KateChopin.org
THE KATE CHOPIN INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY
4 February 2012

Kate Chopin FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions about Kate Chopin and her Works

Many of the questions and answers on this page also appear at other places on this site. You can follow links to those places, where you'll find related information.

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Questions about Chopin's personal life
Questions about Chopin's reputation as a feminist reformer
Questions about Chopin's French expressions
Questions about Chopin's attitude toward race and death
New: Questions about Chopin's style, influences, and translations
Questions about copyright protection of Chopin's work
An unanswered question

Questions about The Awakening, At Fault, and Kate Chopin's short stories

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Questions about Chopin's personal life:

Q: How do you pronounce "Chopin"?

A: In the French way, like that of the composer, Frédéric Chopin--in English, something like SHOW-pan.

Q: When was Kate Chopin born? Some internet sites say 1851 and others 1850.

A: Her tombstone says 1851, but thirty years ago a French scholar revealed that the United States census and her baptismal certificate (no birth certificate exists) show that Chopin was born on February 8, 1850. The Library of Congress in September, 2009, accepted the corrected date, but some printed sources and web sites still give her birth date as 1851.

Q: Was Kate born a Chopin or is that her married name?

A: She was born Catherine O'Flaherty. You can read a brief description of her life.

Q: The Kate Chopin biography I'm reading spells Catherine with a "K." Why is there this difference?

A: There's not much of a difference. "Catherine" and "Katherine" would likely be pronounced the same in English, but "Kate" is what Chopin was called by her family and friends. It's common in the States and other English-speaking places for a woman named Catherine to be referred to with the one-syllable Kate rather than the longer Catherine. Because "Cate" would be puzzling to most English readers, we have "Kate"--and therefore, in the longer form, "Katherine."

Q: Was Kate Chopin's husband related, however distantly, to Frédéric Chopin the composer?

A: Apparently not. Kate Chopin has had three biographers, but none of them has discovered a family connection, and a French scholar in Paris has not found a link.

Q: I was wondering where in Missouri Kate Chopin was born and where in Missouri she lived while she wrote her fiction.

A: According to Emily Toth in her biography Unveiling Kate Chopin, Catherine O'Flaherty was born in 1850 in St. Louis on Eight Street between Chouteau and Gratiot. The family in 1865 moved to 1118 St. Ange Avenue in St. Louis.

When Kate returned to St. Louis in 1884 after her years in Louisiana, she lived first at 1125 St. Ange Avenue and then at 1122 St. Ange Avenue. In 1886 she moved to 3317 Morgan Street, which in now Delmar. In 1903 she moved to 4232 McPherson Avenue (the house is still there), where she died in 1904.

Q: I understand that Chopin had several children. What are their names?

A: Between 1871 and 1879 Kate Chopin gave birth to five sons and a daughter--in order of birth, Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza).

Q: Did Kate Chopin speak French as well as English?

A: Yes. Her mother’s family was of French stock, and Kate grew up bilingual.

Q. My literature anthology says that Kate Chopin's mother was Creole. Does that mean that Chopin has African-American roots?

A. No. In American English, the word "Creole" (the noun form of the word) carries several different meanings. For Kate Chopin, the following definition applies (it's from the Merriam Webster online dictionary): "a white person descended from early French or Spanish settlers of the United States Gulf states and preserving their speech and culture."

Q: I believe Kate Chopin visited Paris in 1870 but did not stay very long. Do you have more details about her visit?

A: According to Chopin's Commonplace Book, as published in Kate Chopin's Private Papers (Indiana University Press, 1998), Chopin and her husband arrived in Paris sometime between the 27th of August and the 4th of September, 1870, while France was at war with Prussia. They left the city on the 10th of September of that year. So Chopin was in Paris somewhere between one week and two weeks. She did not visit Europe again.

Q: I'm reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I've just met Simon Legree. I've read somewhere that Simon Legree was modeled after the father of Oscar Chopin, Kate Chopin's husband. Do you know if this is true or just rumor?

