Kate Chopin - the Story of an Hour

Marco Liu

ENG 2150

Professor Russell

Research Paper Assignment

Kate Chopin

        Kate Chopin was not normal woman to say the least. As a woman in the 19th century, you didn’t have much to aspire for besides getting married and essentially being a piece of property owned by her husband. However, unlike other housewives in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kate didn’t succumb to social norms. She was an independent spirit who roamed the city alone, smoking cigarettes and debating with others about politics and social issues [1]. After her husband passed away, Kate began to write fiction and her writing was unlike those of her female peers at the time as it highlighted themes of love, sex, marriage, women, and most importantly, female independence. This theme of female independence is why Kate Chopin is known as one of the first feminists in America and it is best showcased in one of her most popular stories, “The Story of an Hour”.

        Kate Chopin was born as Catherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri on February 8, 1850. She was the third of five children and the second child of Thomas O’Flaherty of County Galway, Ireland and Eliza Fairs of St. Louis. Her sisters had died in infancy and her brothers from her father’s first marriage had died in their early twenties, making her the only child in her family to live past the age of twenty-five. Her mother’s side of the family was French so she was both bilingual and bicultural and a lot of her writing could be attributed to her exposure to French culture and literature. In 1855, her father was killed in a train accident when the train that he was aboard crossed a bridge that collapsed. This accident would be the main inspiration of “The Story of an Hour”, in which Kate would depict the imagined effect the tragedy had on her mother. For the next two years following the accident, Kate lived at home with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of whom were widows.

Kate’s preteen years were integral in her development as a writer and a feminist as she lived in a female-centered household [2]. She was luckily part of a long line of ground breaking women. Her great-great-grandmother was the first woman in St. Louis to obtain legal separation from her husband. After gaining independence from her husband, she raised five children and ran a shipping business on the Mississippi [3]. This autonomy continued through the generations. While she was at living at home, her great-grand mother oversaw her education and taught her everything from French and music to the gossip of St. Louis women of the past. Her grandmother had a great impact on Kate as well as she encouraged Kate to reject hypocrisy and to love music and storytelling and to indulge in unconventional behavior [4]. Until the age of sixteen, Kate lived in a home where there were no married couples.

As for her education, Kate attended the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic boarding school “devoted to creating good wives and mothers while also teaching independent thinking”, from 1855 to 1868. The nuns that taught at the school were known for their intelligence and played an integral role in her upbringing and her writings as an adult. With the influence of the nuns as well as her grandmother, she became an avid reader of fairy tales, poetry, religious allegories, and contemporary popular novels written by women. Her English teacher encouraged her to write and from 1867 to 1870, Kate kept a “commonplace book” where she recorded observations on her readings and studies. By the time she was eighteen, Kate was a model citizen.

Kate was always at the top of the class and she consistently won medals and she was even elected into the Children of Mary Sodality. On top of her academic achievements, Kate was known as one of St. Louis’s prettiest and most popular girls. However, her diary revealed a side of Kate that the public didn’t get to see. In it, Kate wrote about her conflicted feelings about social pressures such as attending dances, flirting, and overall complying with society’s norms for women. In one of her diary entries, she wrote advice on flirting where she said to “just keep asking ‘What do you think?’” [5].  She also voiced her passion for the writings from authors such as Victor Hugo, Dante, Molière, Jane Austen, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Also, even though she went to Catholic school, Kate’s belief in God was minimal due to all the tragedies she was surrounded by during her childhood. On top of her father dying on All Saints Day, her grandmother passed away three days before Christmas in 1863 and her half-brother, George, died in the Civil War of typhoid fever on Mardi Gras.

After her graduation, Kate met Oscar Chopin, the son of a wealthy cotton-growing family in Louisiana. A year later after they met, the two got married and settled in New Orleans so that Oscar could continue his cotton brokerage business. In their first ten years of marriage, Kate gave birth to five sons and a daughter. Her marriage had a huge influence on her writing as motherhood’s joys and demands and societal restraints on women were important themes in her writing. However, Kate did not have as many restraints as other women did as a result of marriage. Like the Pontelliers in her novel, “The Awakening”, Kate and Oscar were very happy together and became immersed in Louisiana’s aristocratic society. Oscar was very tolerant of Kate’s unconventional ways, despite his relatives’ warnings. He came to treat Kate as an intellectual equal and did not mind that she smoked and drank. However, as all good things must come to an end, the couple’s happiness did not last forever.

In 1879, Oscar’s cotton brokerage business began to go under and the family was forced to move north to Natchitoches Parish, where Oscar’s family owned several small plantations. During their time there, Oscar bought and ran a general store in Cloutierville, Louisiana, where the Chopins became active in the local society. Kate became acquainted with the Creole community, which would also become an important part of her writing. In the next three years, Oscar continued to be worn down by financial worries and he died of swamp fever in 1883. His death, in conjunction with her father’s death, brought about her story, “The Story of an Hour”. His death left Kate $12,000, or $200,000 by today’s standards, in debt along with their six children to take care of. Kate decided to take matters into her own hands and managed Oscar’s business and plantations herself. During this time, she was also romantically involved with Albert Sampite, an unhappily unmarried man, and this affair would be the inspiration for Kate’s novel, “The Awakening” [6]. In 1884, despite Kate’s efforts, the general store and the plantations failed and Kate followed her mother’s suggestion and moved back to St. Louis with the children, where finances were no longer a problem. However, as things started to brighten up for Kate, her mother passed away in the following year.