Kate Chopin

By JANET BEER
Kate Chopin (18501904) first published a story, Wiser than a God, in the
PhiladelphiaMusic Journal in 1889; her last, PollysOpportunity, appeared in
the YouthsCompanion in 1902. The thirteen years in betweenmarked a hugely
productive career as a writer, primarily of short stories, with a novel at the
beginning and at the end of the 1890s; an earlier novel, Young Dr. Gosse, she
seems to have destroyed. Chopin did not work seriously at her fiction until
she was a widow and had returned to her birthplace, St Louis, Missouri, to live.
During her briefmarried life (although itwas long enough for her to produce six
children), she lived in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then in Cloutierville,
and it is in this southern state, in every way more French than American in its
heritage and culture, that she setmost of her stories and both her novels. Indeed,
the publishers advertisement for her first collection of short stories, Bayou
Folk, in 1894, drew attention to the fact that Chopins characters were semialiens
and featured in narratives quite unlike most American tales.
Chopins work was published in the leading magazines of her day; she
wrote for a variety of different audiences, including children, but she also
found ways and exercised the means to place stories which were often daring
in terms of their subject matter and expression. She was expert in her manipulation
of both form and language so as to position herself to write about
issues which she found compelling issues which were often controversial.
Commentators on her work are always sensitive to the level of Chopins
awareness of the editorial and critical reception of her writing in turn-ofthe-
century America. It is clear that the knowledge she had of the literary
marketplace operated alongside a determination to write about difficult
subjects. Working, as she did, in a particular sector of the literary world,
writing mainly short stories for magazines, she became adept at finding ways
to accommodate the tastes and idiosyncrasies of the editors without too much
compromise on her part.
When Chopin published her novel, The Awakening, however, she came
under a different kind of scrutiny. Chopins biographer, Emily Toth, has dealt
effectively with the overstatement of the detrimental effects that the negative
reviews of the novel may have had on Chopin, but it seems highly unlikely
that Chopin thought that the subject matter of her novel would be uncontentious.
Her voice was often a transgressive voice; some of her stories were not
deemed fit to print, even by the most liberal of magazine editors, and others
she did not attempt to place in the public domain the most famous of these
being the story of joyful adulterous sex, The Storm, written in 1898. The
majority of her tales, however, did see the light of day and were published in
magazines such as Vogue, Harpers, Century, Atlantic Monthly, Two Tales,
Youths Companion and a variety of St Louis and New Orleans periodicals
and newspapers, as detailed by Bernard Koloski in his essay here, The
Awakening: The First Hundred Years. Chopins writing brought her in
much-needed income, and she kept detailed records of submissions and
money earned. She wrote for a living but, as Pamela Knights has made
clear: although she often yielded to the compromises required for publication,
she would also defend her artistry, and was prepared to resist editorial
suggestion.
What we do and dont know about
Kate Chopins life
An anonymous newspaper friend once called Kate Chopin a rogue in porcelain,
flashing her witty, provocative and advanced opinions right into the face
of Philistia.1 Others noted Chopins quiet manner and her gift for saying so
many good and witty things.2 She possessed every grace and talent essential
to the maintenance of a brilliant social circle.3 She was wise and cosmopolitan
and did not make moral judgements. Nor did she force her own children,
five sons and a daughter, to leave home or get jobs, and only one was married
before his mother died at fifty-four. She deliberately kept a condemned book,
Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure, on her parlour table so that young visitors
would peruse it out of curiosity and discover that it was unpardonably dull;
and immoral, chiefly because it is not true (714).
Real life and mixed emotions were much more interesting to her than
Hardys melancholy story. According to her daughter, Chopin had a habit
of looking on the amusing side of everything, but also rather a sad nature.4
She knew that life has both beauty and brutality and she also knew how to
keep secrets.
The facts of Kate OFlaherty Chopins life are well known. Although her
tombstone lists her birthdate as 1851, her baptismal record shows that she
was born on 8 February 1850, in St Louis, Missouri. She was the second child
and first daughter of Eliza Faris OFlaherty, twenty-two, whose husband was
Thomas OFlaherty, forty-five, an Irish immigrant and wealthy businessman
who owned four household slaves. Kate had an older brother, an older halfbrother
and two little sisters who died young, which may be why, at five, she
was sent to boarding school at the Sacred Heart Academy.
Two months later, her father was killed in a train accident, Kate was
brought home, and her grandmother and great-grandmother moved in
making three generations of women who were widowed young and never
remarried. Kate OFlaherty grew up in a matriarchy, where women handled
their own money and made their own decisions, as did the nuns at the Sacred
Heart Academy, where she returned two years later. She was sixteen before
she ever lived with a married couple again (an aunt and uncle), and so she had
little opportunity to form traditional notions about marriage and submissive
wives. When she married Oscar Chopin on 9 June 1870, she started off on
their European honeymoon with a clean slate and an open mind.
The Chopins settled in New Orleans, where Oscar was a cotton factor (the
middle man between growers and buyers). Within nine years, Kate had given
birth to six children, the last in Cloutierville (Cloochy-ville) in north
Louisiana, where the family moved when Oscars business failed. In that
small village, Kate Chopin entertained and annoyed local people with her
flamboyant fashions and brusque urban manners. Oscar was a local favourite,
but when he died of malaria on 10 December 1882, $12,000 in debt, Kate
was left without his social protection. She paid off the debts, had a scandalous
romance with a local married planter, Albert Sampite (Sam-pi-TAY), and
quickly moved back to her mothers home in St Louis in 1884 just a year
before her mother died of cancer.
Her doctor, seeing her deep grief, suggested that she try writing, and, by
1890, Chopin had become St Louis first woman professional writer.
Eventually she published two novels (At Fault and The Awakening) and
two collections of short stories (Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie), while
producing several dozen other pieces, including short stories, essays, poems,
translations, one play and one polka.
Much critical work on Kate Chopin has focused on the historical, geographical
and personal contexts to her writings, illuminating her work by reference
to social practices in Louisiana, the world of the Creoles, the myths of the
Bayou and her own upbringing and adult experiences. Of particular interest
to critics has been the issue of literary influence, with much attention being
paid to French writers. Contemporary reviewers compared her unfavourably
with such minor French writers as Paul Bourget,1 and Willa Cathers labelling
of The Awakening as a Creole Bovary2 continues to dominate much critical
thinking, even though Edna Pontellier has little in common with Emma
Bovary and Chopins use of descriptive language and of direct and indirect
speech is very different from that of Flaubert. More recently, Per Seyersted
asserts that Chopin was influenced by the feminism of Madame de Stal and
George Sand and by the realism of Flaubert and Maupassant.