Relationship between Chopins Life and The Awakening Essay -- Chopin

Relationship between Chopin's Life and The Awakening Katherine O'Flahtery Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri February 8,1851. She was the daughter of Thomas and Eliza O'Flaherty, a prominent Irish-born merchant and his wife. Together, Chopin's parents represented freedom and the American dream. Their ambition and spirit helped mold Chopin into a unique character with independence and intelligence. Her father died suddenly when Chopin was four years old. His death was the result of a terrible accident that took the lives of several civic leaders when the key link to the Pacific Railroad was being completed and a bridge collapsed. After Thomas O'Flahtery's death, Katherine's childhood was most profoundly influenced by her mother and grandmother, women of French Creole pioneers. As a child, Chopin spent much of her time with her family's Creole and mulatto slaves, whose dialects she mastered. She studied piano, wrote poetry, and read books by such famous authors as Dickens, Austen, and Goethe. Although Katherine displayed a very indep endent and responsible personality, she was once nicknamed the littlest rebel for yanking down a Union flag. However, despite her free spirit, Chopin grew to be a leading social belle, admired for her wit and beauty. As a debutante, Chopin was an undistinguished student at the convent school named the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. She graduated at age seventeen and spent two years as a young woman of fashionable St. Louis society. It was then that the young Katherine O'Flaherty met Oscar Chopin, a wealthy Creole cotton factor. In the year 1870, Kate married Oscar and, for the next decade, Kate Chopin pursued the demanding social and domestic schedule of a wealthy wife and mother. ... ...r that surrounded the publication of The Awakening, and its harsh reception is what ultimately stopped her from writing. She felt that because of the vast amount of controversy and criticism she received because of The Awakening, there was no future for her as an author. Chopin devoted the last few years of her life to her family. Katherine O'Flaherty Chopin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 22, 1904 at the age of 53. Many felt that Kate Chopin had been denied the recognition she desperately wanted and richly deserved. As well as The Awakening, other of Chopin's writings are receiving the critical acclaim that they had been neglected. The short stories collected in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie established Chopin as an important writer of local-color fiction. Works Cited: Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1899. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1993.