Kate Chopin's fiction: a twentieth-century critical reappraisal.

Abstract

Women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century were revising the world view they had inherited from a society that said women mattered less than men did, a society that failed to recognize the authenticity of a woman's emotions, needs, and desires. These literary women often resorted to symbolic narratives to express their feelings of constriction, exclusion, and dispossession. Kate Chopin was one of the most daring and courageous female writers during this period, a fact which became the basis for a complete rejection of her works by a male-dominated society who misread and misinterpreted the implications she presents. Chopin and her works were severely criticized because of her realistic portrayal of women' s situations depicting ideas which were not socially acceptable at that time. Chopin dealt with dangerous themes---dangerous, that is, to men and masculine vanity. She detailed assertive, unorthodox women characters, unsatisfactory marriages, the specters of illicit love, adultery, incest, and prostitution. She was the first woman writer in this country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Her truthful depiction of woman's life in American society brought the wrath of male critics to bear both on her works and on her personal life. Chopin explores many themes, the most prominent of which is the awakening or reoccurrence of sexual passion in women and men. The carefully developed interrelationship between living up to society's expectations and escaping from its strictures is a dominant feature of her character development. Women have traditionally found their individual value through their relationships with men, in their marriage, as mothers, as friends of other women, and as members of a society and culture. Chopin challenges each of these conventions through the experiences of her heroines. Kate Chopin was a twentieth-century woman writing to a nineteenth-century audience. A close assessment of her works discloses a panorama of human emotions better understood by modern audiences. Her rejection and subsequent silencing by male critics was a serious, but fortunately temporary, loss to American literature.