by Kate Chopin
KATE CHOPIN shares with Cable and Grace King the honor of having achieved for the Creole a permanent place in American literature. She was a woman of sensitive temper, brought by life to an intimate knowledge of a simple and emotional people dwelling in a region of peculiar beauty. After many years of sympathetic acquaintance with this people and this background, she began, for her own sake, to record in precise and expressive language the stories her experience had suggested to her imagination. The result was her fiction — vivid histories of emotional situations, told with a delicate sensuous realism, and a few studies of complex feminine natures. Her value is in her material, her universality, and her art.
Mrs. Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri. February 8, 1851, the daughter of Thomas O’Flaherty, of County Galway, Ireland, and Eliza Faris, who was herself the daughter of Wilson Faris, a Virginian, and Athenaise Charleville, descendant of an early Huguenot family. Such ancestry explains in part Mrs. Chopin’s mingled talents: she has the humor and pathos of the Celt fused with a keen Gallic sensuousness and love for art. She was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where, though remarkable for her essays and poetic exercises, she achieved little scholastic distinction, preferring Fielding and Scott in her father’s attic to the lives of the saints in his library. Yet even at that age she was a natural story-teller and acquainted with the soft Creole French. At seventeen she entered St. Louis society, where, doubtless, she began to acquire her subtle insight into the feminine character and the intricacies of the feminine soul in sex and conscience. At nineteen she was married to Oscar Chopin, a distant cousin, a cotton-factor in New Orleans, where, after a visit to Europe, the Chopins spent the next ten years. During this time, though engrossed in social and maternal duties — she bore six children — and without a thought of writing, she was gathering the Creole material afterwards so exquisitely employed. In 1880 she entered into final and intimate touch with the actors of her drama when the family removed to a large plantation in the little hamlet of Cloutiersville, in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana— “a rambling little French village of one street, with the Catholic church at one end, and our plantation at the other, and Red River flowing through everybody’s back-yard.” Her best stories are in this setting, for here, leading the happy and industrious life of chatelaine to the whole neighborhood, she learned by heart the scenery, the customs, and the people. Creole, free mulatto, and negro came under her humorous yet tolerant eye, and her nature absorbed the country and its stories. In 1882 her husband died: his widow, after managing the plantation for about a year, moved to take up her permanent residence in St. Louis.
Mrs. Chopin was now over thirty-five years old, yet had not written a line for publication. Until this time she had been learning her material; afterward she used it, and, strangely enough, she never used any other. Her latter life finds absolutely no direct reflection in her work: her mature wisdom was all employed in the interpretation of her early vivid experience. The actual practice of writing was undertaken at the suggestion of a friend, apparently to relieve her loneliness and to fill the new leisure of a life always full. Her first story, called “Euphrasie,” was written in 1888, and later rewritten and published in the Century under the title “A No Account Creole.” As her stories became known, she contributed regularly to the Atlantic, Century, Youth’s Companion, Saturday Evening Post, Mirror, Criterion, Vogue, and others. Thenceforth her output, though limited, was steady until the appearance of her best known novel, ‘The Awakening.’ The unfriendly reception given this by certain narrow-minded critics struck deep at the author’s heart, even killing her desire to write; so that from about 1899 until her death in St. Louis, August, 1904, she produced nothing more.
Mrs. Chopin’s complete work consists of four books and numerous uncollected sketches and stories in newspapers and magazines. Her first volume was a novel ‘At Fault’ (1890). This was a beginner’s novel and had a local success. Occasional scenes are vivid and full of dramatic strength, but the dramatic often becomes melodramatic, and the solution is cheap and conventional. Two or three of the Creole characters are drawn with the faultless objective touch that makes them real: Therese lives, and Gregoire Santien is clear-cut and vital. In the book are tokens of the author’s ultimate qualities — an intimate knowledge of feminine psychology, joined with the power of translating this into concrete emotional form.
