Chopin and Oates: An Awakening

Chopin and Oates: An "Awakening" as to where modern women "Are going and have been"

Both Kate Chopin and Joyce Carol Oates can best be characterized as feminist authors of their respective centuries who show how apparently positive female social roles actually limit women. The heroine Mrs. Louise Mallard of "The Story of an Hour" seems to have a happy life as a protected wife. She has been treated like a child for most of her existence, supposedly because of her physically weak constitution. When Mrs. Mallard learns of her husband's apparent demise, she feels a strange sense of joy, because she realizes his death means her liberation and her ability to do what she wants. However, when she learns he is alive, she is struck with horror, and dies. The beautiful, teenage heroine Connie of "Where are you going, where have you been" seems to have mastered youthful, feminine seduction and coquetry, but she is undone -- raped and perhaps murdered, it is implied -- by the fact that her apparent maturity has the ability to attract a much older, experienced, and more cruel man ironically named Arnold Friend.

Kate Chopin was famous for chronicling the frustrations and limitations of the role of married women during the 19th century. Chopin's book the Awakening told the story of an adulterous woman seeking futilely to find fulfillment in the institution of marriage and the arms of a lover. It was condemned by the public but later championed by modern feminists. Chopin was born in St. Louis in 1850, a product of a 'mixed' marriage, unlike the upper-class woman of "The Story of an Hour." Chopin was second child of Thomas O'Flaherty of County Galway, Ireland and Eliza Faris of St. Louis ("Kate Chopin: Biography," Kate Chopin International Society, 2008). The inspiration for the New Orleans setting of the Awakening came when Kate married Oscar Chopin of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana and moved with him to live in his home city. The marriage seemed to be happier than the individuals whose lives Chopin later chronicled in her novel and short stories. She and Oscar traveled widely, not just from her home, but throughout Europe. Yet she clearly drew from her own life to write "A Story of an Hour." Oscar died an untimely death from malaria in 1882, and her own father died young in a railroad accident, similar to that which is mistakenly and briefly believed to take the life of Brently, the husband of main character Mrs. Mallard of "The Story of an Hour." Chopin understood the fantasy of liberation in non-marital relations enjoyed by her heroine, although unlike her other famous heroine of the Awakening, Kate enjoyed extramarital liaisons only after her husband's death. In 1884, she briefly engaged in a tryst with a local planter before moving to St. Louis' more civilized environment, and richer cultural life. St. Louis proved to be a positive influence on Chopin's works, in contrast to the even more constrained roles for women in New Orleans ("Kate Chopin: Biography," Kate Chopin International Society, 2008).

The wildly prolific Joyce Carol Oates also delves into the role of modern women in her fiction writing, although a quick review of her works spanning the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, suggests it is more difficult to draw as direct a connection between Oates' major works and biography than it is with Chopin. However, like Mrs. Mallard of "The Story of an Hour" briefly delights in a fantasy coming to life, only to find her hopes dashed when the promise of freedom is taken away, the heroine Connie of "Where are you going, where have you been," finds her fantasy of being seductive and more beautiful than her conventional mother and sister to be far different than she realizes in reality. In Oates, much more explicitly than in Chopin, the trap of femininity 'used' as a vehicle of liberation for the teenage Connie becomes a lie, as Connie becomes the victim of rape and possibly (it is implied) even murder. The weak-hearted Louise of "The Story of an Hour" might fantasize about using her inheritance to travel. However, Connie actually makes herself look beautiful -- but when she is confronted with Arnold Friend who styles himself on an image of James Dean and other rebellious male figures, she discovers that beneath the veneer of approval for her and his apparent rebellion he just wants her sexually and he is ugly and old. Connie originally wanted to be powerful through her sexuality but her culture has rendered her passive as a woman so she merely lets Friend into her home, as if she has no other choice, given how she has lived the previous years of her life.