The Awakening and Selected Stories: Introduction by Jane Smiley (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Chopin, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593468791 ISBN 13: 9780593468791

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A feminist literary landmark: the daring story of a woman's search for personal freedom that was so controversial in 1899 that it ended its author's career.

With an effortless, sure-handed artistry, Kate Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young mother and model wife, whose romantic involvement with a young man at a seaside resort allows her for the first time to imagine a freer life. Upon her return to New Orleans, Edna leaves her husband’s home for her own cottage, pursues her artistic ambitions, and begins an affair, only to discover that the constraints of social custom are more powerful than she had thought. Contemporary readers were shocked by the frank, unapologetic treatment of adultery in The Awakening, but over the ensuing century the novel went on to achieve the status of a classic for its visionary prescience and narrative brilliance.

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KATE CHOPIN (1851-1904) brought out her first novel, At Fault, at her own expense in 1890. It was followed by two well-reviewed collections of her short stories: Bayou Folk in 1894 and A Night in Acadie in 1897. The Awakening appeared in 1899 to an explosion of disapproving reviews and the cancellation of her next book contract. However, within a decade of her early death at the age of fifty-four, her literary genius began to be widely recognized.

ABOUT THE INTRODUCER:  JANE SMILEY is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. Her most recent novels are Perestroika in Paris and A Dangerous Business. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.

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from the Introduction by Jane Smiley

When I first read The Awakening, in my thirties, I didn’t know a thing about Kate Chopin, but her novel spoke to me because she delves so precisely into the mind of her pro­tagonist, Edna Pontellier. Edna has thoughts and feelings that I considered to be normal for married women of her age—a withdrawal from her “duties,” a retreat into her inner life, and an urge to discover more about the world, both her social world and the natural world. I had a little trouble with a writing style that I considered archaic, but at the same time, I was put­ting together a novel that made use of a very archaic style (The Greenlanders), and so I appreciated what readers learn about the characters of a novel by uncovering the details of that style.
 
It wasn’t until I read The Awakening again, in my fifties, that I got to know about the history of the novel and learned what a scandal its publication had caused. Not only did I still appreciate it, I appreciated it even more because an honest and explorative novelist is likely to cause a scandal at some point—novelists are literary explorers who use stories to uncover the secrets of human nature and display them. You don’t have to be the Marquis de Sade or Émile Zola to cause a scandal—in 1899, when The Awakening was published, you could do it by giving a wife and a mother a growing sense of independence and then honestly portraying the despair that her choices pres­ent to her.
 
Kate Chopin grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri, and was liv­ing in Saint Louis when she wrote The Awakening, at around the same time that the Saint Louis suburb that I grew up in was being established. It doesn’t surprise me that Chopin turned out to be an independent-minded novelist and short story writer. Saint Louis has a way of infusing its children with a sense of curiosity and ambition, maybe because Saint Lou­isans have always known that you could get out of town—by steamboat, by airplane, or by Route 66 (Chuck Berry made sure we would never forget this). She was born Katherine O’Flaherty in 1851 in Saint Louis, and she understood from the beginning that her Irish and French inheritance set her apart from the American culture into which she was born. She was educated intermittently at a local Catholic school and was an avid reader in both English and French. Her father died in a bizarre railroad accident when she was only five—the state was celebrating a new bridge across the Missouri River, and various prominent figures were invited to take part in the first trip. The bridge collapsed.
 
Kate’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother devoted themselves to educating her, and in doing so, they gave her a strong sense of how independent, thoughtful, and self-supporting women could be. She also made a lifelong friend, Kitty Garesché, with whom she rode ponies, ice-skated, and climbed trees. Like Kate’s female relatives, Kitty was passion­ate about music, art, and gossiping—the perfect friend for a future novelist.
 
The Civil War, in Saint Louis, was a perfect example of the complicated history of Saint Louis, a home for both avid abo­litionists and slave-owning Southern sympathizers. According to Emily Toth, one of Chopin’s biographers, in early May, after the declaration of war, there was a skirmish at a local Con­federate barracks; twenty-eight people were killed, and the mayor declared martial law. Lots of citizens fled to Illinois, and Kitty Gareshé’s family, as Southern sympathizers, were kicked out of town. Not long afterward, Kate’s great-grandmother, from whom she had learned a lot, and her half brother died. Other relatives, in Louisiana, died during the siege at Vicks­burg, a battle that spurred more violence in Saint Louis. In the spring of 1865, the Confederate army planned an attack on Saint Louis, causing more flight and further barricading, but the war ended before they managed to instigate it. Kate was fourteen. After the war, she returned to school, to the Sacred Heart Academy (which is still there, now called the Academy of the Sacred Heart, and serves kindergarten through grade eight). At the academy, she met a young nun from Ireland who was not much older than she was and who encouraged Kate to fulfill the talents she saw in her student. Kate kept notes on all sorts of things—books she read, people she read about, events in her life —and she wrote poems, jokes, and observa­tions about women (Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin, chapter 3).
 
When she was eighteen, she “came out” into society (a significant Saint Louis tradition that I was spared), and she continued to write about her new social life as “a nuisance” (Unveiling Kate Chopin, 47). When she was twenty, she joined some friends on a steamboat trip to New Orleans and was charmed by the region. It may have been around that time that Kate met Oscar Chopin, from New Orleans, and fell in love. They married on June 9, 1870. She was twenty-one. They cel­ebrated with a honeymoon in Europe and were in Paris when Emperor Napoleon III was captured by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War and the Second French Empire was replaced by the French Third Republic. They escaped.
 
When Kate and Oscar returned to New Orleans, she was pregnant with her first child. Eventually, she and Oscar had six children. Toth suspects that in the fall of 1872, Kate met Edgar Degas, who was visiting New Orleans. Not only did Degas’s uncle and brother work in the same business as Oscar (and one of the paintings Degas produced in New Orleans was titled A Cotton Office in New Orleans), Degas was also an avid walker and observer. There is a great deal of circumstantial evi­dence that The Awakening was inspired by information Degas may have exchanged with Kate as they strolled together or socialized in New Orleans (see below).
 
Chopin’s life now became very busy, of course, but she remained independent, interested in her own career, and con­stantly observant. As an independent, active young woman from Saint Louis, she did not completely fit in in New Orleans, but Oscar didn’t try to make her. As someone who loves to walk, observe, and eavesdrop myself, I know that doing this teaches a writer much of what she knows and also sparks inspi­ration. Through the 1870s, while raising her children, Cho­pin also had to navigate post–Civil War unrest, a yellow fever outbreak, and in 1879, the failure of Oscar’s business (cotton trading between the growers and the manufacturers). The fam­ily moved out of New Orleans to Cloutierville, where Oscar’s relatives lived, 225 miles northwest of New Orleans. Oscar bought the local general store, and Kate continued to be her independent and observant self, which meant that in a very small town (the population now is about eight hundred), she was judged both positively (for her looks) and negatively (for her habit of doing what she wished, including going for solo evening horseback rides). She began to spend more time back in Saint Louis, and Oscar dealt with several bouts of illness. He died in December 1882. Kate was thirty-two, her oldest child was ten, and her youngest was not quite three. Kate returned to Saint Louis.
 
For the next seventeen years, Kate Chopin drew on her expe­riences in Louisiana (and, to some degree, in Saint Louis) to fulfill her ambitions and support her family. She wrote ninety-seven short stories, many of which were published in local or national magazines, including Vogue and The Atlantic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593468791
• ISBN 13: 9780593468791
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland