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Title: Unveiling Kate Chopin by Emily Toth ISBN: 1-57806-102-4 Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: The Awakening: the rest of the story
Comment: Emily Toth wrote Unveiling Kate Chopin after the remarkable recent discovery of Chopin's diaries and manuscripts. This intimate perspective paints a whole new picture of her life and work. Throughout this biography, Toth draws parallels between actual experiences from Chopin's life to characters and incidents in her writing. Suddenly, her stories have new depth of meaning. Toth begins her saga when sixteen-year-old Eliza Faris, a genuine Creole, married thirty-nine-year-old Thomas O'Flaherty, a wealthy businessman in St. Louis. A domineering patriarch, O'Flaherty sent his daughter Kate away to boarding school at age five. Although the reason why is unknown, Toth suggests "a dark family drama triggered sending Kate away." Shortly after this, Thomas O'Flaherty died in a tragic train wreck, and Kate came home to stay. This incident of her father's death closely parallels Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," with a different twist at the end. Toth describes Chopin's childhood as a paradise dominated by women. Life bloomed until the Civil War brought the invasion of the Union army to St. Louis. Speaking out against the Union, Kate herself narrowly escaped imprisonment. Union soldiers intruded the family's home, committing, what Toth refers to as, an "outrage." Chopin married a sensitive and wealthy young Louisiana Frenchman, Oscar Chopin. A non-conformist, Kate never quite fit in with his people, displaying such radical behavior as smoking, walking alone, riding bareback and astride, and lifting her skirts to provocatively show her ankles. It is no wonder that she felt like an outsider, similar to Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. After her husband's death, Kate began developing as a professional writer, following the classic rule of "Write about what you know," and submitting her stories to newspapers and magazines. She learned that as long as her heroines never triumphed over their men, they were accepted. Her passion was for exposing the realism of social problems women faced in a world where men wrote the rules. Audiences embraced her book Bayou Folk, yet they looked past the courageous qualities of the women characters, seeing only the quaint local color. In April, 1899 Chopin published her finest work, The Awakening. The crushing reviews of her masterpiece labeled it "morbid," "unhealthy," "not wholesome," "shocking," "crude" and "sex fiction." Thus the novel modern audiences celebrate Kate Chopin for writing, brought her career to a scandalous end. Like Edna in The Awakening, naked and unveiled to the world, she had swum out too far. Chopin died a few years later in 1904. Toth portrays Chopin as a brilliant creative woman with the courage to brave the controversy against conventional traditions of Victorian America. She captures the sensitive world where Chopin bloomed and relates how it cultivated the genius who wrote of subjects nearly a century ahead of her time.
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Title: Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography by Per Seyersted ISBN: 080710678X Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: June, 1980 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Awakening: An Authoritative Text Biographical and Historical Contexts Criticism (A Norton Critical Edition) by Kate Chopin, Margo Culley ISBN: 0393960579 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $10.65 |
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Title: Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Stories (Library of America, 136.) by Kate Chopin, Sandra M. Gilbert ISBN: 1931082219 Publisher: Library of America Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Approaches to Teaching Chopin's the Awakening (Approaches to Teaching World Literature, N0 16) by Bernard Koloski ISBN: 0873525086 Publisher: Modern Language Association of America Pub. Date: September, 1988 List Price(USD): $19.75 |
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Title: Awakening by Kate Chopin ISBN: 0380002450 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 10 February, 1982 List Price(USD): $4.50 |
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