Kate Chopin

1. Kate Chopin Lecture Three, Chopin and Feminist Approaches to Literature

2. Agenda Feminist Approaches to Reading and Kate Chopin Kate Chopin—context, history, and her place in Literature Hour Two: Visitors from Career Services The Victorian Era (Chopin) to Modernism (T.S. Eliot, next week) Question Set #3—move to the lab downstairs

3. About Chopin Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote two published novels and about a hundred short stories in the 1890s. Most of her fiction is set in Louisiana. Published by some of America's most prestigious magazines, including Vogue and the Atlantic Monthly Influenced heavily by her “time and place” Serves as an example of a writer between Victorian and Modernist values

4. Background • Catherine (Kate) O'Flaherty was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 8, 1850. • Her father was Thomas O'Flaherty of County Galway, Ireland. • Her mother was Eliza Faris of St. Louis. • Grew-up speaking both French and English • 1868, Kate attended the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart • Mentored by women--by her mother, her grandmother, great grandmother, as well as by the Sacred Heart nuns

5. Continued… • Between 1871 and 1879, she gave birth to five sons and a daughter. • In New Orleans, where she and her husband lived until 1879, Chopin was at the center of Southern aristocratic social life. • 1882 her husband Oscar died of malaria; in 1885 her mother died too. • She became active in St. Louis literary and cultural circles, discussing the works of many writers, including Hegel, Zola, and George Sand.

7. Spent the Civil War in St. Louis, a city where residents supported both the Union and the Confederacy. Deeply responsive during the period just prior to her undertaking a literary career to the major new ideas and fiction of her time (e.g., Darwinism, Hegel’s dialectics, etc.) From 1867 to 1870 kept a "commonplace book" in which she recorded diary entries Writing for her was a therapy against depression

8. Lecture (in-class) only content: The Victorian Era Values, Ideals, and Women Angels and Evil Women (duplicity) Keeping up Appearances Codes of Conduct Chopin’s interesting negotiation of these*

9. The Story of an Hour: Characters • Louise Mallard • Brently Mallard: husband of Louise • Josephine: sister of Louise • Richards: friend of Brently Mallard

10. The Victoria Era to Modernism

11. Pre-Modernist/Modernist • Advances in technology • World War I, World War II • Industrialization • Media and wide-spread knowledge distribution

12. Modernism The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities in art and literature after World War I. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’.. rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, [modernists] presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray.”

13. Reflection of Life: • Modern life is chaotic, futile, fragmentary Eliot argues that modern poetry “must be difficult” to match the intricacy of modern experience. • Poetry should reflect this fragmentary nature of life: “ The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning”

14. Homework What are several historical, social, and cultural forces that prompted the modernist movement? What were the effects of these influential factors?