Kate Chopin facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Kate Chopin
Chopin in 1894
Born	Katherine O'Flaherty (1850-02-08)February 8, 1850 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died	August 22, 1904(1904-08-22) (aged 54) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Genre	Realistic fiction
Notable works	The Awakening
Spouse	Oscar Chopin ​ ​ (m. 1870; died 1882)​
Children	6
Signature

Kate Chopin (/ˈʃoʊpæn/, also US: /ʃoʊˈpæn, ˈʃoʊpən/; born Katherine O'Flaherty; February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904) was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and she is one of the more frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage. She is best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening.

Of maternal French and paternal Irish descent, Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She married and moved with her husband to New Orleans. They later lived in the country in Cloutierville, Louisiana. From 1892 to 1895, Chopin wrote short stories for both children and adults that were published in national magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her stories aroused controversy because of her subjects and her approach; they were condemned as immoral by some critics.

Her major works were two short story collections and two novels. The collections are Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included "Désirée's Baby" (1893), a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana, "The Story of an Hour" (1894), and "The Storm" (written 1898, first published 1969). ("The Storm" is a sequel to "At the Cadian Ball (1892)," which appeared in Bayou Folk, her first collection of short stories.)

Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The characters in her stories are usually residents of Louisiana, and many are Creoles of various ethnic or racial backgrounds. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north-central Louisiana, a region where she lived.

Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote "some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius."

Life

Chopin and her children in New Orleans, 1877

Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was a successful businessman who had immigrated to the United States from Galway, Ireland. Her mother, Eliza Faris, was his second wife, and a well-connected member of the ethnic French community in St. Louis as the daughter of Athénaïse Charleville, a Louisiana creole of French Canadian descent. Some of Chopin's ancestors were among the early European (French) inhabitants of Dauphin Island, Alabama.

Kate was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her half-brothers (from her father's first marriage) died in their early 20s. They were reared Roman Catholic in the French and Irish traditions. She also became an avid reader of fairy tales, poetry, religious allegories, and classic and contemporary novels. She graduated from Sacred Heart Convent in St. Louis in 1868.

At the age of five, she was sent to Sacred Heart Academy, where she learned how to handle her own money and make her own decisions, as the nuns intended. Upon her father's death, she was brought home to live with her grandmother and great-grandmother, comprising three generations of women who were widowed young and never remarried. For two years, she was tutored at home by her great-grandmother, Victoria (or Victoire) Charleville, who taught French, music, history, gossip and the need to look on life without fear. After those two years, Kate went back to Sacred Heart Academy, which her best friend and neighbor, Kitty Garesche, also attended, and where her mentor, Mary O'Meara, taught. A gifted writer of both verse and prose, O'Meara guided her student to write regularly, to judge herself critically, and to conduct herself valiantly. Nine days after Kate and Kitty's first communions in May 1861, the Civil War came to St. Louis. During the war, Kate's half-brother died of fever, and her great-grandmother died as well. After the war ended, Kitty and her family were banished from St. Louis for supporting the Confederacy.

Chopin house in Cloutierville

In St. Louis, Missouri on June 8, 1870, she married Oscar Chopin and settled with him in his home town of New Orleans. The Chopins had six children between 1871 and 1879: in order of birth, Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza). In 1879, Oscar Chopin's cotton brokerage failed.

The family left the city and moved to Cloutierville in south Natchitoches Parish to manage several small plantations and a general store] They became active in the community, where Chopin found, in the local creole culture, much material for her future writing.

When Oscar Chopin died in 1882, he left Kate $42,000 in debt (approximately $1.27 million in 2024 ). Emily Toth stated "for a while the widow Kate ran his [Oscar's] business and flirted outrageously with local men; (she even engaged in a relationship with a married farmer)." Although Chopin worked to make her late husband's plantation and general store succeed, two years later she sold her Louisiana business.

Her mother had implored her to move back to St. Louis, which Chopin did, with her mother's financial support. Her children gradually settled into life in the bustling city, but Chopin's mother died the following year.

Chopin struggled with depression after the successive loss of her husband, her business, and her mother. Chopin's obstetrician and family friend Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer suggested that she start writing, believing that it could be therapeutic for her. He understood that writing could be a focus for her extraordinary energy as well as a source of income.

By the early 1890s, Chopin's short stories, articles, and translations were appearing in periodicals, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and in various literary magazines. During a period of considerable publishing of folk tales, works in dialect, and other elements of Southern folk life, she was considered a regional writer who provided local color. Her literary qualities were overlooked.

In 1899, The Awakening,her second novel, was published. Some newspaper critics reviewed the novel favorably. However, the critical reception was largely negative. The critics considered the behavior of the novel's characters, especially the women to be in conflict with prevailing standards of moral conduct and therefore offensive.

