KATE CHOPIN

You have read a novel by Kate Chopin: The Awakening, and a short story: The Story of an Hour.

Let's lear more about the author and her context.

I've taken great material from a webquest:

http://www.zunal.com/process.php?w=50307

I've assigned one question to each of you. We will deal with them in class next Tuesday 20, but if you want, you can start reading at home.

The Life and Times of Kate Chopin

Use the following hyperlinks to discover information about Kate Chopin and answer the questions that follow:
http://www.angelfire.com/nv/English243/Chopin.html
http://www.katechopin.org/
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-bio/bl-kchopin.htm
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/cultural.asp?e=2c
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/cultural.asp?e=1b
http://www.legacy98.org/timeline.html

1. On what topic do Kate Chopin’s works focus? Ale
2. What reaction did her two novels, At Fault and The Awakening, receive? Lucila
3. When did Kate Chopin live and write? What were the social, political and legal realities for women of her time? Florencia
4. When did critics/scholars finally begin to accept The Awakening? After viewing a timeline of the women’s rights movement, suggest a reason for that acceptance. Noelia
5. Are Chopin’s own life/family background/beliefs evident in “The Story of an Hour”? Milena
6. Who were some of Chopin’s female contemporaries with whom she shared similar concerns? Cristian
7. Compare/contrast the following quotes taken from two of Chopin’s stories:

"Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had
apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life
which questions." Description of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening.

"There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There
would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe
they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature." Description of Mrs. Mallard in
"The Story of an Hour." Everybody

8. Choose a few lines from Chopin’s own words (her diaries or journals) and explain how those beliefs/concerns make her “a woman ahead of her times” and how they are reflected in “The Story of an Hour”. Vero

By reading we discover different worlds! Hope you enjoy the activity in spite of the effort it calls for!

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Hi guys! Here's the first part of the production based on the short story. Please, go online and watch the rest of it.
What differences do you find between the written version and this televised production?

The Yellow Wallpaper PBS Masterpiece Theater 1989 part 1

http://youtu.be/BAJm6gFJb4I

In case you have any problems, here's the link to the 8 parts.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Yellow+Wallpaper+PBS+Masterpiece+Theater+1989&aq=f

Yet, here's another link. It`s in five parts and apparently the sound is better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wod6aV8f1oo&feature=related

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913) This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner.

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.

Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there?

Now the story of the story is this:

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.

But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.

It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

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Front page illustration for the original serialized version of The Yellow Wallpaper from the New England Magazine (1892).