Women and emancipation in Kate Chopin’s works

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, more precisely in 1850, one of the most important American writers was born: Catharine O’Flaherty Faris, better known as Kate Chopin. She is considered a precursor in her times who articulated in her work the unspoken desires and secrets of women’s experiences and feelings. In a period when Victorian prudery pervaded not only family life, but also the public area, she wrote openly about women: her works challenged the conventions and rules of a society that restricted women’s dreams of freedom and independence and questioned women´s identity. Chopin’s female characters and their dreams of emancipation are linked to the main purpose of this project that is, then, to demonstrate that it does exist an evolution in the behaviour and disposition of Kate Chopin’s female protagonists in their longing for reaching their freedom. Taking into account Janet Beer’s assertion in which she claims that Chopin is an interesting subject of study for the parallelism between her personal and fictional evolution, five fictional heroines from her short stories (“Désirée’s Baby”, “The Story of an Hour”, “A Respectable Woman” and “The Storm”) and her last novel The Awakening have been examined and analysed to prove that this evolution cannot be denied.