This novel, her best-known work, is the story of a woman trapped within the confines of an oppressive society. Out of print for several decades, it was rediscovered in the 1970s, when there was a wave of new studies and appreciation of women's writings. The novel has been reprinted and now is widely available. It has been critically acclaimed for its writing quality and importance as an early feminist work of the South.

Critics suggest that such works as The Awakening were scandalous and therefore not socially embraced. Chopin was discouraged by the lack of acceptance, but she continued to write, turning to the short story. In 1900, she wrote "The Gentleman from New Orleans." That same year she was listed in the first edition of Marquis Who's Who. However, she never made much money from her writing, getting by on the investments she made locally in Louisiana and St. Louis of the inheritance from her mother's estate.

Kate Chopin's grave in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri

While visiting the St. Louis World's Fair on August 20, 1904, Chopin suffered a brain hemorrhage. She died two days later, at the age of 54. She was interred in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.

Literary themes

Kate Chopin lived in a variety of locations, based on different economies and societies. These were sources of insights and observations from which she analyzed and expressed her ideas about late 19th-century Southern American society. She was brought up by women who were primarily ethnic French. Living in areas influenced by the Louisiana Creole and Cajun cultures after she joined her husband in Louisiana, she based many of her stories and sketches on her life in Louisiana. They expressed her unusual portrayals (for the time) of women as individuals with separate wants and needs.

Chopin went beyond Maupassant's technique and style to give her writing its own flavor. She had an ability to perceive life and creatively express it. She concentrated on women's lives and their continual struggles to create an identity of their own within the Southern society of the late nineteenth century. For instance, in "The Story of an Hour", Mrs. Mallard allows herself time to reflect after learning of her husband's death.

Not many writers during the mid- to late 19th century were bold enough to address subjects that Chopin addressed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory University wrote that "Kate was neither a feminist nor a suffragist, she said so. She was nonetheless a woman who took women extremely seriously. She never doubted women's ability to be strong." Kate Chopin's sympathies lay with the individual in the context of his and her personal life and society.

Through her stories, Chopin wrote a kind of autobiography and described her societies; she had grown up in a time when her surroundings included the abolitionist movements before the American Civil War, and their influence on freedmen education and rights afterward, as well as the emergence of feminism. Her ideas and descriptions were not reporting, but her stories expressed the reality of her world.

Chopin took strong interest in her surroundings and wrote about many of her observations. Jane Le Marquand assesses Chopin's writings as a new feminist voice, while other intellectuals recognize it as the voice of an individual who happens to be a woman. Marquand writes, "Chopin undermines patriarchy by endowing the Other, the woman, with an individual identity and a sense of self, a sense of self to which the letters she leaves behind give voice. The 'official' version of her life, that constructed by the men around her, is challenged and overthrown by the woman of the story."

Chopin appeared to express her belief in the strength of women. Marquand draws from theories about creative nonfiction in terms of her work. In order for a story to be autobiographical, or even biographical, Marquand writes, there has to be a nonfictional element, but more often than not the author exaggerates the truth to spark and hold interest for the readers. Kate Chopin might have been surprised to know her work has been characterized as feminist in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, just as she had been in her own time to have it described as immoral. Critics tend to regard writers as individuals with larger points of view addressed to factions in society.

Early works

Kate Chopin began her writing career with her first story published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. By the early 1890s, Chopin forged a successful writing career, contributing short stories and articles to local publications and literary journals. She also initially wrote a number of short stories such as "A Point at Issue!", "A No-Account Creole", "Beyond the Bayou" which were published in various magazines. In 1890, her first novel "At Fault" was published privately. The protagonist demonstrates the initial theme of Kate Chopin's works when she began writing. In 1892, Kate Chopin produced "Désirée's Baby", "Ripe Figs" and "At the 'Cadian Ball" which appeared in Two Tales that year, and eight of her other stories were published.

The short story "Désirée's Baby" focuses on Kate Chopin's experience with miscegenation and communities of the Creoles of color in Louisiana. She came of age when slavery was institutionalized in St. Louis and the South. In Louisiana, there had been communities established of free people of color, especially in New Orleans, where formal arrangements were made between white men and free women of color or enslaved women for plaçage, a kind of common-law marriage. There and in the country, she lived with a society based on the history of slavery and the continuation of plantation life, to a great extent. Mixed-race people (also known as mulattos) were numerous in New Orleans and the South. This story addresses the racism of 19th century America; persons who were visibly European-American could be threatened by the revelation of also having African ancestry. Chopin was not afraid to address such issues, which were often suppressed and intentionally ignored. Her character Armand tries to deny this reality, when he refuses to believe that he is of partial black descent, as it threatens his ideas about himself and his status in life. R. R. Foy believed that Chopin's story reached the level of great fiction, in which the only true subject is "human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the view with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it". The story can also be seen from a feminist perspective, where the white wife is unjustly made to suffer for having given birth to a partially black child.

