Chopin's reputation chiefly rests, was published in 1899. This short
novel in thirty-nine episodes of varying length, tied together by recurring
imagery (of the sea for example), is the story of the sensual and psychological
'awakening' of its protagonist, Edna Pontellier, wife of the stolid but unobjectionable
Léonce Pontellier and mother to his children. A summer vacation on Grand Isle
leads to Edna falling passionately in love with another man, Robert Lebrun, an
affair that is not consummated but which arouses such powerful sexual feelings
that Edna, when parted from Robert, embarks on a physical affair with a man for
whom she cares little, Alcée Arobin. She decides to become an artist and leaves
the marital home and her family, heedless of scandal. At the novel's lyrical
end Edna swims, naked, far out to sea, and presumably drowns.
1. A well-educated woman with Irish-French inheritance, anti-Yankee feelings.
Kate Chopin was born Catherine
O'Flaherty in St Louis, Missouri, on 8 February 1850. Her parents were
Irish-born merchant Thomas O'Flaherty and Eliza Faris, daughter of a prominent
St Louis French family. Thomas was a widower with a son, George, who died
whilst serving as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War; Kate was the
second child of this second marriage. A defining influence on her childhood was
her French great-grandmother, who taught her to play the piano and speak
French, as well as the art of storytelling. The old lady oversaw her education
for over a year, after her father's death in a railway accident in 1855
necessitated her temporary withdrawal from the convent school, the Academy of
the Sacred Heart, where she studied from 1855 to 1868. At the age of thirteen,
Kate O'Flaherty became a minor local celebrity after tearing down a Union flag
attached to her house by Yankee soldiers.
2. A happy marriage with a degree of liberty for a 19th century woman.
Mrs Mallard, the protagonist in her "The
Story of an Hour," being wrongly informed of her
husband's death feels herself 'free, free, free!' and anticipates a future
where 'there would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence
with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will
upon a fellow creature'. It was only after her husband died that she began to commit herself to a serious writing.
3. The Awakening, her major achievement as a novelist.
The Awakening, the work on
which Chopin's reputation chiefly rests, was published in 1899. This short
novel in thirty-nine episodes of varying length, tied together by recurring
imagery (of the sea for example), is the story of the sensual and psychological
'awakening' of its protagonist, Edna Pontellier, wife of the stolid but unobjectionable
Léonce Pontellier and mother to his children. A summer vacation on Grand Isle
leads to Edna falling passionately in love with another man, Robert Lebrun, an
affair that is not consummated but which arouses such powerful sexual feelings
that Edna, when parted from Robert, embarks on a physical affair with a man for
whom she cares little, Alcée Arobin. She decides to become an artist and leaves
the marital home and her family, heedless of scandal. At the novel's lyrical
end Edna swims, naked, far out to sea, and presumably drowns.
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