--1850 – Kate was born in St. Louis, Missouri
--She was the youngest of three children
--She came from a very strong woman-oriented family and grew up surrounded by
examples of independent women. At
the age of 5, her father died leaving her and her siblings to be raised by her
mother, her widowed-grandmother, and her widowed-great-grandmother.
Kate Chopin was surrounded by these strong examples, and this might have
been an influence on her writing her characteristic strong, independent female
characters.
--In 1870 Kate married Oscar Chopin who was a wealthy Creole cotton broker from
Louisiana and they moved to New Orleans.
--Between the year 1871 and 1879 she played the role of dutiful wife and gave
birth to 6 children
--In 1879 financial difficulties forced the Chopins to move to Cloutierville,
which was a tiny French settlement located in Natchitoches Parish located in
Northwestern Louisiana.
--In 1882 her husband Oscar died of Malaria
--In 1884 Kate and her 6 children moved back to her hometown of St. Louis
Missouri
--She began to write as an attempt to support herself and her children
--1890 she
published her first novel At Fault at
her own expense
--Throughout the 1890s, she published many short stories that appeared in
national magazines such as Vogue, Atlantic Monthly, Century,
and The Saturday Evening Post.
--In 1894 she published a collection of stories called Bayou
Folk and then in 1897 published another collection called A Night in Acadie. Both
of these collections began to establish her as a writer of local color fiction
who also touched on themes of marriage, infidelity and sexual freedom.
--June 1897 - Kate began to write The
Awakening and then completed it in January 1898
--The Awakening was published a year later in 1899 and was received
with a lot of criticism
--1904 – Kate, on a visit to Louisiana, had a stroke and then died two days
later
Literary
Movements of The Awakening
Click here to read an article on this subject
--focus on the everyday life of characters
--real thoughts of characters revealed
--regionalism
--sexuality is a feature of character identity, rather than being elided
Clemens is known as a realist
The “biology” of a situation, an extension of realism
--Edna is a woman, therefore, a wife and mother first
(according to the societal norms)
--She she differs from the males in her life
--Because she is a woman she feels “owned” by men
--She feels her only escape from being a woman is to kill herself
Criticism
--The
main criticism that Chopin received after the publication of The
Awakening was that she did not make the novel a morality tale.
Chopin never punishes Edna for her immorality, her selfish attitude
toward of the institution of marriage, and her abandonment of her children.
--The
St. Louis Republic : “In her creations she commits unutterable crimes against
polite society, but in the essentials of her art she never blunders.
Like most of her work, however, The
Awakening is too strong a drink for moral babes, and should be labeled
‘poison.’”
--St. Louis Mirror: “One
would fain beg the gods, in pure cowardice, for sleep unending rather than to
know what an ugly, cruel, loathsome Monster Passion can be when, like a tiger,
it slowly awakens. This is the kind
of awakening that impresses the reader in Mrs. Chopin’s heroine.”
--Public Opinion : “We
are well-satisfied when she [Edna] drowns herself.”
Praise
--The
Dial: “a poignant spiritual tragedy”
--Indianapolis
Journal: It “is not a healthy
story…yet one feels while reading it that he is moving among real people and
events.
--The New York
Times Saturday Review of Books: “Particularly
poignant is the woman’s awakening, as Mrs. Chopin tells it.
The author has a clever way of managing a difficult subject, and wisely
tempers the emotional elements…Such is the cleverness in the handling of the
story that you feel pity for the most unfortunate of her sex.”
The
Ocean:
--Symbol of freedom and escape (also seen in the “Open Boat”)
--She remembers the fields of her childhood as an ocean
--The sounds of the surf comfort her throughout the novel
--She learns to swim in the ocean and feels “free”
--She finally escapes to the sea
Art:
--Symbol
of freedom and self-expression
--Music is an art but is used differently by different women, i.e. Adele plays
music for the enjoyment of her family, thus is accepted by society.
Mme. Reisz plays for the art of it and is not accepted by society.
--Edna tries to escape everyday life through art
Clothes:
--At first, Edna is fully dressed, as the novel goes on, she becomes less and
less dressed. This is a symbol for
the shedding of societal rules. At
the end, she is completely naked, she has shed all her inhibitions.
The PBS site on the documentary Kate
Chopin: A Re-Awakening – including interviews with people involved in
production, an electronic library of online e-texts of her work, links to online
print materials and primary sources related to Kate Chopin
A literary traveling site that includes information
on Grand Isle,
LA. Also has pictures, info for
visitors, and a woman’s journal of her travels to Grand Isle as the setting in
The Awakening.
--created
by Ellen Steinke and Beth Tomerlin, edited by LG.