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The Awakening, By Kate Chopin

757 Words4 Pages

Kate Chopin is known as one of the most influential female authors to hail from the United States. Much of her modern-day success came posthumously, but during her own time, Chopin was well-known and positively received for her short stories in particular, which were published in various prestigious magazines such as Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Young People, Youth’s Companion, and the Century. Chopin made waves with her then-controversial themes regarding women, depicting her female characters as sexually powerful and independent, and was one of the first pioneers in feminist literature. Catherine “Kate” O’Flaherty was born in St. Louis to Thomas O’Flaherty and Eliza Faris in 1850. Her mother had French heritage, and as a result, …show more content…

Over this period of time, Kate published two novels named At Fault and The Awakening as well as hundreds of short stories, some of which are children’s stories. It was the latter in particular that attained the most attention at the time, as Kate’s short stories found themselves published in high-end magazines that were distributed nationally, such as Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Young People. Some of these famed short stories include titles such as Bayou Folk, A Night in Acadie, The Storm, The Story of an Hour, Désirée’s Baby, A Pair of Silk Stockings, A Respectable Woman, and Athénaïse. However, while her short stories were loved, Kate’s second novel, The Awakening, met with harsh criticism at the time of its publication due to Kate’s defiance of gender roles and expectations for women through the novel’s protagonist, Edna Pontellier, who ultimately denied her role as a mother and a wife in favor of being independent. Despite the controversy surrounding The Awakening, it is with this novel that Kate Chopin is noted have broken new ground with literature by being the first female writer in the country to undertake passion as a serious subject for literature This blatant separation from the normal public perception of women with themes involving women that were ahead of their time became a trademark of Kate Chopin’s works as she rejected tradition and age-old customs and pioneered into her society’s mistreatment of sexuality, divorce, and females’ need for existential

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Despite Victorian society’s rejection of any sort of feminist progressive mindset, the decades preceding allowed for these ideas to take root in the women’s suffrage movement. Kate Chopin in her novel The Awakening, explores the concept of feminist individualism and fulfillment through the characterization of the protagonist Edna. Edna throughout the novel defies gender roles and develops into a strong independent woman. Yet at the conclusion of the novel, she commits suicide. Critics for decades have tried to comprehend Chopin 's intention of this conclusion.

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