A: Here is what Emily Toth says in her 1990 biography of Kate Chopin: "Local folklore confused [Dr. Chopin, Oscar Chopin's father] with Robert McAlpin, who had owned the land before him and who was sometimes said to be the model for Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin." So the connection between Oscar Chopin's father and Simon Legree is rumor, not fact.

You may want to read Chopin's early novel, At Fault. It includes a chapter in which two characters visit Robert McAlpin's grave.

Questions about Chopin's reputation as a feminist reformer:

Q: Was Kate Chopin’s work forgotten until her literary revival in the 1970s?

A: With a few exceptions here and there, The Awakening was. But some of Chopin's short stories were not forgotten. Several of those stories appeared in anthologies from the 1920s on, and several important scholars were writing about her fiction for decades before it caught fire with the appearance of her Complete Works in 1969.

Q: Was Kate Chopin involved in the women's suffrage movement, in the progressive movements for educational reform, health care reform, or sanitation improvement? Was she involved in any other historically significant happenings of her time?

A: Kate Chopin was an artist, a writer of fiction, and like many artists--in the nineteenth century and today--she considered that her primary responsibility to people was showing them the truth about life as she understood it.

So if you're asking if Kate Chopin was involved in social activism as political scientists today would understand that term, the answer is no. She was not a social reformer. Her goal was not to change the world but to describe it accurately, to show people the truth about the lives of women and men in the nineteenth-century America she knew.

If, however, you're asking if Chopin was involved in "historically significant happenings" as many artists would understand those words, then the answer is yes. She was among the first American authors to write truthfully about women's hidden lives, about women's sexuality, and about some of the complexities and contradictions in women's relationships with their husbands.

As the critic Per Seyersted phrases it, Kate Chopin "broke new ground in American literature. She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction. Revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardy fathom today; with an uncompromising honesty and no trace of sensationalism, she undertook to give the unsparing truth about woman’s submerged life. She was something of a pioneer in the amoral treatment of sexuality, of divorce, and of woman’s urge for an existential authenticity. She is in many respects a modern writer, particularly in her awareness of the complexities of truth and the complications of freedom."

Artists like Kate Chopin see the truth and help others to see it. Once people are able to recognize the truth, then they can create social reform movements and set out to correct wrongs and injustices.

Q: So does that mean that what I read on a blog is true, that Kate Chopin "was an integral part of the evolution of feminism, providing early 20th century readers with feminist literature that is still highly respected and studied today"?

A: No, it's almost certainly not true, simply because, from everything we can tell, little of what many readers today consider Chopin's feminist literature was read in the early years of the twentieth century--The Awakening, for example, or "The Story of an Hour," or, certainly, "The Storm." You might argue that after the 1960s or 1970s Chopin became "an integral part of the evolution of feminism," but she probably had little or no influence on early 20th-century feminist readers.

Questions about Chopin's use of French expressions and dialects

Q: Why are there French expressions in Chopin's novels and stories?

A: Most of the characters in Kate Chopin's short stories and in her two novels, The Awakening, and At Fault, speak French, Spanish, Creole, or all three, in addition to English. Many people with French and Spanish roots lived in Louisiana, where most of Chopin's works are set, and some of them spoke more than one language. Like Mark Twain and other writers of her time, Chopin was determined to be accurate in the way she recorded the speech of the people she focused on in her fiction. Some editions of her works include translations of French expressions, and Chopin usually subtly glosses such expressions in the text. Missing the meaning of a French expression is not likely to lead to a mistake in understanding a story or novel.

Also check the question about this as it applies to The Awakening.

Q: What about the Creole or other dialectal expressions? I love Kate Chopin, but at places in the short stories, I really struggle with understanding what her characters are saying. How do I deal with that?

A: You might try reading the stories aloud--or you might find someone who can read them aloud with feeling. Chopin is capturing what her characters sound like as they speak, so it may be helpful to hear the story, rather than read it.

