Kate Chopin's "A Respectable Woman"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains how Chopin intermingles reference, literary allusion, biography and psychology with her story of Mrs. Baroda, Gouvernail and Gaston to ridicule the conventions, which control the behaviors of "respectable" nineteenth-century women. This paper points out Chopin's intertextual reference to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself". The author believes that Chopin intersperses her own knowledge of society and convictions to transcend the small-minded judgments of her audience.

From the Paper:

"In addition to evoking eroticism by referring to Whitman's "Song of Myself," Chopin scrutinized the nineteenth-century's negative reception of Whitman by embracing his "vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-formed America" (Whitman 516) and, at the same time, denouncing the critics she herself faced. As Whitman's writing achievement suffered because readers, offended by his celebration of sexuality and the body, disregarded his genius, so did Chopin endure the realities of a society controlled by taboo -- in "A Respectable Woman," a married woman attracted to a man other than her husband. She, too, experienced the hostility of a public that regarded her work as scandalous. She acknowledges her artistic kinship with Whitman in "A Respectable Woman" by quoting from one of his greatest works."

More papers on Kate Chopin's "A Respectable Woman":

• Analytical Essay # 67246 : "Ironies in "A Respectable Woman" and "The Necklace"
• Book Review # 111810 : "Kate Chopin's New Roles of Women"
• Analytical Essay # 8863 : "Kate Chopin: Woman Out of Her Time"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: