An anonymous newspaper friend once called Kate Chopin 'a rogue in porcelain, flashing her witty, provocative and advanced opinions right into the face of Philistia'. (1) Others noted Chopin's quiet manner and her gift for saying 'so many good and witty things'. (2) She possessed 'every grace and talent essential to the maintenance of a brilliant social circle'. (3) She was wise and cosmopolitan and did not make moral judgements. Nor did she force her own children, five sons and a daughter, to leave home or get jobs, and only one was married before his mother died at fifty-four. She deliberately kept a condemned book, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, on her parlour table so that young visitors would peruse it out of curiosity and discover that it was 'unpardonably dull; and immoral, chiefly because it is not true' (714).
Real life and mixed emotions were much more interesting to her than Hardy's melancholy story. According to her daughter, Chopin had a 'habit of looking on the amusing side of everything', but also 'rather a sad nature'. (4) She knew that life has both beauty and brutality - and she also knew how to keep secrets.
The facts of Kate O'Flaherty Chopin's life are well known. Although her tombstone lists her birthdate as 1851, her baptismal record shows that she was born on 8 February 1850, in St Louis, Missouri. She was the second child and first daughter of Eliza Faris O'Flaherty, twenty-two, whose husband was Thomas O'Flaherty, forty-five, an Irish immigrant and wealthy businessman who owned four household slaves. Kate had an older brother, an older half-brother and two little sisters who died young, which may be why, at five, she was sent to boarding school at the Sacred Heart Academy.
Two months later, her father was killed in a train accident, Kate was brought home, and her grandmother and great-grandmother moved in - making three generations of women who were widowed young and never remarried. Kate O'Flaherty grew up in a matriarchy, where women handled their own money and made their own decisions, as did the nuns at the Sacred Heart Academy, where she returned two years later. She was sixteen before she ever lived with a married couple again (an aunt and uncle), and so she had little opportunity to form traditional notions about marriage and submissive wives. When she married Oscar Chopin on 9 June 1870, she started off on their European honeymoon with a clean slate and an open mind.
The Chopins settled in New Orleans, where Oscar was a cotton factor (the middle man between growers and buyers). Within nine years, Kate had given birth to six children, the last in Cloutierville ('Cloochy-ville') in north Louisiana, where the family moved when Oscar's business failed. In that small village, Kate Chopin entertained and annoyed local people with her flamboyant fashions and brusque urban manners. Oscar was a local favourite, but when he died of malaria on 10 December 1882, $12,000 in debt, Kate was left without his social protection. She paid off the debts, had a scandalous romance with a local married planter, Albert Sampite ('Sam-pi-TAY'), and quickly moved back to her mother's home in St Louis in 1884 - just a year before her mother died of cancer.
Her doctor, seeing her deep grief, suggested that she try writing, and, by 1890, Chopin had become St Louis' first woman professional writer. Eventually she published two novels (At Fault and The Awakening) and two collections of short stories (Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie), while producing several dozen other pieces, including short stories, essays, poems, translations, one play and one polka.
The Awakening, though, received mixed to hostile reviews, at a time when Chopin's health was deteriorating. Within a few years, she also became the caregiver for her eldest son. His wife had died in childbirth, sending him into a nervous breakdown from which he never fully recovered. Chopin rallied to enjoy the St Louis World's Fair, but on one very hot day she had a cerebral haemorrhage and died on 22 August 1904.
Outside of Louisiana, she was mostly forgotten for half a century, until Per Seyersted, a Norwegian graduate student studying in the USA, rediscovered her and promoted her work. Other dissertation writers and scholars, among them Bernard Koloski, Helen Taylor and Emily Toth, resurrected her reputation, and she is now solidly in the American literary canon. Yet, there are still many mysteries about her life. Chopin's first biographer, Daniel Rankin, completed his work twenty-eight years after her death when many people who had known her were still alive, but he relied too heavily on Chopin's sister-in-law, Fannie Hertzog Chopin, who was, by then, losing her memory. Rankin was also a priest, and people are reluctant to share gossipy titbits with the clergy. (5)
Seyersted interviewed whomever he could find by the mid 1960s and got some recollections of the Chopins' jolly marriage during their New Orleans years (1870-9). But he also could not, or perhaps would not, ask impertinent questions. In the 1960s, publishing, too, was more restricted than it is today. When Seyersted discovered Chopin's 'The Storm' in her 1894 diary and wanted to publish it in the Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, he was told he could not do so. It was too erotic, too explicit. (6) Now, of course, it is reprinted everywhere, and Kate Chopin is viewed as a pioneering writer about sex.
Notes
(1) Emily Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 197.
(2) Toth, Unveiling, 162.
(3) Toth, Unveiling, 182.
(4) Daniel Rankin, Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania, 1932), 35.
(5) Personal interviews, 1984-97, with Lucille Carnahan.
(6) Per Seyersted, Per Seyersted Collection, Missouri Historical Society.
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