Kate Chopin: A Reawakening

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. . . . . . . . . . . The people walked in little groups toward the beach. They talked and laughed. Some of them sang. . .

. . . . . . In a stream of stories and in her novel, The Awakening, she explored the unsparing truth of women's submerged lives. Chopin stories were set in Louisiana in the aftermath of war. It would be a landscape that she would draw from memory in the final years of her life. . .

Kate Chopin's own story began four decades earlier, further north along the river. St. Louis in the 1850s still harbored the spirit of a fur trading town, but the city was expanding as waves of settlers passed through to the west. Here on the front street levee, Captain Thomas O'Flerty and Irish merchant furnished them with boats and supplies. She had married Eliza Ferris when she was only 16, but her family had fallen on hard times and needed financial support. She gave him legitimacy in the French Creole aristocracy. In 1850, their daughter Kate was born. They were doing well, then fate intervened. On November 1, 1855, Thomas O'Flerty joined city leaders in celebration of a new line

of the Pacific Railroad. Just as the train crossed a bridge, the structure buckled under the weight. Ten cars plunged 30 feet in the river, amidst rain and lightning. Kate's father and 29 others were killed. Kate was only five in a household now run solely by women. Her great-grandmother, Madame Victoria Chalaville, determined to take over her education. She taught Kate music and French. The nuns at Sacred Heart convent took over her days with an elite education for French intellectual women. It was unusual, given that most girls didn't go to school at all.

There, she met Kitty Gereche, a classmate. They had the kind of friendship that a lot of girls have that really helps them throughout life, having someone to tell secrets to and to share a lot of things with. It just was the one lasting relationship throughout Kate's life. But there were hardships. Civil war intervened. Tragedy's neo-flarity household multiplied with the deaths of Kate's half-brother, and Madame Chalaville. Kitty's family was forced to leave town when it was learned that her father was supplying the Confederates with guns. Kate and Kitty did not see each other for years. When they finally came together again in the late 1860s, they were young women of marriageable age.

I do not think that Kate resembled her mother so much as her father, Kitty remembered. She was an Irish beauty. Her eyes were brown and looked right at you. Meanwhile, Kitty had decided to enter a convent. It was as if a curtain had fallen between them. The 1870s was a time of few choices for women. Kate's questioning of Catholicism and of women's roles came to the fore in her story, Lilax. Madame Adrienne Vareval never announced her coming, but the good nuns knew very well to look for her. With a scent of Lilax, Sister Agatha would turn to the window upon her face the happy,

beatific expression with which pure and simple souls watch for the coming of those they love. Adrienne rang the bell. The door was opened cautiously by a lay sister who stood there with downcast eyes and flaming cheeks, saying, by order of her mother superior, after which she closed the door. Adrienne remained stunned. The lilax fell from her arms. What the story sets up is this relationship, this tension between the need in people's lives for sensuality, for the physical, for that kind of innocence and physicality represented by childhood, that Adrienne comes to recapture, Adrienne Vareval comes to recapture in her time at the convent. Set against that is the morality, a rigid morality of Catholicism, which will not tolerate the juxtaposition of innocence and physicality and sensuality.

That you either have to be innocent or you have to be sexual, you can't be both. Kate chose another path and stepped into a world of social engagements. Many were held at Oakland, the elegant country home of Louis Benoit. It was the heart of St. Louis' French Creole society. At one of these gala affairs, Kate met Oscar Chopin, the son of a wealthy Louisiana planter, and a relative of the Benoit family. On June 9, 1870, they married and embarked on a three month tour of Europe. By the time they reached Paris, the Franco-Prussian war had broken out.

On August 19, Kate despaired, rain still falling, so Oscar went out alone, and returned with the very sad news of the war. Never have the French armies suffered such repeated modifications. Oscar and Kate were forced to retreat to his native Louisiana. They settled in New Orleans in the fall of 1870. It was a world unto itself. She arrived in the city pregnant with her first child. She recalled, I can remember yet that hot southern day on magazine street New Orleans, waking from out of a stupor to see in my mother's arms a little piece of humanity all dressed in white, which they told me was my little son.

