Lecture XI.a--The Modern Novel: Virginia Woolf and the
Word
Juan
Gris - Portrait of Pablo Picasso
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin: With a novel and two collections of well-received short stories, Kate Chopin gained a national reputation as an author, but that reputation turned to notoriety with
The Awakening (1899), a novel that dealt frankly--too frankly for the taste of the time--with a woman's emerging romantic and sexual passion. The adverse and even hostile reaction to this book numbed Chopin's creativity for years, and she was only beginning to regain her artistic confidence at the time of her sudden and early death. Although the occasional critic referred in passing to the excellence of
The Awakening, Chopin's name was kept alive for decades by the frequent anthologizing of a handful of short stories, typecasting her as a local colorist of largely historical importance. But with the rediscovery of
The Awakening in the 1960s and the restoration of all of her work to print, she has at last taken her rightful place as a serious artist who made a permanent
contribution to American literature.
The Following From the Women Writers Class of
Instructor: Ann M Woodlief
E-mail: awood@vcu.edu
As a writer, Kate Chopin wrote very rapidly and without much revision. She usually worked in her
home surrounded by her children. The content and message of The Awakening caused an uproar
and Chopin was denied admission into the St. Louis Fine Art Club based on its publication. She
was terribly hurt by the reaction to the book and in the remaining five years of her life she wrote only
a few short stories, and only a small number of those were published. Like Edna, she paid the price
for defying societal rules, and as Lazar Ziff explains, she "learned that her society would not tolerate
her questionings. Her tortured silence as the new century arrived was a loss to American letters of
the order of the untimely deaths of Crane and Norris. She was alive when the twentieth century
began, but she had been struck mute by a society fearful in the face of an uncertain dawn" (Ziff, 305).
1850 : Kate Chopin (Katherine O'Flaherty) born on February 8 to Thomas
O'Flaherty, an Irish immigrant, and Eliza Faris, a Creole.
1855 : Kate's father dies in a rail accident. Kate begins school at Academy of
the Sacred Heart in St. Louis.
1863 : Kate's great-grandmother, Victoire Verdon Charleville, dies. Kate's
half-brother, George O'Flaherty, a Confederate soldier, dies of typhoid
fever.
1868 :
Kate graduates from the Academy of the Sacred Heart.
1869 : Kate visits New Orleans in the spring.
1870 :
Kate marries Oscar Chopin on June 9 in St. Louis. Their honeymoon in
Europe is cut short by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. The
couple moves to New Orleans in October.
1871 :
Jean Chopin, the first of Kate's six children, is born on May 22.
1873 :
Oscar Chopin Jr. born.
1874 :
The Chopins move to the Garden District of New Orleans, and visit
Grand Isle in the summer.
1879 :
Oscar's cotton business fails, and the Chopins move to Cloutierville,
Louisiana. Lelia Chopin born.
1882 : Kate's husband dies of malaria.
1884 :
Kate moves back to St. Louis.
1885 :
Eliza O'Flaherty, Kate's mother, dies in June.
1888 :
Kate writes her first poem, 'If It Might Be,' and begins the story 'Euphraisie.'
1889 :
"If It Might Be" is published in the literary and political journal America.
Two stories, "Wiser than a God" and "A Point at Issue" published in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
1890 :
Kate's first novel, At Fault, is published privately.
1891 :
Kate unsuccessfully submits the novel Young Dr. Gosse to several
publishers. She later destroys the manuscript.
1893 : "Désirée's Baby" published in Vogue.
1894 :
Bayou Folk published. Kate writes "Story of an Hour."
1895 : "Athénaise" written.
1896 : "Athénaise" published.
1897 :
A Night in Acadie published. Kate begins work on The Awakening in
June.
1898 :
Kate completes The Awakening in January.
1899 :
The Awakening is published, to scathing reviews.
1900 : Kate writes "The Gentleman from New Orleans", and is listed in the
first edition of Who's Who in USA.
1904 :
Kate visits the Louisiana Purchase Exposition on August 18, where she
suffers a stroke. She dies two days later.
Kate Chopin on
PBS
Gertrude Stein
Information from: Al Filreis
Class of 1942, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Faculty Director, The Kelly Writers House
PENNSYLVANIA PROFESSOR OF THE YEAR
afilreis@english.upenn.edu
[adapted from an entry in the (c)Encyclopedia Britannica] (b. Feb. 3, 1874, Allegheny, Pa., U.S.--d. July
27, 1946, Paris), avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius, whose Paris home
was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II.
Stein spent her infancy in Vienna and Paris and her girlhood in Oakland, Calif. At Radcliffe College she studied psychology with the philosopher William James. After further study at Johns Hopkins medical school she went to Paris, where she was able to live by private means. From 1903 to 1912 she lived with her brother Leo, who became an accomplished art critic; thereafter she lived with her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967).
Stein and her brother were among the first collectors of works by the Cubists and other
experimental painters of the period, such as Pablo Picasso (who painted her portrait), Henri
Matisse, and Georges Braque, several of whom became her friends. At her salon they mingled with expatriate American writers, such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and other visitors drawn by her literary reputation. Her literary and artistic judgments were revered, and her chance remarks could make or destroy reputations. In her own work, she attempted to parallel the theories of Cubism, specifically in her concentration on the illumination of the present moment and her use of slightly varied repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation. The best explanation of her theory of writing is found in the essay Composition and Explanation, which is based on lectures that she gave at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was issued as a book in 1926. Among her work that was most thoroughly influenced by Cubism is Tender Buttons (1914), which carries fragmentation and abstraction beyond the borders of intelligibility.
Her first published book, Three Lives (1909), the stories of three working-class women, has been called a minor masterpiece. The Making of Americans, a long composition written in 1906-08 but not published until 1925, was too convoluted and obscure for general readers, for whom she remained essentially the author of such lines as "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Her only book to reach a wide public was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually Stein's own
autobiography. The performance in the United States of her Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which the composer Virgil Thomson had made into an opera, led to a triumphal American lecture tour in 1934-35. Thomson also wrote the music for her second opera, The Mother of Us All (published 1947), based on the life of feminist Susan B. Anthony.
Stein became a legend in Paris, especially after surviving the German occupation of France and befriending the many young American servicemen who visited her. She wrote about these soldiers inBrewsie and Willie (1946).
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
A critical study is Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1971). James R. Mellow, Charmed
Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (1974, reissued 1982), describes her life in France. Shirley
Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (eds.), Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature (1987), contains
scholarly essays. Bruce Kellner (ed.), A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example
(1988), provides a literary guide, including an annotated bibliography of selected criticism.
Continue
with Lecture XI.
|
