The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Kate Chopin [4]
Kate Chopin, nee Catherine O‘Flaherty, was the second of three children born to Thomas and Eliza Faris O’Flaherty. Her parents’ disparate backgrounds are representative of the many intersecting histories that made up the population of nineteenth-century St. Louis. Thomas was an Irish immigrant, who rose from manual laborer to become a successful local businessman. Following the death of his first wife, the thirty-nine-year-old Thomas quickly became engaged to Eliza Faris, twenty-three years his junior, who came from a respectable but impoverished Creole family. If Thomas was living the American dream of new arrivals from Europe, Eliza belonged to the St. Louis establishment, such as it was. With roots that extended back well before the city was an American territory, she descended from the French-speaking Charlevilles, who had moved from Montreal to Louisiana in the 1700s. In this, she is a true Creole of the kind who frequently appear in Chopin’s fiction. Eleven years after the marriage of Thomas and Eliza, Thomas suffered a fatal accident, ironically brought about by the very success he had sought since his arrival on American soil. One of a group of important local figures invited to dedicate the new Gasconade Bridge to Jefferson City, he died when the structure collapsed as they crossed it by train.
Only five years old at the time of her father’s death, Kate was raised in a household dominated by women. She became a favorite of her great grandmother, Victoire Verdon Charleville, who taught her French, nurtured her musical talents, and entertained her with stories about her tough and resourceful female ancestors. Kate also found a lifelong friend in Kitty Garesché, her classmate at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. The close-knit female community that surrounded Chopin left its mark on her fiction, which often dwells on the struggles of women protagonists to reconcile the demands of marriage, family, and social obligations.
Kate’s early adolescence was punctuated by separation and death. The Civil War, which forced the closure of her school and divided the city, brought an end to a comfortable, sheltered childhood. Although St. Louis was officially allied with the Union, many of Kate’s family and friends sympathized with the Confederacy. Her half-brother, George O‘Flaherty, fought for the South and died of typhoid fever before the War’s end. She lost her best friend when the Garesché family was expelled from the city because of its patriarch’s aid to the Confederacy (they would be reunited upon Kitty’s return in 1868). And thirteen-year-old Kate was most directly touched by the conflict when she was arrested for tearing down a Union flag hung on the porch of the family home, a crime punishable by death. A Confederate partisan raised in an atmosphere where slavery was tolerated, Chopin’s racial politics remain ambiguous, and critics seeking resolution have found her fiction rife with contradictions. The same cannot be said of her husband, Oscar Chopin, an avowed racial supremacist and member of the Crescent City White League, a New Orleans group dedicated to preserving white Southern rule.
Oscar Chopin entered Kate’s life in 1869, another year of ironic coincidences. She wrote her first story, “Emancipation,” a fable about an animal who, having been raised in a cage, discovers the sublime joy of freedom. It is possible to read this story as an allegory for the author’s yearning to cast off all social bonds. But at the same time she found herself entangled in new relationships of her own, including her engagement to Oscar, whom she would marry in 1870. Of French descent, Oscar had been raised on the family plantation in Natchitoches (pronounced “nak-e-tosh