Full disclosure. I teach Kate Chopin's The Awakening every year to my students when we reach our unit about literature as protest. And I fully believe her work is as seminal to the feminist experience as the works of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and Zora Neale Hurston are to desegratation. Not only that, it's a master class in writing outward clues to the subtle inner life of a character who is only slowly growing to actually DO anything as an act of her will.
Okay, that said, I found this awesome documentary for my students to watch to introduce her work. So, now you have to suffer... I mean jump for joy through it too.
There's a bit from The Awakening that I think applies here to Kate herself, both as a woman and as a writer: "She was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her."
That's where we all start as creators though, isn't it? If we don't realize our positions as an individual with something worth saying and how crucial that message might be to the world within and around us, then what's the point of writing anything at all? It would be as empty as shoveling air into a truck for load after load all day as empty trucks drive off and return for another load of nothing.
Write What You Know
From that kernel of knowing she was a unique individual with something to say, Kate found a voice that began with the stuff she had experienced and knew something about.
Say's the narrator:
"On the eve of the 20th century, Kate Chopin confronted the fundamental dilemma of what it meant to be a woman. In a stream of stories and in her novel, The Awakening, she explored the unsparing truth of women's submerged lives."
What Kate knew was what it meant to be a woman in the late 1800s, valued merely as a mom or wife, judged by housekeeping and childrearing with little thought given to dreams that may have reached beyond that cage. This idea wove into her work, from short stories such as "The Story of an Hour" and "A Pair of Silk Stockings" to her magnum opus novel The Awakening.
I would guess that she wasn't trying to start a movement, just tell the kind of story she could relate to and she figured maybe other people could as well, society be damned.
As the documentary voiceover tells us, "Chopin's stories were set in Louisiana in the aftermath of war. It would be a landscape she would draw from memory in the final years of her life." Perhaps that is why her settings seem so effortless and precise. And not only the settings but the people who, well, peopled them. As Barbara Ewell says:
"There was great demand for short fiction at that period, and one of the genres that was most popular was the one known as 'local color,' which offered descriptions of the varied parts of the country, exotic parts of the country. It was pretty clear to her early on that it was her southern stories, her Louisiana stories that sold... While the land inspired her imagination, her time there was limited."
No matter how limited, her experiences in New Orleans offered characters and settings to explore.
And explore them she did.
After her husband, Oscar, and her mother, Eliza, died, Kate was alone with six children to support on a modest income. In the 1880s, writing was one of the few ways women could make a living, averaging from "$l5 to $30 a story, and a few hundred for a novel" according to our narrator. So, at 45 years old, Chopin started on the path toward becoming a published writer.
Her first work was a poem that appeared in January 1889. However, she soon learned that her short stories were what was in demand -- and were her most successful published works.
Write Passionately
Chopin's writing was not just filled with well-described settings and people though. It had a passion that was part of who she herself was. She chose short stories as a form because that's where her passion lay.
Says Barbara Ewell:
What drove Kate Chopin was her passion for writing, and her willingness to let writing take her into places that she had never been herself, necessarily. And certainly, the literary traditions out of which she came had never really gone.
Adding to this, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese says:
She's one of those writers whose sense of craft puts her right on the edge of poetry... The writer she especially admired was the short story and novella writer, Guy de Maupassant, who perfected a kind of writing that she took very seriously.'Here was life, not fiction," she wrote in a private diary aout the novella writer Guy de Maupassant. "Here was a man who escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw."
Write To Change the World,
(Even If It's Not Intentional)
In 1897, Chopin began work on her most ambitious novel, The Awakening. Understand, Chopin did not set out with the goal of becoming a feminist writer. Truth be told, she probably couldn't have told you what a feminist writer was, if such a thing existed in the zeitgeist of her times. What she did set out to do, however, was to tell stories about the human beings she knew inside and out -- people who just happened to be female and who just happened to be denied the very right to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness their husbands, fathers, and even sons could grasp on a daily basis.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese says:
"With Chopin the dark crannies of the human soul were part of what is to be human. It was part of her war against platitudes. If you look only at the surfaces you're not going to begin to understand what people are about. It's a measure of both her talent and her character, her strength as a woman, that she didn't find the depths of the human soul, even human depravity, threatening."
Through Edna, Chopin wrote of what a life awakened to the idea of embracing the daily joys might mean... for a woman. Sure, a man could also identify with her needs (if you don't believe me, read Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome -- I once did a paper on how similar these two awakenings are), but to a woman reader, the story takes on an additional meaning, one that a man will not typically be able to identity as missing from his own life.
Barbara Ewell says of this:
Its spontaneity, and its physical demands opens up Edna to places in her heart and in her soul she'd lost contact with, maybe had never known were there...I don't think any other writer of the period, certainly no male writer, and I don't think any other woman writer tried to understand what happens when a woman experiences her own sexual being and her own self. And of course, that's exactly the tragedy and the dilemma that Chopin is exploring in her fiction which is, what happens, how do you get past this, this bind for women that if you possess your own self, if you possess your own body, you know that the options the society offers you are marriage and death.By novel's end, Edna has awakened to herself, but finds no place for that self in the world she knows. She swims out to sea till her strength is gone.
For Edna, awakening can bring only defeat. The world will simply not allow her to not be a "mother-woman." For Kate Chopin, the novel was something of a defeat as well. While there were a few positive letters and reviews, by and large, the reviews were critical and somewhat scathing. Americans, it seemed, simply were not ready for such emancipated fiction.
The question was whether Americans were prepared to read such emancipated fiction. There were a few positive letters, but then the critical reviews came in.
David Chopin says of this: "They destroyed her spirit when they came out with all this adverse reaction and one of the newspapers called it pure poison and not fit for babes, and there was an awful lot of criticism."
The world isn't often ready to see change happen.
Says Barbara Ewell:
"Once you begin to push against those margins, against those limits, you begin to offend people. You begin to offend convention and expectations, and that's exactly what Kate Chopin ran into with The Awakening."
After such an unforgiving reception of the novel, Kate disappeared into her private life and became more or less obscure in literary circles.
However, in the late 20th century, her work was rediscovered. Stories and books came back into print, and they found new audiences and new acceptance, even praise, among the critics. Not only that, her stories were being taught in schools, and let's be honest, that's what really brings a writer back from the etherous void.
So, even if she never saw it in her time or even approached writing as a form of protest or world-changing action, she accomplished it just the same.
According to Emily Toth:
I'd first read her when I was given a copy of The Awakening by a woman who said to me, "You should read this book," and the big question that we asked ourselves was how did Kate Chopin know all that in 1899?
Can you imagine someone asking something similar about you in the year 2099? Why not?
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