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Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)
American author 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 and most of her best-known work focuses on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women.
Her early novel At Fault (1890) had not been much noticed by the public, but The Awakening (1899) was widely condemned. Critics called it morbid, vulgar, and disagreeable. Willa Cather, who would become a well known 20th century American author (Western prairie, immigrant stories), labeled it trite and sordid. (It was even banned from some libraries.)
Her short stories were well received, published by some of America’s most prestigious magazines—Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Young People, Youth’s Companion, and the Century. A few stories were syndicated by the American Press Association. Twenty-six of her stories are children’s stories.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)
Her stories appeared also in her two published collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), both of which received good reviews from critics.
By the late 1890s, she was well known to magazine readers, but her third collection of stories, to have been called A Vocation and a Voice, was for unknown reasons cancelled by the publisher and did not appear as a separate volume until 1991.
Chopin’s novels were mostly forgotten after her death in 1904, although several appeared in an anthology 5 years after her death; others were reprinted over the years, and slowly people again came to read her.
In the 1930s, a Chopin biography spoke well of her short fiction but dismissed The Awakening as unfortunate. However, by the 1950s scholars recognized that novel as an insightful and moving work of fiction. They set in motion a Kate Chopin revival, one of the more remarkable literary revivals in the United States.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Childhood
Catherine (Kate) O’Flaherty was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 8, 1850, the second child of Thomas O’Flaherty of County Galway, Ireland, and Eliza Faris of St. Louis. Kate’s family on her mother’s side was French and Kate grew up speaking both French and English. She was bilingual and bicultural, and the influence of French life and literature on her thinking is noticeable throughout her fiction.
From 1855 to 1868, Kate attended the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. As a girl, she was mentored by woman—her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, as well as by the Sacred Heart nuns.
Kate formed deep bonds with her family members, the sisters at school, and her life-long friend Kitty Garasché who became founder and headmistress of the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco.
Much of Chopin's fiction draws on the nurturing she received from women as she was growing up.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Childhood
At 18, Kate was an “Irish Beauty,” her friend Kitty later said, with “a droll gift of mimicry” and a passion for music. At about nineteen, through social events at a wealthy estate near St. Louis, Kate met Oscar Chopin whose French father had taken the family to Europe during the Civil War.
“I am going to be married,” Kate confided in her commonplace book, “married to the right man. It does not seem strange as I had thought it would–I feel perfectly calm, perfectly collected. And how surprised everyone was, for I had kept it so secret!” Kate and Oscar were married in 1870.
The couple settled in New Orleans, where Oscar established a business as a cotton factor, dealing with cotton and other commodities (corn, sugar, and molasses, among them). Louisiana was in the midst of Reconstruction at the time, and the city was beset with economic and racial troubles.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Marriage
But New Orleans also offered superb music at the French Opera House, along with fine theatre, horse races, and, of course, Mardi Gras. Kate may have met the French painter Edgar Degas, who lived in New Orleans for several months around 1872.
Like other wealthy families in the city, the Chopins would go by boat to vacation on Grand Isle, a Creole resort in the Gulf of Mexico. (need to know if you read The Awakening.
Between 1871 and 1879 Kate gave birth to five sons and a daughter.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Marriage
Oscar bought a general store in Cloutierville, but in 1882 he died of malaria–and Kate became a widow at age thirty-two, with the responsibility of raising six children. She never remarried.
In 1883 and 1884, Chopin’s recent biographer, Emily Toth, has written that Kate had an affair with a local planter. But she then moved with her family back to St. Louis where she found better schools for her children and a richer cultural life for herself. Shortly after, in 1885, her mother died.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)—Writing Career
Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, her obstetrician and a family friend, encouraged her to write. Influenced by Guy de Maupassant and other writers, French and American, Kate began to compose fiction, and in 1889 one of her stories appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In 1890 her first novel, At Fault, was published privately.
Chopin completed a second novel, to have been called Young Dr. Gosse and Théo, but her attempt to find a publisher failed and she later destroyed the manuscript.
She became active in St. Louis literary and cultural circles, discussing the works of many writers, including Hegel, Zola, and George Sand.
During the next decade, she plunged into her work and kept accurate records of when she wrote her hundred or so short stories, which magazines she submitted them to, when they were accepted (or rejected) and published, and how much she was paid for them.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Marriage
Chopin published an essay in Critic that offers a rare insight into what she thinks about writers and writing. “There is a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana, nor does it lie at the antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it.”
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Marriage
Chopin’s grandmother died in 1897. She worked on The Awakening that year, finishing the novel in 1898. She also wrote her short story “The Storm” in 1898, but, apparently because of its sexual content, she did not send it out to publishers. Probably no mainstream American publisher would have printed the story.
