K

atherine Chopin (ne OFlaherty) was born in 1851, in St Louis,

Missouri, of a French Creole mother and an Irish immigrant father. She

died in 1904, in St Louis, of a brain haemorrhage. Chopin received a strict
Catholic education, was an excellent pianist, and was fl uent in French. In
1870, she moved to New Orleans with her husband and had six children
before returning, upon his death fourteen years later, to St Louis to take up
the serious writing career interrupted by marriage. An early novel, At Fault,
said to be derivative of Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre, numerous short stories,
and a second novel (destroyed by the author), Young Doctor Gosse, preceded
the 1899 publication of The Awakening. An insanely hostile critical reaction
followed, along with her publishers refusal to publish the third and fi nal
collection of short stories. Only sixty years later was her work rescued from
oblivion with the 1969 Per Seyersted edition of the Complete Works.
Kathleen Wheeler

Chopins last, exquisite, and liberating touch in The Awakening

is her modernist gesture of a refusal of fi nality at the end of the novel: 3
even into the literal level of the narrative, an uncertainty as to the meaning
Kate Chopin: Ironist of Realism 121

and value of Ednas action is reinforced by the symbolic and metaphorical

implications of her journey as the journey of the soul into the realms of the
impossible.
The Awakening becomes for the alert reader a literary autobiography,
and a tragic prognostication of things to come in Chopins life. For the
novel was a literary suicide: Chopins admirers viciously turned against her
obscenities. As a literary autobiography, it portrays Chopins own awakening
from a passive, submissive mother and wife to a woman with autonomy, as
she asserted her right to become a fully alive human being (in her case, as an
artist). Yet the novel also metaphorically dramatises the related struggle of
both the woman artist (and all genuine artists) to break with artistic traditions
and conventions in order to create new forms of expression that seem bizarre,
offensive, immoral, and ugly to a contemporary audience. For Chopin, every
artist is original only to the extent that she can adapt old forms and then
create new ones more congruent with the new perceptions and experiences
that she needs to express. Chopin showed that to remain within traditional
conventions and accepted forms is tantamount to drowning ones individuality,
originality, and creativity in a sea of banalities. Indeed, ones identity remains
unformed and immature as a result, if not actually non-existent.
The Awakening depicts
the struggle to establish an individual womans right to her point of view
in both life and art.