But Kate Chopin’s lasting fame will depend upon her two collections of Creole short-stories— ‘Bayou Folk’ (1894) and ‘A Night In Acadie’ (1897). These stories are “distinguished by a keen knowledge of dramatic values, a rare insight into character, a pronounced story-telling gift of the first order.” Her technique has the instinctiveness of genius; for she wrote her stories often at one sitting, and devoted little time to rewriting or revision. Her motifs are the old trite human emotions called forth by elemental situations in a warm Southern atmosphere, where they exist as pure and full-colored as the flowers. She uses plots as old as Homer to depict the individual Creole — his foible and his passion — to him the outline and the substance of the world. Such stories live because they are our stories and to-morrow’s and God’s. The faithfulness of old slaves; the childish pride of the twins who buy their new shoes, but carry them home in hand to keep from getting them dusty; the good Ozeme’s sacrifice of his long-expected holiday to help a bed-ridden negro mammy save her cotton crop; the flight from her husband of Athenaise, unaware of her approaching motherhood — these are simple things, yet of lasting interest to humanity. And the events happen in a land of bayous, and flowers, and sunshine, of galleried houses and chicken “gumbo,” where the village priest carries consolation through dusty streets, listening to appeals in soft patois and dialect. In reproducing the charm of this atmosphere, in saturating her stories with color, Mrs. Chopin is, in her way, superior to Cable. The qualities of her style are largely French. There is the wonderful precision and simplicity: Maupassant’s economical selection of detail and Flaubert’s brilliant analysis, tempered with some of Gautier’s picturesqueness. There is restraint, flexibility, exquisite taste and proportion, finish, and an inevitable denouement. In “Desiree’s Baby,” for example, these elements are joined in one of the most perfect short-stories in English.
Mrs. Chopin’s most ambitious work, and that by many regarded as her greatest achievement, is ‘The Awakening,’ a novel (1899). It was written in the belief that in this larger form she could best develop the qualities of her talent. The book shows breadth of view, sincerity, art of the finest kind, a deep knowledge of the woman soul, and accurate individualized character delineation. But it fails of greatness because its theme and its persons are not usual. Or if usual, they do not appeal to a wide audience. The awakening is from the easy comfort of a marriage of convenience to a realization of deeper soul-needs. Edna, the wife of Leonce Pontellier, and mother of two children, is aroused by the simple love of a young Creole to the knowledge of demands in her rich passionate nature that cannot be satisfied by her wifely and maternal duties. Without a fitting education she tries to realize her self at the expense of her functions. Meeting with insurmountable obstacles in society and in her own soul, she surrenders life rather than her new independence. The morals of this study were harshly criticized by people who misunderstood its motive. It is true that the growth of the woman’s nature requires sensuous treatment, but this treatment, though bold, is always of the greatest purity. It is not immoral — merely honest, and the only question is whether the theme is worth the exquisite art employed in developing it. Its problem is not one for children, because they would not understand it, but the author with her loftiest mother-love might well have paraphrased Daudet’s words and written as dedication: “For my daughter when she shall be twenty-one years old.”
In Southern literature, Mrs. Chopin’s stories are representative of that group of fiction-writers who with knowledge, fine art, and sympathetic love for the people and scenes around them, have, in studies of their own localities, recorded and
interpreted the permanent human emotions.
From: Book Reviews, June 1894. Page 97.
Pembroke. By Mary E. Wilkins. (Harper & Brothers.)
Bayou Folk. By Kate Chopin. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.)
The extent and variety of this country are suggested by the books here coupled. Each is a literary performance of unusual value, but, although both American, they are hardly more alike than are English and French, or Italian and German. The respective sections typified are, so to speak, strangers to one another, and any one who will read the books in conjunction will be in position to realize the division of the people during the Rebellion. In effect that division is constant, though in practice, in the uniform bearing of Federal law, it is not constantly felt. But in going out of ourselves, in studying the people, we come with something like a shock upon the facts. Heredity, climate, slavery, the facts of settlement, the development under diverse laws and social systems, all bear weightily upon the case. These widely separated parts of the Atlantic seaboard were settled by people as unlike each other as the colonies were far removed, and they have to all intents retained their original characteristics to this day. Immigration has touched them slightly if at all, the present inhabitants of the far North and South being almost wholly the descendants of the men and women of colonial times. As relates to Louisiana, that was an almost purely French colony until some time after the Revolution, and there are multitudes of people there yet who are in all respects French, and who regard the Federal Government ironically; it is nothing to them, while their social conventions are everything.
