Ethics Unchanged
Ethics Unchanged
Kate Chopin was a remarkable writer, and woman who was faced with many trials and tribulations during her lifetime. She was born in 1850 with the name Katherine O’Flaherty, and married Oscar Chopin in 1879. Sadly, before she was 33 she had become an orphan and widow when she lost her grandmother, father, a mother she adored, and finally her husband. “These losses compelled Chopin to delve more intensely into literature and for the next two years she secluded herself in the family attic—even missing school”( GaleLit 3). It is important to know, that Chopin did not have the highest education, but did eventually go back to school and graduated from a Catholic school named the “Academy of the Sacred Heart”. Her stories are often sad, and relentless. They are stories about things that a young catholic school girl should never speak of. They relayed messages of unhappy women caught and trapped in their marriage. As the Kate Chopin International Society states, “Most of the stories are set in the late nineteenth century in Louisiana, often rural Louisiana. Most of the characters, like most of the people living in Louisiana at the time, are Creoles, Acadians, Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and people of mixed race” (katechopin.org 2). This tells us that she wrote after the civil war had ended. Three of the stories that Chopin wrote, that were not published until after her death are “The Storm” which is about infidelity, “The Story of an Hour” has the theme of a woman’s happiness when she believes her husband was killed. Strangely enough, she is the one who dies in the end. Lastly, there is “Desiree’s Baby” which is about a family secret that is kept for generations, only to be found out when it is too late, and when suicide was the escape. With all of these stories being so morally questionable, one would assume that Chopin was in a cruel marriage herself. I was surprised to learn...
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