For example, here's a passage from an early Chopin story in which a caretaker at a plantation is talking to a visitor. The caretaker says that he himself would not be complaining about how run down the place has become:

"If it would been me myse'f, I would nevair grumb'. W'en a chimbly breck, I take one, two de boys; we patch 'im up bes' we know how. We keep on men' de fence', firs' one place, anudder. . . ."

If you could hear that read aloud, you might understand better. In today's standard English, the character would be saying something like:

"If it would [have] been me myself, I would never grumble. When a chimney breaks, I take one or two [of] the boys; we patch it up [the] best we know how. We keep on mending the fences, first [at] one place [and then at] another. . . ."

Questions about Chopin's attitude toward race and her stories about death:

Q: I understand some critics fault Kate Chopin for her attitudes toward race. Where could I find discussions of that subject?

A: There's been a good deal written about Chopin and race. You might start by reading articles by Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Helen Taylor, and Elizabeth Ammons in the Norton Critical Edition of The Awakening, and you might look at Bonnie James Shaker's Coloring Locals. For a defense of Chopin you might start by checking Emily Toth's Kate Chopin and Bernard Koloski's Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction, and on line you could read Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's comments on the Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening site. You can find information about these and other publications about Chopin and race at the bottom of the Awakening page and the Short Stories page of this site, as well as on pages devoted to individual stories, like "Désirée's Baby."

Q: I know that Chopin dealt with a lot of deaths to loved ones growing up. Do many of her writings involve the death of a character? Are these writings available?

A: In addition to famous stories like "The Story of an Hour" and "Désirée's Baby" and the novels At Fault and The Awakening, here are fifteen short stories in which the subject of death comes up (listed in order of composition):

"For Marse Chouchoute"
"The Maid of Saint Phillippe"
"Doctor Chevalier's Lie"
"The Return of Alcibiade"
"La Belle Zoraïde"
"At Chênière Caminada"
"A Sentimental Soul"
"Her Letters"
"Odalie Misses Mass"
"Dead Men's Shoes"
"Madame Martel's Christmas Eve"
"Nég Créol"
"Suzette"
"The Locket"
"The Godmother"

Yes, all of Kate Chopin's works are available in the books listed near the bottom of most pages on this site; both her novels and many of her stories are posted on the web.

Questions about Chopin's style, influences, publication dates, and translations:

Q: I find it difficult to find the right terms for describing Kate Chopin's style, which I think has some romantic elements but also some realistic ones. In what ways was Chopin influenced by other writers, like Maupassant?

A: Chopin read widely and drew from many movements in nineteenth-century literature—romanticism (she had read Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson), realism (she reviewed a book by Hamlin Garland) and local color (she places her characters in a geographical and historical moment and details their sometimes exotic speech patterns and cultural dispositions). She mentions German philosopher and playwright Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in her work as well as other European writers from Aeschylus to Ibsen. She was deeply influenced by French writers Guy de Maupassant (she loved his economy of detail) and Émile Zola (she was impressed by his determination to tell the truth), both of whom she read in their original French. She understood that Maupassant and Zola rejected sentimental fiction, but she was drawn to the work of the French writer George Sand who at times used sentimental elements to describe a woman trying to balance the well-being of others with her own freedom and integrity.

Q: Do you know if Chopin read Charles Baudelaire, and if so, whether she read Les Fleurs du Mal? Did she own a copy of this book?

A: We're aware of no direct evidence that Kate Chopin read Charles Baudelaire. Everything we know about what Chopin read is described by her three biographers. You'll find titles of their biographies at the bottom of our Biography page. In searching for possible influences on Chopin, it's best to start with the biographers. So far as we can tell, no additional primary material about Chopin (such as evidence about whom she read) has emerged in recent years.

New Question: What about Alphonse Daudet? Did she read Daudet?

