Chopin's Life. Kate Chopin Wrote for Women Term Paper

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Chopin's life. Kate Chopin wrote for women at a time when women were to be "seen and not heard." She wrote of their lives, their fears, and the secrets that they kept from everyone but themselves. He stories still touch women today, because they bring out the underlying emotions so common in everyday events.

After being sent off to boarding school at the tender age of five, partly for her defiant and inquisitive attitude, Kate Chopin grew up in a house of strong women who were dominated by her equally strong and opinionated father, Thomas O'Flaherty. However, her father was killed in a train crash, just as Mrs. Mallard's husband's supposed fate in "The Story of an Hour." When her father died, she returned home. One biographer notes, "in real life, the crash that killed Thomas O'Flaherty liberated his daughter to come home, to be raised among the powerful women of her family. Her father's death kept Kate O'Flaherty from growing up in the typical nineteenth-century patriarchal household, in which a powerful husband ruled the roost" (Toth 10-11). Thus, Chopin knew liberation and freedom by the age of six, and chose to write eloquently about it later in her short story, "The Story of an Hour."

Like most of Chopin's works, this short story tells the tale of a woman with troubles. Kate often thought about the weight placed on her mother after her father died. Historian Toth continues, "Her most obvious musing takes place in 'The Story of an Hour,' written nearly forty years after the Gasconade [train crash that killed her father]" (Toth 10). Thus, Chopin's work reflect changes and thoughts about her own life, even if she disguises them and sets them in differing locales with divergent characters.

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There is a piece of Chopin in all she writes, and perhaps even more so in "The Story of an Hour."

This short story focuses on Mrs. Mallard, a married woman with "heart trouble." Afraid of her reaction, her sister Josephine breaks the news to her that her husband has been killed in a train wreck. At first, Mrs. Mallard grieves, as just about any woman would. Chopin writes, "She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms (Chopin 13). But then, she begins to realize the true implications of her husband's death. She realizes she will live alone, but as she contemplates the future, she also begins to realize she has gained something quite precious, her freedom. Chopin continues, "There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature" (Chopin 13). While the words refer to the newly widowed Mrs. Mallard, they could just as easily have referred to Chopin's own early liberation from the boarding school after her father's death. Free to create her own life with her mother and other female relatives, she immediately recognized the liberating value of no male in the home. Her feelings may not have been fresh when she wrote this story, but it is clear that her experience led this story in many ways.

Chopin's experience with her father is clear in nearly every sentence of this story. Later, Mrs. Mallard thinks "And….....

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