Kate Chopin

Women have been deemed mad for centuries. Such a diagnosis leads them to two paths: they either die within themselves, or, more advantageously, they ascend to a different level of freedom. In this paper, focusing on two texts produced in the late nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and Kate Chopin’s The awakening (1899), we argue that, with a Gothic-like morbidity, their self-destructive protagonists, when facing restricting and limited lives, are aroused by a death instinct more satisfying than the unbearable reality they live in. Thus, it is through the annihilation of life, either via madness or death, that they reach liberation.

This chapter appears in the edited collection Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches (2015).

With the benefit of hindsight, Kate Chopin (1850-1904) is now classified among the great American feminist writers. Author of short stories and novels, Chopin’s work appeared in popular magazines of her time and focused on the domestic lives of female characters; the mundane details of women’s lives revealed what was important to them during a time when women’s personal narratives were largely absent from public spaces.

Teaching “The Story of an Hour” during the first part of a two course series for first year writing students in the Middle East has revealed interesting parallels between the sensibilities of Chopin’s era and attitudes towards women and marriage in contemporary Arab society. Gender roles and the placement of women within the family, under the care of her father, then her husband, are widely accepted.

Through the examination of students’ reading logs, essays, and comments in class discussion, we will examine how female Arab and South Asian students in Qatar read this text; a story ostensibly about a woman who dies from joy.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the portrayal of the female perspective in a largely male-dominated society of the Old South in Kate Chopin's short stories: "Désirée's Baby" and "The Story of an Hour". The paper relies on the new historicist approach for the analysis of race and gender in Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" and marriage as a burden in "The Story of an Hour". The paper concludes that the aforementioned issues did not only cause the re-inscription and interrogation of the female perspective but a major proliferation in the works of Kate Chopin as one of the predecessors to feminist writing.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are stories of women struggling with mental illness, fictional accounts of the psychological concept of dissociation, showing that dissociation has been an under-analyzed subject in literature throughout history.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, portrays an influential period of the protagonist’s life. Narrated by a twenty-eight year old Edna Pontellier as an individual struggling with a “dual life—the outward existence which conforms, [and] the inward life which questions” (Chopin 26), Edna experiences an epiphany, which leads her to describe her experiences, her memories, both nostalgic and traumatic, her reveries, her yearnings and her devotions. Afterwards, in her relationships, she seeks to obtain self-ownership and develop her inner reality and self through self-actualization. Because of her review of her childhood and because of her attentiveness towards her experiences at Grand Isle and in New Orleans after her epiphany, Edna grows in her understanding of her world and develops her own perspective greatly. Respecting and considering the advice and wisdom of her family and friends, including Léonce Pontellier, Madame Adele Ratignolle, and Mademoiselle Reisz, she seeks to develop her inner awareness. Via physical and psychosomatic capacities, Edna explores herself in relation to her past and present and, thus, gains incomparable and valuable awareness of her being. Throughout The Awakening, Kate Chopin traces Edna Pontellier’s passage from an unconscious awareness to a full awareness of her dreams, desires, and passions.

This article discusses the ways in which 19 th century feminist American writer Kate Chopin gains a new audience in the branch campus classroom of Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. Originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2015 issue of the journal of Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice.

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” deals with many important themes that are still valid today; such as the importance of being independent, unhealthy relationships, marital oppression and even the concept of love and marriage. She manages to write about all these never-ending problems and express the position of a woman in an unhealthy relationship in just two and a half pages with the help of one unlucky character, a misunderstanding and an open window.

In exploring the tough process of translating Toni Morrison’s Beloved into Chinese, the paper will be framed by Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as expressed in his famous 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator” and Jacques Derrida’s related exposition in “Des Tours de Babel.”  Since I am fully aware that translating this difficult novel is highly challenging, why, then, did I agree to undertake the task?  The paper begins by examining the psychic struggles I underwent and the rationale involved before I finally accepted the challenge.  Subtitled “To Be a Responsible Morrison Translator,” the second section investigates what I believe to be the prerequisites of a good translator of Morrison’s novels in general and of Beloved in particular.  In the third section, which constitutes the principal focus of my paper, I will explore the problems I encountered while rendering Morrison’s most well-known novel into Chinese and how I came to solve them.  Starting with the choice of a Chinese title, I proceed to analyze the novel’s narrative style and tone, its biblical allusions, its oral and aural quality, its poetic prose and songs, its dialogues, colloquialisms and word-play.  But the hardest linguistic nut for me to crack was translating the various interior monologues in Part Two, especially the chapter narrated through Beloved’s “Middle Passage” stream of consciousness.  While I conclude the main section with a reflection of the cultural differences and barriers, in the final section I will put forth a number of observations concerning the craft and art of translation while using translation metaphorically to propound the correlation of my “redemptive” act of translation with Morrison’s writing of Beloved.

