A Literary Imagination Put to a Halt

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Kate Chopin’s literary career began to flourish after her husband’s death and her deep intimate thoughts of her social and marital status were revealed in her fictitious works. Her imagination that she had put into her works was perceived to be her own intimate thoughts that she longed to live during her marriage. She had a “pursuit of solitude, independence, and an identity apart from her children—and apart from the men who always admired her.” (Chopin 114) Her beginning literary career quickly prospered yet came to an abrupt ending once her book The Awakening was criticized for its feminist delivery, adultery, immorality, and its attempt to advocate for the repressed women of the 19th century.

Today Kate Chopin’s works do not receive such condemnation and are highly conceived as great literary works. Due to Kate Chopin’s life evolving in the 19th century, when women’s place was thought to be in the home, raising children, and putting all their dedication into their husband’s wishes and lifestyle, her work did not receive the desired attention that only came after her death in 1904. She revealed to the world that “a person lives in a community, but the community also lives in the person.” (Krstovic 11) Nancy Walker states in her book Kate Chopin A Literary Life,

“Fortunately for Kate Chopin, the regional sketches with which she began her publishing career were in great demand in the final decades of the century; on the other hand, late-century Victorian notions of feminine propriety had a devastating effect on the novel [The Awakening] that should have been the capstone of her career.” (Walker 6)

The negative attention that it did receive caused Chopin to end her dreams as a literary writer.

Catherine (Kate) O’Flaherty wa...

... middle of paper ...

...ues it assigns to women, not to fully human beings.” (Bloom vii)

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, ed. Kate Chopin. Comp. Chelsea House Publishers. New York: Chelsea House,

1987.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening: an Authoritative Text, Biographical and Historical Contexts,

Criticism. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994.

Krstovic, Jelena. Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction

Writers. Vol. 110. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 2008. 1-88.

Roberts, Edgar V. “The Story of an Hour.” Literature: an Introduction to Reading and Writing.

New York: Longman, 2009. 331-32.

Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Walker, Nancy A. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave,

2001.

Witalec, Janet. Twentieth-century Literary Criticism. Vol. 127. Detroit, MI: Gale Research,

2003. 1-237.

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