Kate Chopin and Feminism of the late 19th century

Introduction

Kate Chopin is considered as one of the foremost Southern regionalist writers. Kate Chopin's fiction stories show the social and sexual detail and delicacy of cultures. In works such as The Awakening, she presents ironic and even daring treatments of the sexual, racial and moral underpinnings of the society. The most well known of her works, The Awakening has become required reading for many students of the history of women's cultural oppression. The Awakening was published in 1899. After its publication, The Awakening created such uproar that its author was alienated from certain social circles in St. Louis. The novel also contributed to rejections of Chopin's later stories and the heavy criticism for the book that she endured hindered her writing. The reason was that the publishing world was simply not ready for such an honest exploration of female independence, a frank cataloguing of a woman's desires and her search for fulfillment outside marriage.

Discussion

In 1894, when Kate Chopin published Bayou Folk which was a collection of Louisiana stories, she was greeted as an outstanding local color writer. Chopin's ultimate examples of the feminine and the emancipated woman are found in The Awakening. In 1899, when she brought out The Awakening, a novel which in certain respects an American Madame Bovary, moreover, many of the libraries banned the book. As a result, her creative spirit was stifled and when she died in 1904, she was forgotten. In 1969, when the complete work of Kate Chopin appeared, the time was ripe for a reassessment and revival of this writer took place. Today she is recognized both as a literary artist of the American realist movement and as a particularly significant commentator on the female experience. (Anastasopoulou, 1991)

Edna Pontellier is the main character in The Awakening who is a wife also a mother but more importantly she is an artist in search of female freedom, sexuality and creativity. At the end of the novel Edna commits suicide by walking out, naked, into the ocean, realizing that for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her and the waves that invited her. She thinks that how strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky. Moreover, she also feels delicious like some new born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known. This act of suicide is a positive embracing of freedom and an act of re-birth.

By October of 1899, Kate had already gone against several taboos of women's writing. When her novel, The Awakening, was published, this was condemned as vulgar, morbid, and unwholesome. In fact, many cities and libraries banned the book and with that Chopin was put on the outside of many social circles. Kate situates the character of Edna Pontellier “between two historical stereotypes of femininity.” The code that Edna follows constricts and describes her as wicked but ...