The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Kate Chopin [3]
1896 Kate destroys the manuscript of Young Dr. Gosse .
1897 Way and Williams (Chicago) publishes a second collection of stories, A Night In Acadie. Chopin begins work on The Awakening.
1899
1900 Due to the notoriety of The Awakening. the publication of Chopin’s third collection of short stories, A Vocation and a Voice, is canceled by the publisher who had signed a contract to issue the volume. Chopin appears in Who’s Who in America.
1904 On August 20 Chopin dies from a cerebral hemorrhage, two days after she visits the St. Louis World’s Fair.
1916 Margaret Sanger opens the country’s first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. She is arrested and imprisoned for thirty days.
1920 U.S. women win the right to vote when Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment.
1929 Father Daniel Rankin, a Marist priest, asks Lelia Chopin Hattersley for her mother’s manuscripts. When he receives the papers, Rankin places them “on loan” at the University of Pennsylvania library. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is published in England.
1932 Rankin writes the first Chopin biography, Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories, as his doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. The book is later criticized by Chopin’s descendants for its inaccuracies.
1955 Chopin’s manuscripts are transferred from the University of Pennsylvania library to the Missouri Historical Society.
1960s-1970s Chopin’s works undergo a revival. The Awakening is hailed as a feminist classic.
1991
1992 Linda and Robert Marhefka discover Chopin’s manuscripts in an old warehouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. They turn out to be part of the body of work that Rankin had received from Lelia Chopin Hattersley in 1929. Today the Rankin-Marhefka Papers are located at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.
INTRODUCTION
ON August 20, 1904, Kate Chopin spent the day at the St. Louis World’s Fair. That evening she collapsed of a cerebral hemorrhage and died on August 22. An author with a flair for the coincidental, Chopin probably would have appreciated the ironic overlap between the end of her own life and the arrival of the world’s largest international exposition in her hometown.
The greatest event in the city’s history, the fair brought some 20,000,000 visitors from around the world to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. Designed to showcase the accomplishments of American civilization, it comprised a miniature city of its own, with a vast expanse of white buildings, lagoons, and carefully landscaped vistas that covered 1,272 acres of Forest Park. Among its many attractions were the Department of Physical Culture, exhibits of the newest artistic, architectural, and technological innovations, the world’s largest Ferris wheel, and a presentation by Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. Visitors could drink iced tea and sample their first ice cream cone, a treat invented by one of the exposition’s concessionaires. Responsibility for representing the world’s cultures fell to the anthropological division, the most elaborate of any World’s Fair. Two of its exhibits were especially popular: the massive Philippine Reservation, which educated visitors about America’s newest colony, and the Pygmy Village populated with authentic African tribespeople. Photographs of the ethnographic attractions, in which primly costumed white ladies and gentlemen peer at scantily clad natives, are a reminder of the jarring encounters that took place in St. Louis. A complex portrait of modernity in the new century, the fair was the site of dizzying juxtapositions of the exotic and the familiar, the traditional and the innovative.
Like the fair, which bore witness to the birth of modernity in the United States, Chopin’s life spanned a tumultuous period in the nation’s history. Born in 1850, when St. Louis was still largely a frontier city, Chopin lived to see it become a bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis. Living in a region divided by Union and Confederate sympathies, she experienced the Civil War firsthand.