Over the decade, five more children were born. Kate's time in New Orleans offered characters and settings to its floor. But to Oscar, the city stirred only bitter frustration. Business at the cotton exchange was down 40%. The aftermath of the war affected everyone, white and black alike. Kate's fiction would explore some of the racial tensions that it swept through the city, during and before her time there. Zora Yeed had seen the bow Mizzor danced the bambola in Congo Square, as proud looking as a king, and Zora Yeed grew sick with love for Mizzor. But when Zora Yeed kneel before her mistress and asked to marry Mizzor,

Madame de la Riviere was speechless with rage. Mizzor was sold away into Georgia, where he would no longer hear his creole tongue spoken, nor dance Kalinda, nor hold La Bell Zora Yeed in his arms. When their baby was born, Zora Yeed came out of the awful shadow, but the baby was removed and sent away to Madame's plantation far at the coast. Zora Yeed could only moan Limuri, Limuri, and turned her face to the wall. She was known ever after, as Zora Yeed lafal. She was shook as a dark cranny of the human soul. We're part of what it is to be human. It was part of her war against platitudes.

If you look only at the surfaces, you're not going to begin to understand what people are about. It's a measure of both her tongue and her character, her strength as a woman, that she didn't find the depths of the human soul, even human to gravity threatening. Where Kate explored Oscar Lett to take a stand, he joined a white league in opposition to black leaders and union forces. On September 14, 1874, the league led a full-scale riot in New Orleans. It took a week for federal troops to restore order. Five years later, economic pressures finally forced the show pens to move. In 1879, they retreated to Oscar's ancestral home in northwest Louisiana.

Here, along the Red River, in Akatish Parish, lay remnants of one of the oldest French plantation communities in America. She was plunked into a tiny town of 600, 700 people. There was really just one long street, and then fields. She never fit in. The land became the central focus of show pens first novel at fault, and many of her short stories. There were acres of open land cultivated in a slovenly fashion, but so rich, that cotton and corn and weed and cocoa grass grew rampant. The Negro quarters were at the far end of this open stretch, and consisted of a long row of old and very crippled cabins. Directly back of these, a dense wood grew in how much mystery and a witchery of sound and shadow

and strange lights when the sun shone. Of a gin house, there was left scarcely a trace. They dealt with the despair of Creoles ruined by the war. About the great solemn pillars, she reached her arms and pressed her cheek and lips upon the senseless brick. Adia, Adia, she whispered. She had grown very old, while the outward pressure of a young and joyous existence had forced her footsteps into the light. Her soul had stayed in the shadow of the rowing. They told of acadians or former slaves gathering for weekly dances in the woods.

Tell us, far, looking at across the prairie, could see them coming from all directions. The little Creole ponies, the mule carts, the Negro musicians. There was the same scene every Saturday at Foches, and all on account of the gumball. Foches stormed at Old Black Dute for her extravagance. She hurled it back at him, while into the pot, went the chickens, and the pans full of minced ham, and the fistful of onion and sage and pimon rouge. She knew how to cook. There was a great demand for short fiction at that period, and one of the genres that was most popular was the one known as local color, which offered descriptions of some of the varied parts of the country, exotic parts of the country.

It was pretty clear to her early on that it was her southern stories or Louisiana stories that sold. While the land inspired her imagination, her time there was limited. A mere three years after they had arrived, Oscar became ill with malaria and died. It was fifteen days before Christmas. Kate tried to hang on, taking over Oscar's place as manager of their plantation store, even keeping shop herself. By 1884, legal matters were settled. Kate moved back to her native St. Louis, now a major commercial center. Chopin seemed happy, and the children were settled. Then on June 28, 1885, her mother Eliza O'Flerti died. It was devastating. Kate felt she had lost her best friend.

