CHOPIN, Kate

Nationality: American. Born: Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, 8 February 1851. Education: The Academy of the Sacred Heart, St. Louis, graduated 1868. Family: Married Oscar Chopin in 1870 (died 1883); five sons and one daughter. Career: Lived in New Orleans, 1870-79, on her husband's plantation in Cloutierville, Louisiana, 1880-82, and in St. Louis after 1884. Died: 22 August 1904.

Publications

Collections

Complete Works, edited by Per Seyersted. 2 vols., 1969.

Short Stories

Bayou Folk. 1894.

A Night in Acadie. 1897.

The Awakening and Other Stories, edited by Lewis Leary. 1970.

Portraits: Short Stories, edited by Helen Taylor. 1979.

The Awakening and Selected Stories, edited by Sandra M. Gil-bert. 1984.

A Pair of Silk Stockings and Other Stories. 1996.

Novels

At Fault. 1890.

The Awakening. 1899; edited by Margaret Culley, 1976.

Other

A Chopin Miscellany, edited by Per Seyersted and Emily Toth. 1979.

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Bibliography:

in Bibliography of American Literature by Jacob Blanck, 1957; Edith Wharton and Chopin: A Reference Guide by Marlene Springer, 1976.

Critical Studies:

Chopin and Her Creole Stories by Daniel S. Rankin, 1932; The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation by Larzer Ziff, 1966; Chopin: A Critical Biography by Per Seyersted, 1969; Chopin by Peggy Skaggs, 1985; Chopin by Barbara C. Ewell, 1986; Forbidden Fruit: On the Relationship Between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Slema Lagerlöf, Chopin, and Margaret Atwood by Bonnie St. Andrews, 1986; New Essays on The Awakening edited by Wendy Martin, 1988; Chopin by Emily Toth, 1988; Gender, Race, and Religion in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Chopin by Helen Taylor, 1989; Verging on the Abyss: the Social Fiction of Chopin and Edith Wharton by Mary E. Papke, 1990; Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou edited by Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis, 1992; Critical Essays on Kate Chopin by Alice Hall Petry, 1996; Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction by Bernard Koloski, 1996; The Art of Dying: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Sylvia Plath by Deborah S. Gentry, 1998.

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Kate Chopin wrote nearly 100 stories between her first critically undistinguished novel, At Fault, and her last major work, The Awakening, which critics found "shocking" and "immoral." Two volumes were published in her lifetime—Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie—and others were printed in magazines such as Youth's Companion, Atlantic Monthly, and Vogue. Recurring characters appear in many of the stories so that, according to one critic, they "maintain artistic autonomy and yet appear strangely related to one another."

Chopin's first works were ranked with those of regionalists George Washington Cable and Grace King and praised for their reflection of "the quaint and picturesque life among the Creole and Acadian folk of the Louisiana bayous" ("A Very Fine Fiddle," "Boulôt and Boulotte," "Beyond the Bayou"). The earliest stories, set primarily in Natchitoches (pronounced Nackitosh) parish, deal with both Creoles, the French-speaking, Catholic middle or upper class, and, less often, Cajuns, who tended to be a lower-class French-speaking group originally resettled from Canada ("At Chênière Caminada," "Love on the Bon-Dieu"). But while Chopin was in one sense a local colorist, later critics have also recognized her work as an early form of both social and regional realism in the tradition of Rebecca Harding Davis, Ellen Glasglow, and Willa Cather.

Chopin did not start writing seriously until she was in her late thirties. As she developed as a writer she called on her wide reading for literary models. She admired Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930); critics agree, however, that the major influences on her work were French—Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary (1857) presages The Awakening, and, particularly, Guy de Maupassant, whose stories, like Chopin's, are marked by realism, detachment, economy, and irony.

The issues and themes in Chopin's work are varied. Although most of her stories emphasize character over plot, some are no more than brief character sketches ("Old Aunt Peggy," "Elizabeth Stock's One Story," "Juanita"). Some deal with family relationships, those between siblings ("Ma'ame Pélagie," "A Family Affair") and those between parent and child ("Charlie," "A Rude Awakening"). Some, such as "A Little Free-Mulatto," "Ozème's Holiday," "The Bênitous' Slave," and "Nég Créol," explore the complicated relationship between blacks and whites. "La Belle Zoraïde" is one of Chopin's most powerful stories, centered on a mistress who raises a beautiful black girl, insisting that a mulatto is the only man she should marry. When the girl falls in love with the black Mézor, Madame Delarivìere has him sold; when Zoraïde bears his child, her mistress tells her it died at birth. The story not only raises the issues of control and racial identity but of grief and loss in the image of the demented Zoraïde clinging to a bundle of rags that she insists is her baby. Maternity is held up throughout Chopin's work as a force that overcomes dissatisfaction, the loss of which brings pain ("Athénaïse," "Regret"). In this sense it is somewhat ironic that Chopin, who lived a rather exemplary private life, should have been condemned for her refusal to uphold, in her writing, society's moral view of marriage and motherhood.

And yet many of her stories do involve dissatisfied women trapped in unhappy marriages with a "sense of hopelessness, an instinctive realization of the futility of rebellion against a social and sacred institution." Some women do not even recognize their unhappiness until they are unexpectedly released ("The Story of an Hour"), and some, such as Mentine in "A Visit to Avoyelles," seem resigned to being dissipated by overwork and childbearing. "In Sabine" centers on 'Tite Reine, who has "changed a good deal" since her marriage—a visitor finds her thinner, uneasy, and distressed, but emboldened finally to leave her abusive husband. The most developed story constructed around this theme is "Athénaïse," in which a wife loses her "sense of duty" as Chopin explores the "Gordian knot of marriage" and Athénaïse explains, "I don't hate him…. It's jus' being married that I detes' an' despise."

Although Chopin, whose work fell into critical neglect soon after her death in 1904, was resurrected by feminist scholars in the 1960s, her sensibilities are often channeled through male protagonists, many of whom embody or articulate not the female but the human condition. Gouvernail, for example, who appears in a number of works ("A Respectable Woman," "Athénaïse," The Awakening), believes the "primordial fact of existence" to be that "things seemed all wrongly arranged in this world, and no one was permitted to be happy in his own way." Many men in Chopin are patient, sensitive, considerate souls who even in the grips of human selfishness follow a gentleman's code. They fall in love easily and passionately, overly susceptible to women's charms. Numerous stories are built around a "coup de foudre," where a man suddenly "abandon[s] himself completely to his passion" against all reason, sometimes coming to his senses and sometimes finding true love ("At the 'Cadian Ball," "Love on the Bon-Dieu," "A No-Account Creole").

Both men and women in Chopin's stories are "attuned to the natural flow of their own emotions"; they are "alive and keen and responsive" in the immediacy of the moment and do not become entangled in guilt, anxiety, or anguished self-analysis. According to one biographer, Per Seyersted, "Chopin concentrated on the immutable impulses of love and sex." She was deeply influenced by Walt Whitman in this regard, and quotes him in her work. The sexuality and eroticism of some of her stories ("Lilacs," "Two Portraits," "A Vocation and a Voice") shocked editors, but Seyersted sees in stories like "The Storm" a foreshadowing of D. H. Lawrence where sexuality reflects not wantonness but "a mystic contact with the elements."

Chopin's universe, finally, is both cruel and moral in its own way, presided over by hope, faith, providence, nature, and eros. The greatest crime is perhaps indifference ("The Godmother"), as Chopin acknowledges "the supremacy of the moving power which is love; which is life."

—Deborah Kelly Kloepfer

See the essays on "Désirée's Baby" and "A Pair of Silk Stockings."