Miss Wilkins shows unimpaired literary skill in her new book. It is the fashion to call her pictures of New England life “photographs,” referring to their accuracy and precision. It may be time, however, to remind this author that the best art is not photographic, — even that photography is not, properly speaking, an art at all. It is the individual personal element which a draughtsman puts into his picture which makes it art; he must select and prepare his material, not take it in the raw from Nature. Taking New England as a field, the two ways of working, as it seems to us, are exemplified by Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett. Miss Wilkins gives, if you please, an absolute portrait; but Miss Jewett, by her feeling and philosophy, makes a more searching picture. It is certain, at least, that if the picture of New England life given in Pembroke is a true one, that life must be the most narrow, hardened, cruel life in all this land or in any land. It has not one redeeming feature, and the wonder is that in such cramped conditions people can draw their breath from youth to age. Such charm always goes with naturalness of narration that Pembroke cannot but fascinate, but it gives pain in equal measure. It tells not only one love story, but three or four simultaneously; but they are all painful stories, not merely sad, but cold to “creepiness,” and savagely unfeeling. Can this be New England? If so, it is a good place to keep away from. We would ask Miss Wilkins to consider this matter a little more closely; that there is another view we have above indicated.
Miss Kate Chopin has not Miss Wilkins’ power and resources as a writer, but she has here produced a more agreeable book, — one that has its sad touches too, but a heartier, more wholesome book, among whose characters we can breathe freely and feel at home. Bayou Folk is a collection of numerous stories and sketches, some of them very brief, all concerned with Creole life in a circumscribed region of Louisiana. They naturally remind the reader of Mr. Cable’s stories; but only because he was the first to open this country to the reading world. Miss Chopin in no manner copies Mr. Cable. There is evident knowledge of the subject shown, and entire sympathy with it. Some of the stories are trifling (we do not refer here to length), and if they were omitted the book would be all the better; but others, such as “The Benitou’s Slave,” “Desiree’s Baby,” “Ma’me Pelagie,” and “ Madame Celestin’s Divorce,” would do credit to the best of the impressionists. “Desiree’s Baby,” in especial, it one of the most touching tales we have ever read. As a whole we have here a delightful picture of manners, and if Pembroke is calculated to make people give New England a wide berth, Bayou Folk is enough to make any one long for the ease and poetry of life in Louisiana. — Philadelphia Evening Telegraph.
From: The Writer, August 1894
KATE CHOPIN By William Schuyler
Mrs. Kate Chopin, the author of “Bayou Folk,” was born in St. Louis in the early ‘fifties and, as can be readily calculated, is not the “young person” that many of her reviewers are tent on thinking her to be. This wrong impression of theirs regarding her, while it is in some respects flattering, is one which Mrs. Chopin seems anxious to correct. Her father was Thomas O’Flaherty, a native of Galloway, Ireland, and for many years a prominent merchant in St. Louis. Her mother was the daughter of Wilson Faris, a Kentuckian, and Athenaise Charleville, a descendant of a Huguenot family which had settled in “Old Kaskaskia” in the early part of the eighteenth century. The predominance of Celtic and the presence of so much French blood in Mrs. Chopin’s ancestry may account for the delicate and sensuous touch and the love of art for art’s sake which characterize all her work, and which are qualities foreign to most Teutonic productions.
Her first childish impressions were gathered just before and during the war and in the latter days of slavery. Her father’s house was full of negro servants, and the soft Creole French and patois and the quaint darkey dialect were more familiar to the growing child than any other form of speech. She also knew the faithful love of her negro “mammy,” and saw the devotion of which the well-treated slaves were capable during the hard times of the war, when the men of the family were either dead or fighting in the ranks of the “lost cause.”
