Kate Chopin was born Catherine
O’Flaherty on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis,
Missouri. She was one of five children, but both her sisters died
in infancy and her brothers died in their twenties. When she was
five years old, Kate was sent to a Catholic boarding school named The
Sacred Heart Academy. Just months later, however, her father died
in a train accident, and she was sent home to live with her mother,
grandmother, and great-grandmother, all widowed. After two years
in their care, she returned to Sacred Heart, where she excelled
in French and English, finishing at the top of her class.
Both at home with family and at school with
the nuns, Kate grew up surrounded by intelligent and independent
women. Her childhood lacked male role models; thus, she was rarely
witness to the tradition of female submission and male domination
that defined most late nineteenth-century marriages. The themes
of female freedom and sexual awareness that dominated Chopin’s adult
writings were undoubtedly a result of the atmosphere in which she
was raised.
After graduating from Sacred Heart, Kate became
a part of the St. Louis social scene. In 1870 she
married Oscar Chopin, the son of a prominent Creole family from
Louisiana. Fulfilling the social responsibilities expected of her,
Kate Chopin bore six children in the first ten years of her marriage
to Oscar. Unlike many women of her time, however, she also enjoyed
a wide range of unconventional freedoms. While Chopin was known
to be a good wife and mother, she often grew tired of domestic life
and escaped to smoke cigarettes or take solitary walks through New
Orleans. She took strong, often controversial positions on the issues
of the day. Chopin’s husband loved her very deeply and supported
and admired her independence and intelligence. She and her family lived
happily in New Orleans for nine years.
When Oscar Chopin’s cotton brokerage failed in 1879,
he moved the family to Cloutierville, Louisiana, where he owned
some land. Kate Chopin adjusted her habits easily to the smaller
provincial lifestyle of Cloutierville and became the subject of
much gossip. While other women in town were completing their household chores,
Chopin would stroll or ride horseback down the town’s main street,
earning the attention and admiration of any man who passed her.
In 1882, her husband died suddenly of swamp
fever, leaving Chopin devastated. However, she would soon learn
to enjoy the pleasures of independence and was rumored to have had
an affair with a married neighbor, Albert Sampite, in the year following her
husband’s death. After a year spent managing her late husband’s general
store and plantation, Chopin moved back to Missouri with her children
to be with her mother and family, a move that may have coincided
with the end of her affair with Sampite. Sadly, Chopin’s mother
died shortly after her return, another in the series of tragic deaths
that marked Kate’s life.
In 1889 Chopin began writing fiction,
an activity that enabled her to develop and express her strong views
on women, sex, and marriage while simultaneously supporting her
family. Chopin enjoyed immediate success with her writings about
the French Creoles and Cajuns she had met and observed during her
New Orleans and Cloutierville years. She sold dozens of short stories
and essays exploring themes of love and independence, passion and
freedom. By setting her stories in a specific region and community
and by basing her characters on real people, Chopin was able to
publish controversial stories in a socially acceptable format. Readers
could choose to see the passions she described as curiosities of
a localized culture rather than universalities in human nature.
Chopin was often asked to attend conferences and give speeches and
was widely celebrated for the majority of her short but prolific
career.
Chopin’s second and final novel, The Awakening, was
published in 1899 at the height of her popularity.
Ironically, this work, now regarded as a classic, essentially marked
the end of Chopin’s writing career. Many of Chopin’s earlier works
had been accepted despite their controversial subject matter because
they appeared to contain narrative reporting rather than critical
commentary. An underlying sense of support invaded the generally
objective tone of The Awakening, however, and the
reading public was shocked by such a sympathetic view toward the
actions and emotions of the sexually aware and independent female
protagonist.
The feminist movement, just beginning to emerge in other
parts of America, was almost entirely absent in the conservative
state of Louisiana. In fact, under Louisiana law, a woman was still
considered the property of her husband. Chopin’s novel was scorned
and ostracized for its open discussion of the emotional and sexual
needs of women. Surprised and deeply hurt by the negative reaction
to The Awakening, Chopin published only three more
short stories before she died of a brain hemorrhage in 1904.
After her death, Chopin was remembered for her “local
color” works about the people of New Orleans but was never acknowledged
as a true literary talent until the rediscovery of The Awakening some
fifty years later. New generations, more accepting of the notions
of female sexuality and equality, praise the novel’s candid and
realistic views and have found it to be informative about early American
feminism. Modern critics have noted the book’s rich detail and imagery
and find that its ironic narrative voice is a rich source for analysis. The
Awakening has now earned a place in the literary canon
for the way it uses these formal and structural techniques to explore
themes of patriarchy, marriage and motherhood, woman’s independence,
desire, and sexuality both honestly and artistically.