The next year, 1899, one of her stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and Herbert S. Stone published The Awakening. A few critics praised the novel’s artistry, but most were negative, calling the book “morbid,” “unpleasant,” “unhealthy,” “sordid,” “poison.”
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Marriage
In 1904 Kate Chopin bought a season ticket for the famous St. Louis World’s Fair, which was located not far from her home. It had been hot in the city all that summer, and Saturday, August 20, was especially hot, so when Chopin returned home from the fair, she was very tired. She called her son at midnight complaining of a pain in her head. Doctors thought that she had had a cerebral hemorrhage. She lapsed into unconsciousness the next day and died on August 22. She is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.
Her last published story appeared in Youth’s Companion on March 30, 1905. Fifty years later, critics began to understand the essence of her work. Since 1969, countless scholars have written about Chopin’s life and work. Most is feminist in nature or focused on women’s positions in society.
Kate Chopin (from Kate Chopin.org)--Marriage
It took decades before critics fully grasped what Chopin had accomplished. In 1969 a critic wrote that she “broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardly fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman’s submerged life. . . . She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom.”
Kate Chopin—Questions for discussion
What did you think of “The Story of an Hour”? Of “Desiree’s Baby”?
Kate Chopin—Questions for discussion
Did any of you read any of the other short stories on her website? Like
“A Pair of Silk Stockings”
“A Respectable Woman”
Eudora Welty—biography (from Annenberg Learner)
Eudora Alice Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived nearly all of her life. A first-generation Mississippian, Welty grew up in comfortable circumstances and developed an early love of reading. After graduating from the local high school at age sixteen, Welty spent two years at Mississippi State College for Women before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a B.A. in English in 1929.
Eudora Welty—biography (from Annenberg Learner)
She declared her intention of becoming a writer, but decided to go into advertising after her father expressed concern that she would be unable to support herself and that writing was perhaps a waste of time. “He was not a lover of fiction,” Welty once recalled, “because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact.”
But Welty continued to write, and her job interviewing poor rural southerners and writing stories as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) helped her develop her ability to capture dialogue and bring to life the variety of situations that would comprise her later fiction. In addition to her writing, the photographs Welty took to accompany her WPA stories have become an important part of her legacy as a southern storyteller.
Note: We read Mary Coin, by Marisa Silver, about the "Migrant Mother" photo taken by Dorothea Lange, also for the WPA
Eudora Welty—biography (from Annenberg Learner)
By 1936 Welty had begun publishing stories in several small but influential southern journals, and she quickly attracted the notice of established writers such as Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter. Porter was especially encouraging; she eventually wrote the preface to Welty’s first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green, published in 1941.
Welty’s writing is rooted in the places she knew best–small southern towns peopled with seemingly ordinary characters who love to talk and whose conversation reveals their complex and often wryly amusing interior lives.
Many of her best-known and most frequently anthologized stories–such as “Why I Live at the P.O.” or “Petrified Man”--feature characters who seem to thrive on the tension and unpredictability that arises from teasing, taunting, or bickering with each other, yet who generally seem to be friends despite their differences.
Eudora Welty—biography (from Annenberg Learner)
By dramatizing the ordinary and everyday conversations of her characters, Welty often demonstrates that differences can bring people together, just as much as they can tear them apart.
Welty won numerous literary awards in her lifetime, including three O’Henry prizes, a Pulitzer, the American Book Award, the National Medal of Arts, and more.
She won the Pulitzer for The Optimist's Daughter in 1973, a novella and an interesting but somewhat "quirky" book.
Her story “Why I Live at the P.O.” also inspired the developer of a popular email program to name his software after her. At the time of her death, Welty was considered by many to be the South’s greatest living writer.
She died July 23, 2001 and her home in Jackson, Mississippi, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public.
Eudora Welty—biography (from Annenberg Learner)
Of her own work, she wrote: “What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.“
"A Worn Path" was included in Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, and received the second place O. Henry Award in 1941. It remains one of Welty's most famous short works.
Questions for discussion
“A Worn Path” is basically the story of an older African American woman who “takes a trip to town” to pick up medicine for her grandson. It’s set in Natchez, Mississippi, during the Depression.
What characteristics of Southern writing do you see in this story?
Questions for discussion
Welty herself has said it is a story about how a writer works. If that’s true, how so?
Questions for discussion
One critic has drawn comparisons between this story and Odysseus?
Ring any bells? Hint: Cold Mountain
Questions for discussion
What are the characteristics of small town life that were so appealing, and appalling, to these short story writers?
Breakout room question
What did you take away from these two short stories?
Next Week
Carson McCullers, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud”
Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”
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