"Desiree's Baby" was first published in an 1893 issue of Vogue, alongside "A Visit to Avoyelles", another of Kate Chopin's short stories, under the heading "Character Studies: The Father of Desiree's Baby – The Lover of Mentine." "A Visit to Avoyelles" typifies the local color writing that Chopin was known, and it is one of her stories that shows a couple in a completely fulfilled marriage. While Doudouce is hoping otherwise, he sees ample evidence that Mentine and Jules' marriage is a happy and fulfilling one despite the poverty-stricken circumstances that they live. In contrast, in "Desiree's Baby" portrays a marriage in trouble. The other contrasts to "A Visit to Avoyelles" are clear, but some are more subtle than others. Unlike Mentine and Jules, Armand and Desiree are rich and own slaves and a plantation. Mentine and Jules' marriage has weathered many hard times, while Armand and Desiree's falls apart at the first sign of trouble. Kate Chopin was talented at showing various sides of marriages and local people and their lives, making her writing very broad and sweeping in topic, even as she had many common themes in her work.

Martha Cutter argues that Kate Chopin demonstrates feminine resistance to patriarchal society through her short stories. Cutter claims that Chopin's resistance can be traced through the timeline of her work, with Chopin becoming more and more understanding of how women can fight back suppression as time progresses. To demonstrate this, Cutter claims that Chopin's earlier stories, such as "At the 'Cadian Ball," "Wiser than a God," and "Mrs. Mobry's Reason" present women who are outright resisting, and are therefore not taken seriously, erased, or called insane. However, in Chopin's later stories, the female characters take on a different voice of resistance, one that is more "covert" and works to undermine patriarchal discourse from within. Cutter exemplifies this idea through the presentation of Chopin's works written after 1894. Cutter claims that Chopin wanted to "disrupt patriarchal discourse, without being censored by it." And to do this, Chopin tried different strategies in her writings: silent women, overly resistant women, women with a "voice covert," and women who mimic patriarchal discourse.

In 1893, she wrote "Madame Célestin's Divorce," and 13 of her stories were published. In 1894, "The Story of an Hour" and "A Respectable woman" were published by Vogue. Bayou Folk, a collection of 23 of Chopin's stories, was a success to Kate Chopin in 1894, published by Houghton Mifflin. It was the first of her works to gain national attention, and it was followed by A Night in Acadie (1897), another collection of short stories.

The Awakening

Published in 1899, her novel The Awakening is considered ahead of its time, garnering more negative reviews than positive from contemporary sources. Chopin was discouraged by this criticism, and she turned to writing short stories almost exclusively. The female characters in The Awakening went beyond the standards of social norms of the time. The novel is considered a classic of feminist fiction.

Representation in other media

Louisiana Public Broadcasting, under president Beth Courtney, produced Kate Chopin: A Reawakening, a documentary on Chopin's life.

Works

Kate Chopin

• "Bayou Folk" Read "Bayou Folk"
• "A Night in Acadie" Read "A Night in Acadie"
• "At the Cadian Ball" (1892) Read "At the Cadian Ball"
• "The Story of an Hour" (1894) Read "The Story of an Hour"
• "Désirée's Baby" (1895) Read "Désirée's Baby"
• "Emancipation: A Life Fable" Read "Emancipation: A Life Fable"
• "The Storm" (1898) Read "The Storm"
• "A Pair of Silk Stockings" Read "A Pair of Silk Stockings"
• "The Locket"
• "Athenaise" Read "Athenaise"
• "Lilacs" Read "Lilacs"
• "A Respectable Woman" Read "A Respectable Woman"
• "The Unexpected" Read "The Unexpected"
• "The Kiss" Read "The Kiss"
• "Beyond the Bayou" Read "Beyond the Bayou"
• "An No-Account Creole" Read "An No-Account Creole"
• The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories
• "Fedora"
• "Regret" Read "Regret
• "Madame Célestin's Divorce" Read "Madame Célestin's Divorce"
• At Fault (1890), Nixon Jones Printing Co, St. Louis Read "At Fault"
• The Awakening (1899), H.S. Stone, Chicago Read "The Awakening"
• "An Egyptian Cigarette" (1900)

Honors and awards

• Her home with Oscar Chopin in Cloutierville was built by Alexis Cloutier in the early part of the 19th century. In the late 20th century, the house was designated as the Kate Chopin House, a National Historic Landmark (NHL), because of her literary significance. The house was adapted for use as the Bayou Folk Museum. On October 1, 2008, the house was destroyed by a fire, with little left but the chimney.
• In 1990, Chopin was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
• In 2012, she was commemorated with an iron bust of her head at the Writer's Corner in the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis, across the street from Left Bank Books.

See also

In Spanish: Kate Chopin para niños