Kate Chopin -- Short Fiction

General Notes

Norton Anthology of American Literature -- Notes on Kate Chopin:

• Independence -- She asserted her independence by smoking in company and going about the streets without a companion of either sex -- both daring acts for the time.

• Influenced by French writers -- Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant.

• She focused on the tension between individual erotic inclination and constraints placed on desire -- especially on women's sexual desire -- by traditional social mores.

• What she told directly -- and without moral judgment -- was how certain women were beginning to challenge the patriarchal rules that sought not only to confine them to well-defined social, economic, and vocational domains but to control their inner life as well.

• A local colorist as well as a regionalist? Also a naturalist?