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... Homers and Emily's death represented the Norths and Souths failure to comprise which caused angst and resentment. What was Faulkner, a lifelong resident of the South, trying to imply by symbolizing the North in Homer Barron as uneducated, blue-collared worker and the South in the town of Jefferson as proper and traditional? Perhaps it is reflective of social classes. This happens as long as society alienates man from man resentment and antagonism abound.
Going back to Chopin, there are three elements here that we can infer regarding her parallelisms between her real life and that of her character Mrs. Mallard in her famous The Story of an Hour. These are the death of her husband, the train wreck and issues on personal freedom. As recorded in her biography, the author Kate meets a Louisiana native, Oscar Chopin, a cotton broker. We see glimpses of her relationship with him by the way she follows her husband wherever he hauls their family from one place to another. At some time during their marriage, they establish a new home in New Orleans while waiting for their first child.
However, her husbands brokerage business fails in 1879 and again he decides to move north to his family plantations in Natchitoches Parish. We see Kate here, subservient as any woman of her time, following her husband wherever he summons here follow (Kate Chopin: A Woman Ahead of Her Time). Author Wyatt posits that Oscar was by all accounts, he adored his wife, admired her independence and intelligence, and allowed her unheard of freedom (Wyatt, Neal). However, one is not sure if this was a real freedom she experiences from her husband because it is also told that After their marriage they lived in New Orleans where she had five boys and two girls, all before she was twenty-eight. (Wyatt, Neal). Having five children before one is twenty-eight years of age means that she bore these children practically one after another. Thus, how could a woman who possesses a freedom of her own give birth one after the other?
In much the same way, The Story of an Hour tells of Mrs. Mallard as she learns of the death of her husband from people who even exercise great caution not to tell the bad news to her right on since Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death. It is the next few scenes that give us an inkling as to how she really views this death because she retreats to her room and instead of grieving, ponders on her life now that she had all the freedom in the world. Even the train wreck is replete with vignettes from her own story.
Kate has her own share of train wrecks in life. The deaths of her loved ones within a short period of time prove disastrous for her and derail her life. Her fathers death derails their family life as she is thrown into the custody of her grandmother. Meeting her husband provides a temporary relief but tragedy knocks at her door once more as she copes with the sudden death of her husband.
Her mother and grandmothers death seem to wreck havoc on her whole being this time. How could she support her six children with no money to spend for their needs? However, she is encouraged by a family physician, Dr. Kolbenheyer, to write stories and as if venting her emotional traumas in them, she writes them in the stories she weave, ever so craftily drawing out from her lifes insights. For Chopin s character, Mrs. Mallard, the train wreck her husband figures in signifies not so much as a tragedy but as the beginning of freedom for her.
Chopin points out that Mrs. Mallard actually disdained her husband as she pens, And yet she had loved him -- sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! The character was portrayed in an understated state of joy amidst the apparently bad news of her husbands death.
Moreover, Kate Chopin's personal freedom comes to her as she writes of her insights about her life after she loses her husband. She is now no longer encumbered by marriage and family matters and her feminism perspectives come out in her writings. As DuBois (1971), says, feminism is a concept with three parts. The parts are, first, an analysis which tries to explain why and how women are oppressed; second, a vision of a society in which women are liberated and sex role stereotypes are obliterated; and third, a conviction that the oppression of women is a primary contradiction in society. There have been two major feminist waves in this country, one running from about 1835 to 1920. The second is some time in the middle of the sixties up to the present (DuBois, 1971).
Feminism is generally said to have begun in the 19 th century as people increasingly adopted the perception that women are oppressed in a male-centered society. For generations, women had been subjected to men. Back then, married women could not enter into contracts without their husband's consent. Women lost all title to property or future earnings upon marriage while their children were legally controlled by the father.
Even women were often without recourse against kidnapping or imprisonment by husbands and other male relatives (McElroy, 1991). We see how the author weaves the ideals of feminism that have survived through the years in her writing The Story of an Hour. This was the backdrop of Kates writings. Her story talks about yearnings for personal freedom, choices in life, possibilities of a wide magnitude open to women who had real personal freedom. Her freedom comes only after the deaths of her husband and mother.
In the same manner, Mrs. Mallard experiences the idea of personal freedom now that she is free as she becomes attuned for the first time to scenes and sounds outside her window, She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. Everything seemed to spring forth with life.
