The Influence of Chopins Life - Book Report/Review Example

A Critical Analysis of the Influence of Chopin’s Life on “the Story of an Hour” Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” can be read as an appendage to her real life as well as her literary corpus. Though endowed with a short-fleeting span, the story appears to be a mute facticity that self-evidently attests much of Chopin’s writing style as well as her grand stance in her contemporary and modern feminist discourse. Chopin never considered herself as a feminist. At least, the famous feminist historian Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese claims so, as she says, “Kate was neither a feminist nor a suffragist, she said so. She was nonetheless a woman who took women extremely seriously.” (1) Here the question that often loiters in the readers’ mind is where Chopin is to be placed in the modern feminist discourse and how this position was influenced by her real life. Chopin’s stories including “The Story of an Hour” explore the womanhood in a society that is extremely patriarchal in nature. Yet it seems that her protagonists appear to be preoccupied with their own selves in a patriarchal backdrop. Patriarchy remains a silent reality in her stories and it does not sound much as an oppressive one. Similarly, in the “Story of an Hour” her protagonist Mrs. Mallard reveals much of a woman’s self in patriarchy that remains a silent reality. Indeed Chopin belongs to an age when female authors were trying to voice out a female-self dispelling the years-old nonexistence. In order to exist in a male dominated society, dispelling the nonexistence, the female authors like Chopin, Gilman, etc had to discover their own selves before engaging with the oppressive patriarchy. Therefore, Chopin like others had to look into her real-life experiences. It is obvious such self-exploration along with a number of other events influenced her writing to be gynocentric. Referring to the influence of Chopin’s real-life experiences on the story, Jasdomin Tolentino comments: Kate Chopin, raised in an unconventional and matriarchal Louisiana family, went against nineteenth century chauvinist society and used her own life experiences to embody her feminist views in stories like “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour.” (7) Like a number of other works of Kate Chopin, “the Story of An Hour” lacks a male villain. Indeed it does not portray the least villainy of the male counterparts. A Mrs. Mallard reaction to her husband appears to be confusing and unusual. But it is obvious that she is not antagonistic to her supposedly dead husband. Yet she feels a sense of relief at the death of Mr. Mallard. The only possible reason behind this sense of relief lies in the fact that she is repulsed by the authoritarian and restrictive persona a husband is supposed to wear in a male dominated society. She is in conflict with the restrictive aura surrounding the patriarchal notion of husband. Rather Mrs. Mallard acknowledges the kindheartedness and love of her husband as an individual. It shows that as an individual or a friend Mr. Mallard is quite a good person: “She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead” (Chopin 34). But the problem evolves from Mr. Mallard’s role of a husband. The phrases, “Free! Body and soul free!”, “free, free, free!”, “no one to live for during those coming years”, etc- all these are to be considered as Mrs. Mallard’s convulsive expression of joy at the prospect of oncoming freedom. One can argue that Mrs. Mallard’s joy is the joy of a freed soul that has been trapped in her marriage. Also since she cannot blame her husband for her imprisonment, the real villain is not the husband, but the institution of marriage that itself is structured patriarchal. This lack of a male villain or a visibly oppressive patriarchal figure can be connected to the lack of Chopin’s bitterness with any male during her lifetime. Also her own conjugal experiences contributed to the creation of character like Mrs. Mallard, trapped in marriage. Referring to the influence of her life on her works, Christina Ker says, “Since all evidence seems to suggest that Kate Chopin herself had a loving and unusually fulfilling marriage for her time…it can probably be deduced that her early years are what greatly influenced her later work” (2). Until her marriage with Oscar Chopin, Katherine O’Flaherty (later Kate Chopin) lived in a female-centered household. At the age of five, her father died in a train accident. From then her family essentially lacked a male figure (Chopin had a brother who died when she was thirteen years old). She passed her preteen years with mother, grandmother and great-grand-mother. All of these women in Kate’s early life were widows. Her great grandmother heavily shaped “young Kate’s mental and artistic growth” by cultivating her “taste for storytelling, a relish for the intimate details about… the earliest settlers of the Louisiana Territory, and an unabashed, unhesitant, even unjudgmental intellectual curiosity about life” (Davis 3). Moreover her early academic education also greatly influenced her life as well as her writing. In the school St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, she learnt about “women’s wisdom, rigorous intellectual challenges, homely chores, and the celebration of women” (Toth “Unveiling Kate” 15). She was taught, by the great grandmother at home, and by the nuns in the school, to think independently, to observe life inquisitively and, at the same time, to be submissive to men (Seyersted 21). But these teachings did not mentally prepare her “to accept completely the limitations on a woman’s autonomy that have traditionally accompanied wifehood.” (Tolentino 11) Indeed the disparity