The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Kate Chopin [1]
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The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction
ISBN 1-59308-113-8
eISBN : 97-8-141-14337-6
LC Control Number 2004115323
Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher
Printed in the United States of America
QM
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FIRST PRINTING
KATE CHOPIN
KATE CHOPIN was born Catherine O‘Flaherty on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Thomas O’Flaherty, an Irish immigrant, and Eliza Faris O’Flaherty, a Creole (that is, a descendant of the original French settlers of Louisiana). Chopin’s sense of womanhood derived largely from the influences of her Creole great-grandmother and her own mother, who was left widowed in charge of a considerable estate at age twenty-seven. Chopin lived for many years in Louisiana following her marriage in 1870 to Oscar Chopin, with whom she had six children.
As a student at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, Chopin kept a “commonplace book,” a diary of her daily life, and wrote poetry. After the death of her husband in 1882, she became more serious about her writing; since she wrote about the people and culture of New Orleans, Chopin was first known as a Creole writer. She composed more than 100 short stories, which were compiled in ayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897).
Chopin developed a reputation for flamboyance. A woman of independent thought, she belonged to a group of liberal intellectuals who wore eccentric clothing. She disliked social functions but attended them to fulfill her “commercial instinct.” Although she never considered herself a women’s suffragist or a feminist, she associated with women’s rights activists who were part of the St. Louis literary circle. During this period, Chopin’s stories focused on taboo subjects, such as interracial relationships, women’s infidelity, and sexuality. The most notable of these stories, ((“Désirée’s Baby”, was published in Vogue magazine in 1893.
Chopin transcended her local status with the publication of The Awakening (1899). Influenced by the urbane stories of Guy de Maupassant, Chopin boldly questioned and defied the constraints on a woman’s freedom and individuality, but not without paying a price. Conservative literary critics relentlessly condemned the novel as immoral, and Chopin found it increasingly difficult to find a publisher. The Awakening was never banned, but the scandal surrounding it placed Chopin on the literary “blacklist” for years. It would take almost a century for The Awakening to receive due credit as an important work of art; it was revived as a feminist classic in the 1970s.
Kate Chopin died of a cerebral hemorrhage at her St. Louis home on August 22, 1904. In 1992 Chopin’s missing manuscripts were discovered in an old warehouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. Known as the Rankin-Marhefka Fragments, these papers are now at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.
THE WORLD OF KATE CHOPIN AND THE AWAKENING
1820- Fanny Wright publicly advocates women’s suffrage, the abolition
1830 of slavery, birth control, and liberal divorce laws in her book Course of Popular Lectures and in the Free Enquirer, a radical journal on civil rights.
1848 The Seneca Falls Convention for Women’s Rights takes place in Seneca Falls, New York.
1850 Catherine (Kate) O‘Flaherty is born on February 8 in St. Louis.
1855 In September Kate enrolls at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, a boarding school. She becomes a friend of Kitty Garesché, a classmate who shares her love for reading and writing. On November 1, Kate’s father, Thomas, dies in a railroad accident. She leaves school for the next two years.
1859 Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection .
1861 On April