Comparing The Awakening And The Storm By Kate Chopin
678 Words3 Pages
Kate Chopin was an American author who wrote stories about women’s lives that were thought to be vulgar and disagreeable by critics and readers. The Awakening and “The Storm” are stories Chopin wrote that were about taboo subjects such as infidelity and sexuality. Her exploration of women’s independence was not celebrated by her society. I believe that if Chopin had published her stories in today’s society, her novels would be at the top of the New York Times’s “Best Sellers” list right next to E. L. James’s book, 50 Shades of Grey(2011). Infidelity in Chopin’s era was socially acceptable if a man was being unfaithful, but a woman could not be unfaithful. Infidelity today is socially acceptable for both men and women, and Chopin’s stories reveal the truthfulness of a woman’s unfaithfulness to be happy. Chopin’s story, “The Storm”, is a story about love and infidelity. Calixta is a married woman who has a young son. She loves and cares…show more content… Chopin’s era was more conservative and women didn’t have as many rights as women today have. The women in Chopin’s stories explored their sexuality and their infidelity. Women got married, and sometimes it wasn’t for love. They tried to “marry up” and find the wealthiest man to marry. Calixta had married Bobinôt but she was still in love with Alcée. Since divorce was a taboo subject, the only way a women could escape marriage was if her husband died. Once a woman’s husband had died, she was no longer expected to remarry. In Chopin’s story, a woman was happiest when her husband wasn’t around. This is true when Clarisse, Alcée wife, “was charmed upon receiving her husband’s letter”(646). In the letter, Alcée tells his wife to not hurry back home, and if “she and the babies [liked] it at Biloxi”(646), they could stay a month longer. As much as she loved her husband, the vacation that she and her children were on was the first time she had experienced freedom since she got