Keywords: Task, Translation, Toni Morrison, Beloved, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida

Comparative translation had been found thanks to the reason for interpreting scriptures. Firstly, scriptures were translated for making sure that people understand religious texts. I believe that, translation is needed in every part of our lives. For instance, we buy products from different stores; books, electronic gadgets, pencils, food, drink, etc. most of these are imported products. Consequently, those products were imported to our country via communicative translations. Besides, there are too many books translated so comparative translation is needed for choosing the best translation. Comparative translation; helps us in understanding the source language because, when we compare both of the texts we can see and verify the structure of the sentence, grammar etc. Learning and understanding a different culture are important for person's liberal education. People live for learning and transferring information to next generations. In other words, if a person learns about another language and culture that'll improve his/her knowledge in a roundabout way that makes a person more intelligent. To talk about another culture, a person can mention about the information that was brought from translations and his/her researches about another culture. In this vein, I'm going to probe about two translations of "The Story of an Hour" and two Turkish translations of it. Thesis Statement: This essay aims to analyze the both of the translations with semantic and socio-linguistic level, and will detect&comment about word-to-word and sense-to-sense translation.

"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin and "Eveline" by James Joyce are the two famous short stories that concentrate on analyzing women's perspective using feminist criticism. Both short stories deal a lot in general about what the position of women was recognised within the era they were composed. "The Story of an Hour", like much of Kate Chopin's composition, ranges around the assumption of female autonomy and its hindrances. In the late 19th century, much of American culture held to the deep-seated notion that women were subordinate to and should remain subservient upon husbands and other male personages. In "The Story of an Hour" Chopin has unimpeachably carried out a feminist stance. When the death news of her husband reaches, Louise Mallard, at first, senses thick grief but later she rolls back to cognitive richness when she realizes something justifiable that there will be no more domination and supremacy due to this event. Overdue she three times whispers the word "free" and simply, that is the highlighted fact of this startling story. Nonetheless, the innermost implication of the story is relatively characterized by the repressive nuptial conventions and its essences as well it's hasty existence. The writer, here, is purposefully putting those matters (repressive marriage and female liberation) under interrogation where hegemony and dominance are over imprudent and often frantic in nature. Moreover, at the end of the story, the passing of Louise Mallard illustrates the factual conditions of the women's stagnant liberation process scrutinizing their possession from the 19th-century perspective. Evelin highlights the social backwardness of women. Evelyn's hesitation and consequent inaction were largely due to the role of women in society at the time. Society has told him that he is powerless, and so he feels powerless. This feeling of powerlessness is partly why Evelyn can't make a decision and she thinks that she needs a male personality named God or Frank to "save" her from the current situation. As a woman, she doesn't have much mobility when it comes to her dignity. Evelyn feels guilty for leaving her father and two children and for her happiness, they know they are dependent on her. Because society has told him that she is a caretaker and should be driven by the needs of others and not by her own will or happiness. Evelyn's role as a woman also affects her outlook and experiences of violence. When Evelyn ends up being in reality, it becomes clear that the decision to stay in an abusive relationship seems complicated and less than a decision, or perhaps not a decision at all.

This research was conducted to analyze racial discrimination and stereotype in one of Kate Chopin's famous short story Désirée's Baby. The short story takes place in the Southern part of United States in the mid nineteenth century before the civil war when different race is a main problem in the society. This was a qualitative research. It was concluded that Désirée's Baby has racial discrimination and stereotype characteristics in the story. It was portrayed in how the characters react to racial problem; the word they used and their acts.

Knowing that 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 was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of " killed. " He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. 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. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will—as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: " free, free, free! " The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

Kate Chopin’s Edna, in that sense, was a mere representation of the solitude of an antithetical independence, who endeavored to build up a new sense of independent female identity and who released herself from the responsibilities by denying being a “mother-woman” (12) in search of freedom.

Within cognitive science and narrative theory, the ‘transparency of the mind’ is a shared optical image to describe the accessibility of cognitive processes and phenomenological experiences. This seeming terminological convergence, however, conceals important differences and potential confusion about what is transparent to whom, or what higher or lower degrees of transparency imply in terms of accessibility. Cognitive science speaks of a transparency of the mind in at least two kinds of cognitive scenarios. One is the so-called transparency of self-knowledge or self-transparency (T1), according to which the mind is said to be transparent to itself. A second condition of transparency is in relation to outward perceptual experiences where, inversely, transparency indicates the introspective inaccessibility of phenomenal states or their ‘phenomenal transparency’ (T2). When looking at the colour blue, the classic example goes, we can just attend to the colour blue and not to the experience itself because we see through the process channelling that experience. Both assumptions have been recently disputed or substantially revisited by new strands in cognitive science, which advocate that perception and self-knowledge are instead inherently opaque. Within this alternative account of the mind, encompassing a range of perspectives that the chapter will group and present as the ‘interpretive cognition’ framework, transparency is considered just an illusory feeling resulting from the positive outcome of successful interpretive mechanisms coping with a vast array of opaque stimuli in inner cognition and outward perception. Drawing on the hypotheses raised by the ‘interpretive cognition’ framework, and especially on its reappraisal of inner transparency (T1), this chapter aims at addressing, refining and reassessing an equally recent debate in narrative theory about the transparency of fictional minds. With a particular focus on moods and introspective opacity (conditions in which the embodied, anti-Cartesian dimension of cognition is particularly relevant), the chapter uses Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) as a case study to show how narrative fiction can transparently bring interpretive processes to the fore, either when this mediation is unperceived by the experiencing character or when opacity becomes perceptible to her.