Kate+Chopin+Bio

=Kate Chopin= By Christina Ker

"AHEAD OF HER TIME" An Overview of the Life and Works of "Having a group of people at my disposal, I thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had the slightest intimation of such a thing, I would have excluded her from the company. But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over, and it was then too late."

Thus did Kate Chopin respond to her critics in the July, 1899, edition of Book News, having been almost universally condemned for the publication of her second novel: The Awakening. A novel that would become an American classic and is often included on required reading lists for literary courses and which is almost certainly a benchmark for the transition of American women writers from the themes of romance and contented domesticity to the exploration of the emotional and sexual needs of women. It is ironic, too, that the publication of The Awakening, certainly her highest artistic achievement as a novelist, would effectively end Kate Chopin's literary career and place her, now recognized as one of the most important of American women novelists, in obscurity for almost half a century.

The question of who was Kate Chopin and what influences did she have has often been asked by readers of her works. Having written the majority of her stories over a 10-year span, and not having begun to write until the age of 39, Kate Chopin was, as one of her most famous characters, Mademoiselle Reisz, stated, "The artist who dares and defies."

Born Catherine O'Flaherty on July 12, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate Chopin was the daughter of an immigrant Irishman, Thomas O'Flaherty and a French-American mother, Eliza Faris. One of three children born to this union (Thomas' second, his first having produced her brother George), Kate was their youngest child and by all accounts, a happy one. However, in 1855 Thomas O'Flaherty died suddenly, and so, at five years old, Kate was forced to reshape her concept of herself and her world, which at that time largely revolved around the father figure as the center of the household. After her father's death, Kate's family included her widowed mother, her widowed grandmother and her widowed great-grandmother.

Her personal community included her brothers, her sister (who later died while still in childhood) and assorted other relatives and people. Records indicate that the O'Flaherty household usually abounded with people during Kate's childhood and adolescence. However, in this happy domestic scene, one begins to get a glimpse of what would ultimately so greatly influence Kate Chopin as a writer-- the lack of male role models and men as central figures in her life as she matured. This lack would also prevent her from experiencing what was basically a fundamental social concept of her time--the tradition of submission of women to men in all social spheres, but especially that of marriage.

In June, 1868, Kate graduated from the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. Being a young debutante, she entered into the St. Louis social scene and was "one of the acknowledged belles of St. Louis." As a young, southern debutante, she would have been thrown together with young men of her social class and preparing for her expected role of wife and mother. However, her upbringing in a household of women and her education by nuns in a school for girls, may not have prepared her to completely accept the societal limitations of such a role. While it is true that she would have been instructed in the basic duties of being both a wife and a mother, and also taught subordination of the self to a "higher" masculine authority, her primary role models, both at home and at school, were women. Therefore, Kate would have been quite accustomed to seeing