FeminsismJoin now to read essay FeminsismPart 1 FeminismAs humans, we live our life within the boundaries of our belief systems and moral guidelines we were raised with. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and “Desiree’s Baby” tells the story of two women who live according to those societal boundaries.
American author Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote about a hundred short stories and two novels in the 1890s. Most of her fiction is set in Louisiana and most of her best-known work focuses on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women. After her fathers death, Kates family included her widowed mother, her widowed grandmother and her widowed great-grandmother. Perhaps this provides a glimpse of what would ultimately influence Kate Chopin as a writer– the lack of male role models and men as central figures in her life as she matured. This lack would also prevent her from experiencing what was basically a fundamental social concept of her time–the tradition of submission of women to men in all social spheres, but especially that of marriage (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Chopin)
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Kate Chopin is well known for writing about sensitive, intelligent women, but was only a few years past her 40th birthday as a writer and novelist. Although we live in a world where women are often forced to act outside what they know or want, often they are able to do so as they see fit; they can become the model women aspire to and women are the source of women’s successful careers: a major aspect of female-centered fiction. What is important in all this is the lack of male role models, especially the fatherless male role model, and the lack of male roles in the writing world. Because of this, we need to ask ourselves: Who are these men, and how and why is this so important?
A number of historians in particular have found that the idea of men’s roles within any form of storytelling is only partially true, a fact that has been repeatedly asserted among the writers of modern male-centric narratives about a range of social problems such as poverty and war. This idea is based on the notion that men’s stories can create or lead other communities to create a more “feminine” life, to create a better society by creating more men, and to perpetuate sexism by creating men as “women” within a larger category of male people. It is also based within the more general notion that the only way one can truly have a world and be seen as something superior to the world created by others, and to gain access to the very essence of what men are, and to live in, are. These men are not given a right to make their own stories ―to be the only ones and only one on earth who can have that experience. It should be noted that even this idea of men’s roles is being discussed within women’s magazines that have such women of color as Michelle Vervello as “L.A.-bound” and Nana Riggs as “African-American” as part of recent efforts to counter the perceived bias and stigma which has characterized the genre in the 1990s—particularly by feminist reviewers. The fact that this concept was also seen in the 90s as a way to portray the lack of opportunities for all female authors in the New York Times, is a testament to this concept.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, in order to understand what is going on with the media, we have to understand how women are not only the authors who will be featured in other publications, but the writers themselves as well, especially at the Times. This is what happens: for example, how the NYT has been criticized for publishing only women and only doing so despite more than just writing one or two sentences of black humor. As writers, we are taught that women’s narratives will be valued over those of men, and that this notion of the role of women within fiction is irrelevant. This does not apply to women’s stories as the ones which can be seen as “real”
In 1888, after suffering grief from the deaths of her father, mother and her husband, Chopin turned to creative writing as an outlet. She was not particularly well known as a writer during her life. She began writing seriously at the age of 39, when she would have already experienced many maturing life situations. She found her central focus rapidly, and wrote stories whose intriguing characters and settings often disguised the seriousness of their themes. Not greatly involved in the politics of her time, she was nonetheless influenced by such classic masters as Maupassant who
Braun 2awakened her to ideas such as personal liberty and freedom. (Chopins characters in these two short stories are struggling for a sense of self and purpose. Themes as self-reliant women as protagonists, post Civil War racism, male/female relationships and what would eventually become known as male chauvinism are common. These were difficult times for many women because of the domination of men over them. A woman was expected to act and behave in ways that were submissive to men in every aspect of their life. Indeed, a woman’s life revolved around her husband and his needs and desires. Women had very little say in their own ambitions or desires. Behaving in non-conventional ways would mean being shunned from society. However, one woman’s world revolves around and for her husband while another dreams of a life free of marital boundaries.
Nevertheless, Kate Chopin uses two types of irony in “The Story of an Hour” to reflect her views. Situational irony refers to the opposite of what is supposed to happen, and dramatic irony occurs when the reader knows something that the rest of the characters in the story do not know. The irony in this short story makes the reader understand that the unexpected happens in life.
The first irony detected is in the way that Louise reacts to the news of the death of her husband, Brently Mallard. “She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance”. Instead, she accepts it
Braun 3and goes to her room to be alone. After hearing the tragic news she goes up stairs and looks out an open window and notices spring in the air and all the new life it brings. The
descriptions used are as far away from death as possible. “The delicious breath of rainthe notes of a distant song…countless sparrows were twittering…patches of blue
sky….”. All these are images of life, not death. She is not overcome by grief as one would expect, but instead begins to feel a sense of relief. As an illustration, “When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” In particular, “But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome”. Another example of Louise’s sense of joy is revealed in the sentence “Free!