between the lesson to think independent and the reality that she was destined to be a housewife helped greatly to create Mrs. Mallard. Mrs. Mallard’s entrapment in her marriage and lack of complaints against her husband are reminiscent of Chopin’s own conjugal life. From her early childhood, she had been accustomed to view autonomous women who were treading the path of life on their own. Therefore, she was not prepared to accept the obligations and limitations imposed by the society on a wife. Her entrapment in Oscar’s household was further reinforced by the fact that her husband was more liberal than others. In fact, like Mrs. Mallard the protagonist of her story, she not only mourned the death of a liberal husband who allowed his wife to “smoke in public”, “stroll up and down the street alone” and “lift her skirts higher than was necessary”, “to wear dress seductively” (Toth, “Kate Chopin” 141) but also guiltily cherished the freedom from “heavy social responsibilities” that her society expected from her as a wife. (Skaggs 3) Oscar died from malaria on December 10, 1882. The story was published subsequently on April 19, 1894. It is very possible that Chopin’s own feelings about Oscar’s death have enriched the story greatly. It is not shocking that she would mourn Oscar’s death but also cherished the freedom derived from it. (Toth “Unveiling Kate” 34) For an autonomous woman, freedom is more important than the life a life of a dearest one. Chopin’s unconventional upbringing in a female-centered family where she viewed female autonomy in practice and where she viewed the deaths of her “father, grandfather, and great-grandfather” “prevented her as she matured from experiencing in her own family the traditional submissiveness of women to men” (Skaggs 2). Like Chopin’s own conjugal life, the protagonist’s acknowledgement of her husband’s kindheartedness and yet her sense of liberation and freedom at her husband, Mr. Mallard’s probable death essentially show that marriage itself is a patriarchal institution that a woman cannot object to, but accept. Works Cited /Annotated Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. 352-54. Print. This story by Kate Chopin, a famous American author, is about a woman who is overwhelmed at the prospect of freedom derived from her husband’s supposed death. This story helped me to find out traces of Chopin’s life’s influence on the writing style and characters. Davis, Sara deSaussure. “Kate Chopin.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 12: American Realists and Naturalists (1982): 59-71. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Pace Univ., Mortola Library. 3 Mar. 2008 http://galenet.galegroup.com/ Web. Sara DeSaussure Davis, a Ph.D. in English Literature has written many articles and books about Kate Chopin. Though this article primarily focused on Chopin’s novel, “The Awakening” Davis has thoroughly summarized Chopin life in it. I found this article very useful because of the discussion on Chopin’s great-grandmother’s influence on her intellectual growth as well as her writings. “Kate Chopin Re-awakening”, Interviews. July 29, 2007. http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/interviews.html Web I found this interview with Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese useful because she has tried to explain how Chopin’s life influenced her feminist stance. Her assertion that “Kate was neither a feminist nor a suffragist” is quite interesting. It is because her stance as a narrator in the aforesaid story cannot prove her to be a feminist in traditional sense. Unlike traditional feminists’ approach to portray an oppressive male villain, Chopin portrays Mrs. Mallard’s husband whom the protagonist considers as a kind person. Ker, Crishtina. “Ahead of Her Time: An Overview of the Life and Works of Kate Chopin”, May 3, 2012. < http://empirezine.com/spotlight/chopin/chopin1.htm> Web Christina Ker’s article generally discusses the major events of Chopin’s life and reviews their general influence on her intellectual growth as well as her writings. Seyersted, Per. Introduction. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. 21. Print. In this book, Seyersted, “an assistant professor of American literature at the University of Oslo” discusses how Chopin’s early formal education influenced her writing. In the introduction of this book the author provides a brief history of Chopin’s early education at the Academy of the Sacred Heart. Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1985. Print. Peggy Skaggs’s book briefly focuses on particular events in Chopin’s life and traces their influences on her major works. A very helpful feature of this book is that has an specific chapter devoted to Chopin’s story, “The Story of An hour”. Tolentino, Jasdomin, “Kate Chopins Life and Personal Influence” (2008). Excellence in Research Awards. Paper 2. Available at http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/research_awards/2 Web. I found this extremely helpful article of Jasdomin Tolentino on “Excellence in Research Awards”. Josdomin’s article is greatly helpful because of its analytical insight into the influences of Chopin’s life on her works as well as the “Story of an Hour”. Toth, Emily. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Print. Emily Toth, a Professor of English at Louisiana State University, is a devoted researcher of Chopin’s works. In this book she claimed that the “Story of an Hour” tells not only Chopin’s mother’s story, but also her own liberation at her husband’s death that preceded the publication of the story by two years. Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1990. Print. This book of Emil Toth helped me a lot with the in-details description of Chopin’s life. Read More