Kate Chopin and the Suffrage Movement For the CSET

If you are studying for the CSET English and the CSET Multiple Subjects tests, then you should learn about Kate Chopin as well as the suffrage movement. While a question may not be on your CSET exam dealing with Kate Chopin, there will most certainly be a question that deals with the Women’s Rights Movement. There will be a CSET practice test on the Women’s Rights Movement at the end of this lesson.

Katherine O’Flaherty (February 8, 1851 – August 22, 1904), known by her married name Kate Chopin, was an American author of short stories and novels.

She wrote The Awakening, The Story of an Hour and The Storm, among other works.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a look at a woman’s life at the turn of the 19th century. Published in 1899, Chopin’s novella shocked critics and audiences alike, who showed little sympathy for the author or her central protagonist, Edna Pontellier. A master of craft, Chopin wrote a forceful novel about a woman who questioned not only her role in society, but the standards of society itself.

By showing what Edna’s options are, Chopin also exhibits why those roles failed to satisfy Edna’s desires.

Many late 19th century writers reacted against an earlier wave of sentimental writings, focusing instead on an approach more akin to “realism”—studies of daily affairs and commonplace events (a method or form in fiction that provides a “slice of life,” an “accurate representation of reality”.) Part of Chopin’s realism relies on regionalism or local color writing, a style of writing that emphasizes regional differences in terms of language, dialect, religion, cultural expectations, class societies, and so on. Readers follow Edna—a Protestant from Kentucky—in her encounters with Catholic Creole society in Louisiana. Edna’s role as “outsider” allows for a comparison between two different Southern cultures and her awakening in part results from the clash of the two world views.

Literary realism is a variable, complex, and often argued about concept. No one work is a perfect example of ‘realism’. Practitioners of a realist style in the American tradition include William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.

In The Awakening, as well as her short stories, Chopin frequently focused on the Creole culture of Louisiana. Unique regional features included a heritage that drew from French and Spanish ancestry, a complex caste system, the settings of urban New Orleans and rural vacation