Unveiling Kate Chopin (Paperback)

by Emily Toth (Author) "WHEN KATE O ' FLAHERTY was five years and seven months old, her parents packed her off to boarding school..." (more)
Key Phrases: bayou folk, Kate Chopin, The Awakening, New Orleans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Widely admired today for her sensitive portrayals of women whose desires transgressed accepted norms, and for her wry commentary on the institution of marriage, turn-of-the-century author Kate Chopin was viewed by her contemporaries as an iconoclast, and they alternately praised and reviled her fiction. In this lively biography, Toth (LSU professor and author of Kate Chopin's Private Papers and Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia) presents strong evidence that the groundbreaking, unconventional qualities of Chopin's fiction derive less from feminist conviction than from the unconventional nature of Chopin's own life. Telling the "true story of a St. Louis society belle who... became the author of the most radical American novel of the 1890s" (that is, 1899's The Awakening), Toth argues that, as the child of a Creole mother and a first-generation Irish father, as a St. Louis "Yankee" who spent much of her adult life in New Orleans and rural Louisiana, and particularly as a girl who grew up in a house full of strong women and who was never subjected to the will of a male authority figure (her father died when she was five), Chopin was simply acclimated to unconventional perspectives on female destiny and traditional cultural values. But as inattentive as she may have been to the dictates of "proper" femininityAshe smoked cigarettes in public, for example, and was a shrewd business womanAeven Chopin recognized the need to restrain the more flagrantly "improper" themes of her fiction, and here Toth is particularly insightful. Ably blending biographical information with pithy analysis of Chopin's fiction, this book makes a convincing case for the writer's life as her richest source of material and inspiration.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Published on the centennial of The Awakening, Toths insightful biography of Kate Chopin uses recently discovered manuscripts to give us the sharpest picture yet of this daring artist, bent on a career as a professional writer with unpopular and unsettling views on marriage. Toth, a leading Chopin scholar, has built her biography on new inquiries: Why did Chopin do what she did? How did she become her true self? Toth credits the French women of Chopins family with nurturing her independence and helping her repudiate the innocence (ignorance) that was thought to be a feminine virtue. Toth gives us a Chopin who preferred to be solitary but who also raised six children, outlived her husband, Oscar, participated in social and literary clubs, and saw herself as a contributing member of the national literary community, even when her masterpiece, The Awakening, received wretched reviews. Toth pays particular attention to the connections between the individuals in Chopins life and the characters in her fiction. A definitive biography.Charles Crawford Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 290 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578061024
• ISBN-13: 978-1578061020
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #504,746 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars The Awakening: the rest of the story, April 5, 2000

By	Linda Whitney (Logandale, NV) - See all my reviews

Emily Toth wrote Unveiling Kate Chopin after the remarkable recent discovery of Chopin's diaries and manuscripts. This intimate perspective paints a whole new picture of her life and work. Throughout this biography, Toth draws parallels between actual experiences from Chopin's life to characters and incidents in her writing. Suddenly, her stories have new depth of meaning. Toth begins her saga when sixteen-year-old Eliza Faris, a genuine Creole, married thirty-nine-year-old Thomas O'Flaherty, a wealthy businessman in St. Louis. A domineering patriarch, O'Flaherty sent his daughter Kate away to boarding school at age five. Although the reason why is unknown, Toth suggests "a dark family drama triggered sending Kate away." Shortly after this, Thomas O'Flaherty died in a tragic train wreck, and Kate came home to stay. This incident of her father's death closely parallels Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," with a different twist at the end. Toth describes Chopin's childhood as a paradise dominated by women. Life bloomed until the Civil War brought the invasion of the Union army to St. Louis. Speaking out against the Union, Kate herself narrowly escaped imprisonment. Union soldiers intruded the family's home, committing, what Toth refers to as, an "outrage." Chopin married a sensitive and wealthy young Louisiana Frenchman, Oscar Chopin. A non-conformist, Kate never quite fit in with his people, displaying such radical behavior as smoking, walking alone, riding bareback and astride, and lifting her skirts to provocatively show her ankles. It is no wonder that she felt like an outsider, similar to Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. After her husband's death, Kate began developing as a professional writer, following the classic rule of "Write about what you know," and submitting her stories to newspapers and magazines. She learned that as long as her heroines never triumphed over their men, they were accepted. Her passion was for exposing the realism of social problems women faced in a world where men wrote the rules. Audiences embraced her book Bayou Folk, yet they looked past the courageous qualities of the women characters, seeing only the quaint local color. In April, 1899 Chopin published her finest work, The Awakening. The crushing reviews of her masterpiece labeled it "morbid," "unhealthy," "not wholesome," "shocking," "crude" and "sex fiction." Thus the novel modern audiences celebrate Kate Chopin for writing, brought her career to a scandalous end. Like Edna in The Awakening, naked and unveiled to the world, she had swum out too far. Chopin died a few years later in 1904. Toth portrays Chopin as a brilliant creative woman with the courage to brave the controversy against conventional traditions of Victorian America. She captures the sensitive world where Chopin bloomed and relates how it cultivated the genius who wrote of subjects nearly a century ahead of her time.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars unwarranted conclusions, June 16, 2007

By	Louise Penberthy "Actor, playwright, mediator... (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

I hope this is a good biography of Kate Chopin, an author whose work I admire. However, if you read this book, I suggest you be very careful of trusting any conclusions the author reaches based on anything less than complete evidence.

Emily Toth makes many assumptions and interpretations which are shaky at best. For example:

Bud Aiken is a representation of Albert Sampite because they share an initial (A). That's weak at best.

Alcee Arobin is a representation of Albert Sampite because the first and last pieces of Albert Sampite's name make Alcee, thus: Al---- -----e becomes Alcee ... say what?

Early on, Toth says evidence suggests that Oscar Chopin helped his mother escape from her husband's (his father's) house. Most of her evidence is based on her interpretation of Oscar's character and what he would have done. Later in the book, she states Oscar's assistance to his mother as an established fact!

I could go on and on but that's enough to give you the idea.

Also, Toth's writing is overblown and florid, especially at the ends of paragraphs where she states her conclusions.

Probably Toth's underlying research and scholarship are sound. It's a pity she marred the book with conclusions she seems to want to be true, and writing that doesn't serve the subjecct.