OPPapers.com

Kate Chopin

OUTLINE

I. General Background Information
a. Father dies at age of five.
i. Kate Chopin’s father dies suddenly, and so, at five years old, Kate is forced to reshape her concept of herself and her world. After her father's death, Kate's family included her widowed mother, her widowed grandmother and her widowed great-grandmother.
b. Marries and has six children.
i. Married a wealthy Creole cotton magnate, Oscar, moved to New Orleans and gave birth to six children.
c. Husband dies & Chopin begins to seriously write.
i. Chopin’s husband dies and she realizes that she needs to turn her writings into a way to support herself and her six children.
II. Chopin’s Feminist Writings
a. “Wiser Than A God”
i. In 1889, Chopin published her first two stories, "Wiser Than a God" and "A Point at Issue," both focusing on what would prove to be her favorite theme—the inherent conflict between the traditional requirement that a wife form her life around her husband's and a woman's need for discrete personhood, a conflict that in Chopin's stories often prevents a woman from having both a happy marriage and a life of her own. These first stories lack finesse; but they introduce the central conflict of her last important work, the novel The Awakening (Lauter 4).
b. The Storm
i. "The Storm," about two lover's infidelity during a thunderstorm, shows Chopin's interest in passion and infidelity (Angelfire 2)
c. “Desiree’s Baby and “The Story of an Hour”
i. Searches for female spiritual emancipation, which she found and expressed in her writings (Deter, 1)
III. Other Works
a. Chopin also wrote many outstanding children's stories, such as "Loka" and "Odalie Misses Mass" (Lauter 6).
IV. The Awakening
a. Shunned by Southern Literary Society.
i. The Awakening was very much ahead of its time; critics were outraged at its moral statements, and Chopin was shunned by southern literary society (Feminism in Literature 6).
b. Condemned by most males.
c. Condemned because of its...