Kate Chopin Lived and Created in a Thesis

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Kate Chopin lived and created in a time when society could not or was not willing to handle her. When she died, in 1903, it felt like the world was putting her on hold. She was a woman ahead of her times who rang the "awakening" for a cohort of women. Her tolling bells would only be heard more than half a century later when a man, a Norwegian professor from the department of British and American studies from the University of Oslo, Per Seyersted, brought Kate Chopin's life achievements back to life.

Since then, as Per Seyersted wrote in his Preface to the book Kate Chopin's Private Letters: "We have come a long way"(X). But, as all her readers will understand now, not only has Kate Chopin "finally received the recognition she deserves"(X), but she gave the world a special insight into the life of women and bourgeois families living in the middle of the nineteenth century along the lines others were tracing for them.

Chopin's novel, the Awakening, republished and translated in many languages at a time when women were in the middle of an emancipation movement never heard of before, made her powerful voice travel in time and join them on their way towards independence. Kate Chopin's exceptional life makes her work the more credible. Her literary work is the direct result of whom she was and how she chose to live. Kate Chopin is Edna Pontellier, as much as any other prestigious writers who identified themselves with their most prominent characters are those characters they created.

In her novel, The Awakening, Kate Chopin introduces her heroin into the spotlight with great care. First, the reader meets Mr. Pontellier, her husband, a forty-year-old businessman relaxing in one of Madame Lebrun's vacation rental properties at the beach, a summer vacation retreat for prominent families of New Orleans. The author chooses to introduce her main characters, Edna Pontellier, alongside another man, Robert Lebrun. He is the one who will induce the beginning of the "awakening" process.

Knowing more about Kate Chopin's biography makes one better understand her characters in The Awakening as well as their trajectory. Chopin does not come across as one of those extremist feminists who blame men for every wrong done to women in every stage in the history of human kind. She is a woman living in the South, in the second half of the nineteenth century. As fortunate as she may be in her freedom to live her life the way she sees it proper, she is not living in an ivory tower. On the contrary, her keen sense of observance makes her respond strongly to what she senses as a series of injustices in the way society treats women of her time. Furthermore, the women's passivity in this case makes Chopin tremble and her creative juices flow onto the pages of The Awakening, an elegant cry of revolt against any type of restraining means women have ever accepted.

That does not mean that men's lives were In the middle of the nineteenth century. They were expected to work hard to provide for their entire families. Like in the case of Chopin's father, Thomas O'Flaherty, they not only had to produce enough income to provide for their immediate family, but also for their relatives, who in his case, were numerous.

It is rather the type of relationship between husband and wife that bothers the artist. Consequently, the role the respective wife plays in her new family and in society comes into Chopin's focus when she writes The Awakening. In a sense, it is ironic that the novel seems to allude to a fairytale full of male and female stereotypes such as "Sleeping Beauty." It is Robert Lebrun, after all, the one who kisses the "sleeping" Mrs. Pontellier. Unlike the fairytale, in Mrs. Pontelliers' case, her brief encounter with Robert is just the beginning of a long process of awakening. The adult Kate Chopin knows what a woman needs in order to find her own identity and be able to live with it.

While men had no other choice but work to financially sustain their whole families and give their daughters enough dowry, they still had the chance to affirm their own personalities, to fill proud of their professional achievements, to boast about them both in society and at home. Women, especially those like Mrs. Pontellier, who had apparently nothing to complain about, as soon as they were in the position to deviate from the norm, were susceptible of being considered hysterical or nonsensical and even be ridiculed for such "misbehavior" or treated as "demented"(Chopin).

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Considering all this, any reader can relate very well to Mrs. Pontellier's "awakening," regardless of one's gender, especially today. It is not only the hindsight that makes one better understand her choices, her evolution, it is also the fact that the women's emancipation process is continuing today in various degrees, depending on the society they are a part of.

Kate Chopin was more than a woman living according to her own standards in what was a man's world beyond a doubt, she was also an artist who worked hard to find a voice and the best means to express it. The Awakening shows her constantly questioning an artist's work. Mademoiselle Reisz, the pianist, is that character who is there to teach by contrast. She is single, she lives alone, she has her own standards, she is not afraid to speak her mind. When she talks to Mrs. Pontellier about what it takes to become an artist she is passionate and eager to make sure her interlocutor does not take the discussion light heartedly in any way: "To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts -- absolute gifts - …And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul."…"The brave soul. The soul that dares and defies" (Chopin, 107 -- Ch. XXI -- last 2-3 pages of the chapter). The author is thus showing her credo, deliberately leaving aside any indication of gender in the discussion.

Mademoiselle Reisz is an important character in Edna's Pontellier evolution. She is the voice of reason, the voice that commands, but intervenes only when her listener is ready. She may be the reflection of those feminine voices that led Kate Chopin into the light of finding her vocation. All the women in her family and the nuns who taught her at the boarding school she attended must have left an indelible impression on Kate's soul, just like Mademoiselle Reisz is leaving on Edna's soul: "Come whenever you feel like it"(Chopin, 109 -- last paragraph in Ch. XXI) she sais to Edna. "Be careful; the stairs and landing are dark; don't' stumble"(idem) she continues with a warning.

The woman in Kate Chopin is speaking through the mouths of Edna and the other feminine characters in the novel in question, with different yet harmonious voices. In Edna and Kate's times, women were never portrayed as something other than good daughters, devoted mothers and wives. As previously mentioned, Kate Chopin appears to be living her life as a married woman in a rather exceptional way, in complete opposition to the ideal picture of a woman at that particular time and in that particular society. In her novel, Edna Pontellier is deliberately focusing on those women whom she admires for various reasons: Madamoiselle Reisz for her talent and "courageous and defying soul," Madame Ratignolles for the balance she found in being a wonderful mother and a loving wife, not because society expected it from her, but because she had found it to be her vocation.

By contrast, Edna is only starting to realize that she is out of an indefinite stagnation period, evolving on the path to a destination she does not know yet. After the vacation she spent with her family at Madame Lebrun's vacation rentals and the episode with Robert Lebrun, she is starting a long and intricate process of soul searching. To make things more complicated, she is discovering for the first time what sexual desire really means. The battle between spirit and flesh must echo a similar battle Kate Chopin had been through herself. By contrast, the writer appears to have had all the freedom in the world inside her marriage, but her high intellectual and artistic sensibilities must have clashed often with her strong sensuality.

Chopin admired beauty in spirit as well as in flesh and this becomes obvious every time her main character in the Awakening engages in conversation with a beautiful woman or a man. In Edna's life, as said before, Mademoiselle Reisz was the reasoning power, probably a parallel with the reasoning power of the nuns' voices at the Academy of the Sacred Heart. Mademoiselle Reisz is for a while a strong counterbalance to the passionate sensuous temperament Edna has not unleashed yet: "it was then, in the presence of that personality which was offensive to her, that the woman, by her divine art, seemed to….....

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