Mrs. Chopin’s girlish friends remember well her gifts as a teller of marvellous stories, most of them the impromptu flashings of childish imagination; and her favorite resort was a stepladder in the attic, where, wrapped in a big shawl in the winter, or in airy dishabille in the dog days, she would pore over the stacks of poetry and fiction which were stored there — the shelves of the library being reserved for solid and pretentious cyclopaedias and Roman Catholic religious works. She was not distinguished as a scholar during her rather irregular attendance at the convent school, as she preferred to read Walter Scott and Edmund Spenser to doing any sums or parsing stupid sentences, and only during the last two years of her school life did she ever do any serious work. Her schoolmates say that her essays and poetic exercises were thought to be quite remarkable, not only by the scholars, but even by the sisters; and, perhaps, had Mrs. Chopin’s environment been different, her genius might have developed twenty years sooner than it did.
But many things occurred to turn her from literary ambition. At seventeen she left school and plunged into the whirl of fashionable life, for two years being one of the acknowledged belles of St. Louis, a favorite not only for her beauty, but also for her amiability of character and her cleverness. She was already fast acquiring that knowledge of human nature which her stories show, though she was then turning it to other than artistic triumphs. She married Mr. Oscar Chopin, a wealthy cotton factor of New Orleans, a distant connection of hers, the Charlevilles having hosts of “cousins” in the Pelican state.
After spending some time in Europe with her husband, she passed the next ten years of her life in New Orleans, engrossed in the manifold duties which overpower a society woman and the conscientious mother of a large and growing family; for six children were born during that period. Toward the close of the decade, her husband gave up his business and removed to Natchitoches Parish, among the bayous of the Red River, to manage several plantations belonging to himself and his relatives. However, his life as a planter was short. He died in 1882, in the midst of the cotton harvest.
It was then that Mrs. Chopin, having rejected all offers of assistance from kindly relatives, undertook the management of her plantations and developed much ability as a business woman. She had to carry on correspondence with the cotton factors in New Orleans, make written contracts,
necessitating many personal interviews with the poorer creoles, the Acadians, and the “free mulattoes,” who raised the crop “on shares,” see that the plantation store was well stocked, and sometimes even, in emergencies, keep shop herself. It was hard work, but in doing it she had the opportunity of closely observing all those oddities of Southern character which give so much life and variety to her pages.
In the midst of all her labors she still found time to keep up her reading, which she had never abandoned, but the subjects which now attracted her were almost entirely scientific, the departments of Biology and Anthropology having a special interest for her. The works of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer were her daily companions; for the study of the human species, both general and particular, has always been her constant delight.
After a few years, when Mrs. Chopin had not only straightened out her affairs, but had put her plantations in a flourishing condition, she returned to her old home, and has ever since made St. Louis her residence.
Having led such a busy life on the plantation, she had learned how to economize her time, and all her social and household duties here, together with her reading, were not sufficient to occupy her mind. Then, urged by the advice of an intimate friend, who had been struck with the literary quality of some of her letters, she began to write, very diffidently at first and only for her friend’s perusal, essays, poems, and stories. Finally, she dared to send her productions to the magazines. With the exception of one beautiful little poem, they were promptly returned. Mrs. Chopin contends that they were properly treated, having been, as she says, “crude and unformed.” She did not, as an unappreciated genius, abuse the editors, but began to study to better her style. In order to aid her self-criticism she sold and even gave away her productions to local periodicals, and holds that she learned much from seeing her work in “cold type.” She wrote a long novel, “At Fault,” which was printed in St. Louis in 1890. In this somewhat imperfect work may be seen the germs of all she has done since. The story has some faults of construction, but the character drawing is excellent, and in the case of the young creole, “Gregoire Santien,” faultless. During the following year she wrote a great number of short stories and sketches, which she sent about to different magazines, and the most of them were not returned as before. The Youth’s Companion, Harper’s Young People, and Wide Awake took all her children’s stories, and the Century Magazine accepted “A No Account Creole,” the longest tale in “Bayou Folk.” This story appeared last January, after having been kept for about three years, and was the means of making Mrs. Chopin’s name better known to the general public. In the mean time, other periodicals had accepted and published her work, which now numbers some sixty stories, and Houghton & Mifflin accepted the collection of twenty-three tales known as “Bayou Folk.”