As Mrs. Mallard looks out that window, she is overwhelmed by the freedom that beckons her. Reading Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour inspires driven women to write many literary pieces on the issues at that time. Therefore, it is not surprising that this literary piece of work touches a nerve in a country dominated by males. Change is highly valued by women today who feel that they are incorporating the best of the modern world into their lives.
Open to ideas and innovation, women are receptive to those who can explain how change will benefit them, just like Louise in Kate Chopin's work. They now walk a narrow bridge between the past and the future. They will reject visions of the future that only repeats the past. Indeed, the theme, the setting and the characters and some events of this story may well derive more from her own set of personal experiences translated poignantly in a short yet memorable story. WORKS CITED Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour.
Available from web DuBois, E. Feminism Old Wave and New Wave. 1971. From cwluherstory. com website. Accessed 24 October 2005 at: < web >. Haywood, Jennifer.
Kate Chopin. Western Illinois University. Accessed 24 October 2004 at: web Henry, Sherry. The Deep Divide, Why American Women Resist Equality. The Macmillan Publishing Co: New York. 1994.
Kate Chopin: A Woman Ahead of Her Time. Accessed 24 October 2005 at: web McElroy, W. (1991). The Roots of Individualist Feminism in 19 th-Century America. Freedom, Feminism, and the State. The Independent Institute, 2 nd ed. , Feb. 1, 1991. From zetetics.
com website Accessed 15 Sept 2005. < web >. Wyatt, Neal. Biography of Kate Chopin. Accessed 24 October 2005 at: web The Norton Introduction to Literature (eight edition) Kate Chopin "The Story of an Hour" Real Life: "Katherine Chopin. " Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2 nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998. Accessed 24 October 2005 at: web COPIES OF THE SOURCES SOURCE: web William Faulkner: An Introduction i IN AN ESSAY published in Commentary (October, 1950), Leslie Fiedler expressed an understandable exasperation over the misconceptions with which critics have obscured the "actual" Faulkner.
It has taken me ten years of wary reading to distinguish the actual writer of The Sound and the Fury from a synthetic Faulkner, com-pounded of sub-Marxian stereotypes... ; and I am aware that there is yet another pseudo-Faulkner, derived mostly from the pot boiling Sanctuary, a more elaborate and chaotic Erskine Caldwell, revealing a world of barnyard sex and violence through a fog of highbrow rhetoric. The grain of regrettable truth in both these views is lost in their misleading emphases; and equally confusing are the less hysteria-cal academic partial glimpses which make Faulkner primarily a histor-ian of Southern culture, or a canny technician whose evocations of terror are secondary to Jamesian experiments with "point of view. " 1 Criticism has certainly been busy offering us many versions of "that writing' man of Oxford. " From the start, however, much of it has been largely blocked by certain concerns with "society, "naturalism, " and "the human condition. " The strange genius from Mississippi seemed often to violate preconceived standards of taste, or capriciously to disregard sober warnings from his critics. That he should deliberately have announced (in the Preface to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary, 1932) his intention of exploiting the horrible and the obscene confirmed SOURCE: SOURCE: Information: Article Title: Gender and Authorial Limitation in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily. Contributors: Renee R. Curry - author. Journal Title: The Mississippi Quarterly.
Volume: 47. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 1994. Page Number: 391 +. COPYRIGHT 1994 Mississippi State University; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group web Gender and authorial limitation in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily by Renee R. Curry Faulkner's extensive authorial power in "A Rose for Emily" looms evident in the design of a large Southern gothic house, in the outline of three complex generations of a Southern community, and in the development of a plot that dutifully weaves and unweaves a mystery through a limited omniscient point of view.
However, Faulkner also reveals and revels in an authorial lack of knowledge when presented with writing a "lady" into a patriarchal Southern text. Although sole author of "A Rose for Emily, " this writer knows little about what went on in his lady's, Miss Emily Grierson's, household. Knowledge of Emily proves unavailable to him (and consequently to the reader) for about thirty years before we meet her -- before her father dies and lets her out of the house -- and also for the last twenty-seven years of her life. He writes, "her front door remained closed, " (1) and with these words, he both instigates and reveals an extended period of limited knowledge. William Faulkner opens "A Rose for Emily" with a lengthy fifty-six-word single sentence that both encapsulates a community's reaction to death and displays an immediate authorial compulsion to describe a scene through gender differences.
This author situates his story in a line-up of men and women conjoined in the desire to attend Miss Emily's funeral but divided in the motivation assigned by the author: When Miss...
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