Chopin, published in her collection A Night in Acadie in 1897. A widely acclaimed, frequently anthologized story, it is set in antebellum New Orleans and deals with slavery, the Southern social system, Creole culture, and the ambiguity of racial identity.
Kate Chopin, 1851-1904
A Night in Acadie
Chicago: Way & Williams, 1897.
Summary
Biographers agree that Katherine O'Flaherty Chopin was born February 8, but there is some discrepancy whether she was born in 1850 or 1851. Living in St. Louis, Missouri, her family was financially stable and socially well established. Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was an Irish immigrant, and her mother, Eliza Faris O'Flaherty, was a French Creole; both were devout Catholics. Though Thomas O'Flaherty died in 1855, Chopin's mother never remarried. Young Kate attended the Sacred Heart Academy in St. Louis, where she graduated in 1868. On June 9, 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, a Louisiana native, and the couple settled in New Orleans. After the failure of Oscar Chopin's cotton factoring business in 1879, the family moved to Cloutierville, in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, where Oscar ran a general store and managed several small plantation properties. Widowed in December 1882, Kate Chopin found herself the sole caretaker of six children and the inheritor of considerable debt. Able to settle her husband's affairs in under two years, Chopin returned to St. Louis in 1884, where she remained until her death on August 22, 1904.
Kate Chopin did not begin writing until the late 1880s, driven by financial necessity and a desire for intellectual activity. Chopin's early work appears shaped by William Dean Howells's realism, though her later ironic pieces show the influence of Guy de Maupassant. Despite living in Louisiana for a brief fourteen years, Chopin infuses her texts with Creole, Cajun, and African American cultures. Her portrait of this uniquely Louisianan society, combined with her employment of dialect and regional mannerisms, contribute to her particular flourish as a local colorist. Her first novel, At Fault, was printed privately in 1890. Two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), were published by Houghton Mifflin and Way & Williams, respectively. Herbert S. Stone & Company printed her last and most famous novel, The Awakening, in April 1899. However, contemporary reviewers were scandalized by its frank and sympathetic portrayal of an adulterous heroine, leaving the author disheartened by the book's reception. Following the rejection of her third collection of short stories, "A Vocation and a Voice," Kate Chopin's artistic production waned.
The twenty-one short stories in A Night in Acadie, like those of Bayou Folk, take place in the uniquely blended, multicultural Louisiana. Yet unlike Chopin's first collection of short stories, A Night in Acadie reveals a bolder, less traditional treatment of bayou life. For example, "Athénaïse" is the tale of a young woman who, wearied after a brief two months of marriage, leaves her husband and moves to New Orleans. Athénaïse comes close to having an affair, but her discovery that she is pregnant awakens her passions and results in her return to her husband, Cazeau. In stories like "Azélie" and "At Chênière Caminada," characters embrace an unrestrained, passionate love that often produces irrational decisions or pronounced despair. A Night in Acadie is populated with memorable figures, including the exceedingly lazy Polydore, who fakes a rheumatic attack in order to avoid labor, and the impish Mamouche, who subjects the neighborhood to his mischievous pranks. In the case of these two tricksters, both ultimately prove repentant, thereby restoring order to their society. Chopin's stories also include rather independent, unconventional women, from Mademoiselle Aurélie in "Regret," a remarkably contented spinster who is transformed by her two-week encounter with surrogate motherhood, to "A Matter of Prejudice's" crotchety Madame Carambeau, who is similarly altered by her experiences nursing a sick "American girl." Throughout these collected short stories, Chopin examines the emergent tensions between individual desires and the communal good. And in somewhat ambivalent terms, Kate Chopin begins exploring the implications of characters' internal awakenings, a theme that would later induce public moral outrage in response to The Awakening.
See also the entry for Kate Chopin from the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture available on this site.
Works Consulted: Garraty, John A. and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Pizer, Donald and Earl N. Harbert, eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Realists and Naturalists, volume 12, Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, 1978; Walker, Nancy A., Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts, The Awakening, second edition, Nancy A. Walker, ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000, 3-21; Wilson, Charles Reagan and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Kate Chopin (/ˈʃoʊpæn/,[1][2] also US: /ʃoʊˈpæn, ˈʃoʊpən/;[3] born Katherine O'Flaherty; February 8, 1851 – August 22, 1904)[4] was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered by scholars[5] to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and is one of the most frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage. She is best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening.
Of maternal French and paternal Irish descent, Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She married and moved with her husband to New Orleans. They later lived in the country in Cloutierville, Louisiana. From 1892 to 1895, Chopin wrote short stories for both children and adults that were published in such national magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her stories aroused controversy because of her subjects and her approach; they were condemned as immoral by some critics.
Her major works were two short story collections and two novels. The collections are Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included "Désirée's Baby" (1893), a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana,[6] "The Story of an Hour" (1894),[7] and "The Storm" (1898).[6] "The Storm" is a sequel to "At the Cadian Ball," which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk.[6]
Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The characters in her stories are usually residents of Louisiana, and many are Creoles of various ethnic or racial backgrounds. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north-central Louisiana, a region where she lived.
Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time.[8] In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, "some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius."