Chopin And Hemingway: A Literary Analysis

Reading literature, at first, might seem like simple stories. However, in works like William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” Katherine Mansfield's “Miss Brill,” and Kate Chopin's “The Storm,” the female protagonists are examples of how society has oppressive expectations of women simply because of their gender.

For centuries man has created this patriarchal society in which women have been treated as the lesser entity, having no sense of self-being or worth. These feelings led women to feel repressed in their everyday life. It was in the late nineteenth century when literary writers started to expose this female repression. Guy de Maupassant and Kate Chopin clearly express definitive examples of female repression in their stories, The Necklace and The Story of an Hour.

I believe there are many points in the story that can be considered to be very relevant to the time it was written, expressing ideas of the approaching feminist movement and building up an awareness of what was happening to women and the forthcoming feminist movement. Many of the ideas that are expressed in the story concern both the women’s movement and an individual woman searching for her identity. Chopin demonstrates

Throughout the 1800’s many people were restricted of their rights and liberties that are stated in the constitution for all people to have, no matter what race or gender they are. Slaves had absolutely no rights. For example, Frederick Douglass from “My Bondage and My Freedom, is not even allowed to be educated because he is only seen as property and not a real person. Women, on the other hand, like the ones from the short stories “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Story of an Hour”, had more freedom, but were oppressed by men. They were subordinate to their husbands and had to listen to them or they could be punished. In the works of Chopin, Gilman, and Douglass, the struggle for freedom is evident in the different characters’ lives.

The Struggle to Be a Womyn “Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual” (93) The Awakening by Kate Chopin introduces the reader to the life of Edna Pontellier, a woman with an independent nature, searching for her true identity in a patriarchal society that expects women to be nothing more than devoted wives and nurturing mothers. In this paper I will describe Edna’s journey of self-discovery and explain why her struggle for independence is no easy task. I will also discuss the relationship Edna has with two other main women characters and describe how these women conform or rebel against a society with many social constraints. Finally I will

Frederic Chopin, the Polish composer and pianist, was born on March 1,1810, according to the statements of the artist himself and his family, but according to his baptismal certificate, which was written several weeks after his birth, the date was 22 February. His birthplace was the village of Zelazowa Wola, part of the Duchy of Warsaw.

A woman's happiness and success during this era is often dependant on the male or husband of the marriage. During this era, Chopin displays to us in both her short stories "The Storm" and "The Story of an Hour" of how reliant women are in their relationship and lives. Women during this era were heavily looked down upon. They were looked so down upon that even the women themselves would look down on themselves resulting in more reliant on the men for their success in life. The women during this time era would be so reliant on men they would do much for the men despite whether they had loved him or not. Chopin many times wrote her short stories with women in marriage with men just for the benefits of living and success rather than love; a “vignettte exploring female desires that cannot be fulfilled in marriage, a common theme for Chopin.” (Brantley 1). During the 19th century, both men and women weren't seen as equal at all. Another push to being reliant on men is government rules and policies of men being the more stronger party of the marriage, relationship, or family. Men were seen as the “better” sex so then women were more reliant. Women had to depend on men to supply them in order to live a healthy lifestyle. Kate Chopin displays this highly in her two short stories as the two women seem really reliant on their male counterpart. The two women shows signs of weakness while their male counterpart were away.

A Woman Far Ahead of Her Time, by Ann Bail Howard, discusses the nature of the female characters in Kate Chopin’s novel’s and short stories. Howard suggests that the women in Chopin’s stories are longing for independence and feel torn between the feminine duties of a married woman and the freedom associated with self-reliance. Howard’s view is correct to a point, but Chopin’s female characters can be viewed as more radically feminist than Howard realizes. Rather than simply being torn between independent and dependant versions of her personality, “The Story of an Hour’s” Mrs. Mallard actually rejoices in her newfound freedom, and, in the culmination of the story, the position of the woman

“The… sea… [was] inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” (Chopin 189). The only way this character felt they could be free from the oppression and pressure from her husband and society was by setting her soul free into the ocean. Oppression of women in the 1800’s led to their rights being limited, literature revealing men’s perception of women, and the idea of a mother-woman. Due to men continuously misinterpreting women in their literary work (“Feminist criticism and literary history”), women started reading their work and analyzed how the women were being perceived. According to the “Feminist Literary Criticism” article by Cantrell, women authors write their books in contrast to how women are perceived in men’s literature.

Women in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s had specific roles determined by the males who were dominant in their society. Women began to write stories which told their gender roles in that era. The authors of these stories lived in this time period and their stories reflect a lot of the traditional roles that were expected of them. The author’s purposes, were to tell about how marriage imprisoned women in this period of time. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s stories provide examples of the gender roles. Their reasoning of writing these stories was to call on women of this era to learn how to empower themselves in this society.

Through the stories of both authors, readers easily recognize that the conclusion of stories dedicates for the reader. As well as Woolf writes in the story "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown". She shows to the reader the knowledge about the differences of context, society, individual, country; when on the same topic, the novelist will have a variety of style to writing. Both Chopin and Woolf have the style of writing look like the Georgian writers who want to write in different ways. By using an Analogy, Chopin can use the blueprint of an old one as a basis for understanding; in this story, Chopin describes a relationship between a loving couple is from six years ago, so that is the cause the storm of love reignites their passion. "A Haunted House"

During the feminist movement many female authors began to write novels about female emancipation. In these novels, the protagonist experiences enlightenment where she discovers that she is living an incomplete life that society has oppressed her into. Before the movement, society forced women into roles that were inferior to men and they were thought of as men’s property. Harold bloom states, “The direction of The Awakening follows what is becoming a pattern in literature by and about women…toward greater self-knowledge that leads in turn to a revelation of the disparity between that self-knowledge and nature of the world” (Bloom, Kate Chopin 43). Moreover, Chopin viewed women’s independence as a personal challenge more than a social struggle, which contradicts her literary works. According to Harold Bloom, “Chopin’s novel was not intended to make a broad social statement but rather that it indicates that Chopin viewed women’s independence as a personal matter”(Bloom, Bloom’s Notes 58). In the past, the novel was banned because of its connection to the feminist movement.

The unique style of Kate Chopin’s writing has influenced and paved the way for many female authors. Although not verbally, Kate Chopin aired political and social issues affecting women and challenging the validity of such restrictions through fiction. Kate Chopin, a feminist in her time, prevailed against the notion that a woman’s purpose was to only be a housewife and nothing more. Kate Chopin fortified the importance of women empowerment, self-expression, self-assertion, and female sexuality through creativity in her literary work.

The two literary works by Browning, and Chopin both suggest ideas about gender and power. Each author expresses their ideas in a different way, but each literary work eventually suggests that women lack power when opposed to the opposite gender. This is evident in Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess, and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”. In fact, in “My Last Duchess” there appeared many instances where there was clearly a lack of power for women.

Progress that has been made throughout time is often taken for granted. Many women have struggled mentally and physically in order to achieve what most people do not acknowledge, women like Kate Chopin. Chopin was a feminist writer of the nineteenth century who bravely pushed the boundaries of what was typically written about. Her literature was often inspired by the influential women in her life, as well as by the fact that she was bilingual and bicultural. Chopin used writing as a coping mechanism, all the while impacting people to change their predisposed beliefs regarding women and what their roles should be. Chopin exposes her view that women should rebel against the submissive housewife lifestyle of dependence and weakness through her