A: Yes, apparently she did. Her friend William Schuyler published an article about her in Writer in August, 1894, in which he says she read both Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. Chopin's biographer Per Seyersted notes that in her fiction she resembles Daudet, who in his work "looked at least as much for goodness and happiness as for misery."

"One reason why Daudet spoke to Mrs. Chopin," Seyersted adds, "was his seductive style infused with the meridional warmth, the sunny, sensuous atmosphere of his Midi [Daudet loved his native Provence, in southern France]. She had herself responded to the luxurious southern fragrance of Louisiana and to the erotic ambiance of her Gauls."

We don't know when she might have read Daudet, but she had been reading French fiction since she was a child. She and her husband were in Europe in 1870, shortly after Daudet published his famous collection of stories Les Lettres de mon moulin [Letters from my Mill]. Some of those stores had been published earlier in French newspapers and magazines which were available in the States.

Chopin's later biographer Emily Toth points out that in 1878 Daudet published Le Nabob, a novel "about a woman artist who believes herself to be monstrously different, because she defies the rules of traditional society." The artist's name, Toth notes, is Félicia Ruys, "an unpronounceable name too much like Reisz [Mademoiselle Reisz, the pianist in The Awakening] to be an accident."

Q: How can I find out when Kate Chopin wrote her stories and novels and where those works were first published?

A: Composition dates and publication dates for Chopin's works appear on pages 1003 to 1032 of The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, 2006).

Q: Your site lists articles about Chopin's work written in languages besides English. Have people also written books about Kate Chopin in other languages?

A: Yes. Here's a book by a French scholar:

Voix Cover

If you know of other books, would you email us?

Questions about photographs of Kate Chopin and copyright protection of Chopin's works:

Q: Our publishing house in Belgrade, Serbia, is planning to publish a Serbian translation of The Awakening. Since it is going to be the first Serbian translation of this novel, we would like to complete the edition with Kate Chopin's portrait. Can you refer us to the institution that can provide us a print-quality picture of Kate Chopin?

A: Most photographs of Kate Chopin are housed in the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. You can order print-quality photos at the museum site.

Q: A friend of mine has written a sequel to "Désirée Baby" and she is considering publishing it. Would doing that violate any of Ms. Chopin's copyrights or the rights of any organization that may hold copyrights on Ms. Chopin's work? Since copyrights can be a tricky thing I thought that I would contact you and ask for your advice and help on this matter.

A: "Désirée's Baby" and almost all the rest of Kate Chopin's works, including The Awakening, are in the public domain. Only a few stories--those first discovered and published in the 1960s--are not. The best known of the still-copyrighted works is "The Storm," which is controlled by the Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge.

So your friend is free to do as she wishes with "Désirée's Baby" and almost anything else Chopin wrote except "The Storm" and a few other stories. If you're concerned about a different Chopin work, get back to us and we'll be happy to check on its status.

An unanswered question:

Q: Can you help with the identity of Mrs. F. M. Estere of 4434 Laclede Avenue of St. Louis and her possible connection with Kate Chopin?

We don't have an answer for this. If you have any information about Mrs. F. M. Estere, would you please email us?

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The following questions deal with Chopin's two published novels, The Awakening and At Fault, and with her short stories. Questions about the short stories are arranged in the order that the stories are listed on the left of every page on this site.

Questions about The Awakening
Questions about At Fault
Questions about "The Storm"
Questions about "At the 'Cadian Ball"
Questions about "The Story of an Hour"
Questions about "Désirée's Baby"
Questions about "A Pair of Silk Stockings"
Questions about "A Respectable Woman"
Questions about "Athénaïse"
Questions about "Beyond the Bayou"
Questions about "A No-Account Creole"
Questions about "Charlie"
Questions about "A Vocation and a Voice"
Questions about "Lilacs"
Questions about "Fedora"
Questions about "A Point at Issue!"
Questions about "Madame Célestin's Divorce"
Questions about "Ripe Figs"
Questions about "Her Letters"
Questions about Chopin's other short stories