She was now absolutely alone, with six children to support. The oldest of whom was 14. She had only a modest income. In the 1880s, writing was one of the few ways women could make a living, averaging some fifteen to thirty dollars a story and a few hundred for a novel. At the age of forty-five, Chopin began her own journey towards becoming a published writer. The writer she especially admired was the short story and novella writer, Gita Mopasal, who perfected a kind of writing that she took very seriously. Here was life, not fiction, she wrote in her diary. Here was a man who escaped from tradition and authority and who in a direct and simple way told us what he saw. Her first work, a poem, appeared in January 1889.

Soon it was her short stories that proved most successful. Her social world expanded, her home became a literary center. She used to have these thirsty afternoon swires and all the poets and the writers and the editors and people who happened to be in town were there. She seemed to be thriving, but how much freedom did an artist really have? In 1897, Chopin was beginning her most ambitious novel, The Awakening. Edna had attempted all summer to learn to swim, but that night she was like the little, tottering, stumbling, clutching child who of a sudden realizes its powers and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence. Once she turned and looked toward the shore, a quick vision of death smote her soul.

The novel is set on grandile, a fashionable resort for New Orleans elite. It is the story of Edna Pintillier, a discontented wife and mother. Her visit to the island and the sensuality of the Gulf trigger an awakening. Its spontaneity and its physical demands opens up Edna to places in her heart and in her soul that she hadn't, she'd lost contact with. Maybe had never known was there. Edna left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing the greater part of them. She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other. Observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine firm quality and texture of her flesh. I don't think any other writer of the period certainly no male writer and I don't think any other woman writer.

Try to understand what happens when a woman experiences her own sexual being and her own self. That's exactly the tragedy and the dilemma that Chopin is exploring in her fiction. Which is, what happens? How do you get past this, this, a bind for women that if you possess your own self, if you possess your own body? You know, that the options that society offers you are marriage and death. By novel's end, Edna has awakened to herself but finds no place for that self in the world she knows. She swims out to see till her strength is gone.

The water of the gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. Along the white beach up and down, there was no living thing inside. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long sweeping stroke. She went on and on. I think Edna's suicide comes from the recognition that she was never going to have what she wanted. And some glimmering that what she really wanted didn't exist in the world. And that's why I think the suicide is portrayed almost as a kind of coming home rather than an act of despair. The question was whether Americans were prepared to read such emancipated fiction.

There were a few positive letters, then the critical reviews came in. They destroyed her spirit. When they came out with all of this adverse reaction, and one of the newspapers called it, pure poison, and that fit for babes. And there was an awful lot of criticism. Once you begin to push against those margins, against those limits, you begin to offend people. You begin to offend convention and expectations. And that's exactly what Kate Chopin ran into with the awakening. After the harsh reception of her novel, Chopin retreated into private life. She sank into obscurity. There was a brief moment of optimism when the Louisiana Exposition, a world's fair, came to St. Louis. On August 20, 1904, Chopin visited the fairgrounds.

Right there in her doorstep were representatives of foundations from all over the globe. And there was whites, and there was action. They were dancing, and there were things to see and things to do when you can understand why she was like to put a lot of time in over there on that midway. It was a hot day, and she returned exhausted. That night, she had a stroke. I think Dan was the last one to see your life, but he spoke of her with such pride. What drove Kate Chopin was her passion for writing, and her willingness to let writing take her into places that she had never been herself, necessarily. And certainly the literary traditions that out of which she came had never really gone.

It was in the late 20th century that her writings were really recovered. They came back into print, and they were newly recognized and appreciated by critics, and taught in schools. And that's what brings a writer back into currency. The rediscovery of the awakening came as a godsend, the most incredible gift to the women's movement. I first read her when I was given a copy of the Awakening by a woman who said to me, you should read this book. And the big question that we all asked ourselves was how did Kate Chopin know all that in 1899? She was one of those writers whose sense of craft puts her right on the edge of poetry. She could have shouted for joy, a feeling of exaltation overtooker, as if some power of significant import had been given her, to control the working of her body and her soul. How strange and awful to stand naked under the sky. How delicious!

She felt like some newborn creature opening its eyes in a familiar world it had never known. To learn more about Kate Chopin, a reawakening, visit LPB Online at the internet address on your screen. Thank you. This is PBS.

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