In The Awakening (1899), the novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her public career as a writer, Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment. In the two story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the popular local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales that portray Louisiana bayou cultures with sympathetic insight and an eye to the unresolved conflicts of a South reeling from the Civil War. Louis businessman, and the man’s alcoholic wife. The explosive novel At Fault (1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Now, The Library of America collects all of Chopin’s novels and stories as never before in one authoritative volume. Her stories of fiercely independent women challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics, and today seem decades ahead of their time. From ruined Louisiana plantations to bustling, cosmopolitan New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unflinching honesty about propriety and its strictures, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |