Kate Chopin Essays (1449 words) - Fiction, Frdric Chopin

Kate Chopin Kate Chopin is an American writer of the late nineteenth century. She is known for her depictions of southern culture and of women's struggles for freedom. At this time in American history, women did not have a voice of their own and according to custom, they were to obey their father and husband. Generally, many women agreed to accept this customary way of life. Kate Chopin thought quite differently. The boldness Kate Chopin takes in portraying women in the late nineteenth century can be seen throughout The Awakening and other short stories. The following is an overview of her dramatic writing style. Elaine Showalter states, Chopin went boldly beyond the work of her precursors in writing about women's longing for sexual and personal emancipation. (170). Chopin said that she was not a feminist of a suffragist. She was not an activist and she never joined the women's suffrage movement or belonged to a female literary community. Chopin saw freedom as a matter of your won spirit or soul without constraints. She did not try to encourage the women's movement in her writing; rather, she wrote what she felt. In writing what she felt, Chopin came to believe that a true artist defied tradition and rejected respectable morality and the conventions and formulas to literary success. (Showalter 171). It could be said Chopin had a literary awakening. In the early stages of Chopin's career, she tried to follow the literary advice and examples of others of her time. These efforts proved to be worthless. Chopin translated Solitude, a story by Guy de Maupassant, in which Maupassant escaped from tradition and authorityhad entered into himself and looked out upon life though his own being and with his own eyes. (Seyested 701). Chopin did not want to imitate Maupassant; she just wanted to express herself in her writing the way he had done so in his. In The Awakening Chopin seems to tell her story through the main character Edna Pontellier. Her breaking away from the conventions of literary domesticity is shown through Edna breaking away from the conventional feminine roles of wife and mother (Showalter 170). Kate Chopin shows boldness by taking the main characters and having them completely change their views on life. Edna is a young woman who discovers that her pampered married life is not what she wants. So she rebels to find fulfillment for her psychological, social, and sexual drives. Edna is married to Leonce Pontellier. Leonce is Edna's older husband who expects his wife to obey the region's social conventions. He sees Edna as a piece of personal property (Chopin The Awakening 2). Chopin tells in the novel that Edna is fond of her husband, with no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth (18). Edna married Leonce primarily to secure a fatherly protector who would not make too many domestic, emotional, and sexual demands on her. Edna also has no motherly attachment to her children. She was fond of her children in and uneven, impulsive way. When her children were away, she did not miss them except with an occasional intense longing (18). These feelings show that Edna was not the normal mother-woman of that time. The largest and most criticized step Chopin takes is in The Awakening. Edna is having many mixed feelings about herself and her sexuality. In the novel, Chopin allows Edna to have an affair. This affair is not out of love but out of the need for passion in Edna's life. When Edna's one true love leaves, this allows Edna to face her changing feelings. Her true love, Robert, returns but they both realize it is not ment to be and he leaves again. He explains his action by saying, I love you. Good-by, because I love you, (112). Much shock felt by the readers toward The Awakening and other stories by Chopin was the boldness she took in rejecting the conventions of other women's writing. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier appears to reject the domestic empire of the mother and the sororal world of women's culture. (Showalter 178). Edna seems to go beyond the bonds of womanhood, she did not have a mother of daughter and refuses to go to her own sister's