Kate Chopin’s “Emancipation” and “Awakening”

Kate Chopin was born Catherine O’Flaherty on February 8, 1850, in St Kate Chopin was born Catherine O’Flaherty on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was one of five children, but both her sisters died in infancy and her brothers died in their twenties. When she was five years old, Kate was sent to a Catholic boarding school named The Sacred Heart Academy. Just months later, however, her father died in a train accident, and she was sent home to live with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all widowed. After two years in their care, she returned to Sacred Heart, where she excelled in French and English, finishing at the top of her class.

Her childhood lacked male role models; thus, she was rarely witness to the tradition of female submission and male domination that defined most late nineteenth-century marriages. The themes of female freedom and sexual awareness that dominated Chopin’s adult writings were undoubtedly a result of the atmosphere in which she was raised.

Surprised and deeply hurt by the negative reaction to The Awakening, Chopin published only three more short stories before she died of a brain hemorrhage in 1904.

The Awakening has now earned a place in the literary canon for the way it uses these formal and structural techniques to explore themes of patriarchy, marriage and motherhood, woman’s independence, desire, and sexuality both honestly and artistically.

The plot of “Awakening” centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics. The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry Jame.

“Emancipation” describes an animal “born in a cage,” who “opening his eyes upon Life… saw… confining walls.” He thrives until one day someone accidentally leaves open the cage’s door. He first reacts with fear, but the “Light” lures him with increasing force until at last the “spell of the Unknown” pulls him out altogether, “and with a bound he was gone”

Women who insist on freedom from traditional duties and limitations causing editors often to turn down many of her stories because her women characters were considered too passionate and emancipated. Her heroines usually live out their strong impulses. They try to defy conventions and to decide over their own lives. Kate Chopin herself saw and understood all aspects of the femininity.

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