Week 10 Flashcards
(9 cards)
Kate Chopin (1850–1904)
Kate Chopin wrote about 100 short stories, which
carry the literary stamp of her times, namely of
realism and of local-color traditions.
But her local-color tales bear neither nostalgic,
sentimental, melodramatic or humorous traits nor are they peopled by aristocratic southerners full of integrity, representing the quaint Old South.
Kate Chopin’s regional stories such as “Désirée’s Baby” negotiate problems of mixed ‘races’ in families and present rebellious acts of female self-assertion and moral transgressions without falling back on humor to take the edge off their messages. Chopin thus transcends the generic rules of local color fiction whose conventions she exploits in order to express the otherwise inexpressible.
Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1850 to Thomas O’Flaherty, an Irish immigrant, and Eliza Faris, a French-Creole.
In 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, a cotton trader and son of a plantation owner. They set up home in New Orleans where between 1871-78 five sons were born.
After the failure of Oscar Chopin’s cotton business and the family’s move to Cloutierville, a rural area of Louisiana, another child, a daughter, was born. After the death of her husband in 1882, Kate Chopin returned to St. Louis and continued publishing to secure her family an income.
short story collection Bayou Folk (1894)
second collection of stories A Night in Acadie (1897)
The Awakening, a novel (1899) which was set in New Orleans.
1904: Chopin died in St. Louis.
Gender and Race: Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” (1893)
Chopin’s topics include:
gender roles
race issues such as interracial sexual liaisons and miscegenation
social transgressions and joyful adulterous sex
Chopin faced many problems with publishers and was rejected more than once in spite of the fact that her accurate depictions of everyday life of ordinary people in Louisiana––a region the rest of the USA considered as fairly exotic––met with the expectations of her readership.
In Chopin’s stories, the reader is left in doubt about her own opinions.
By not spelling out explicit messages and by concealing her own opinion, Chopin’s fiction is considered by some as racist, by others as anti-racist, sharply criticizing the straightjacket of absurd racial classifications and moral values, which characterized late nineteenth-century Louisiana.
The extremely well crafted short story “Désirée’s Baby” evidences the latter reading. It is Chopin’s most often anthologized short story and encompasses only 2,152 words.
Written in 1892, “Désirée’s Baby” was first published in Vogue in January 1893, before it was printed again a year later in Bayou Folk, and demonstrates the important role tacit meanings generally play in Chopin’s works.
While brevity is one reason for the story’s suggestiveness, the fact that Chopin had to earn a living and therefore needed to please the northern publishers and the potential white middle-class national readership, is another reason for her semantic strategy of implicitness.
Unlike the emancipated protagonists of Chopin’s later work, this short story has a vulnerable and submissive young woman as its heroine.
Setting = ante-bellum Louisiana, when slavery was still legal & solidly based on the rigid ‘one-drop’ racial taxonomies.
Like so many other of Chopin’s stories and novels, “Désirée’s Baby” deals with marriage and motherhood but also embraces the theme of miscegenation.
It tells the story of a young couple, Désirée Valmondé, a foundling, and Armand Aubingy, who eventually become aware of the fact that their newborn is dark-skinned and that some of their ancestors must have been slaves.
Armand blames Désirée for not being white and comes to hate her. As a consequence, the young wife in great despair walks off with her baby into the bayou: “She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again.” (247)
Some weeks later, while her husband burns the belongings of his wife and baby, together with letters his wife had written to him during their courtship, the reader learns about another, much older letter that Armand’s mother wrote to his father:
“He read it. She was thanking God for the blessing of her husband’s love: – ‘But, above all,’ she wrote, ‘night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.’” (247)
The story’s ending brings home the tragic irony of Désirée’s death, caused by the suspicion that she may have ‘Negro’ ancestry, when in fact it is her husband who is ‘black’ through his mother.
Chopin’s narrator does not comment on the curious twist at the end of the story. What is more, the point of view from which the last four paragraphs are told is characterized by a shift from a general, omniscient perspective to Armand’s personal point of view. “He read it” (i.e. his mother’s letter, 247) does not reveal to the reader whether Armand has been long aware of the letter’s content or whether he only read it shortly before or even while the bonfire was already underway.
If he had known its content before, then the act of burning his mother’s letter can be read as Armand’s denial of his own ‘Negro’ ancestry. He can neither accept “the unconscious injury [his wife] had brought upon his home and his name” (246), nor recognize the truth that in the veins of his own old and proud Louisiana family runs the blood of non-white ancestors. By burning the letter he tries to destroy once and for all the evidence of his ‘racial impurity.’
Armand’s deep-rooted racism
a dense net of insinuations and implications
they foreshadow the tragic dénouement and ending of the story
underlying structure = antithetical, contrasting light and shadow, whiteness and blackness, the Satanic and Providence Armand as an almost satanic figure with extreme passions (his feelings for Désirée were like “an avalanche, or like a prairie fire,” 242) and an “imperious and exacting nature” (244).
Dark colors are used as his symbols: his house ‘L’Abri’ (= ‘the shelter’) is shadowed by oak branches “like a pall” and its roof is “black like a cowl” (243), he has a “dark, handsome face” (244) and after the discovery of his baby’s Negroid features, “the very spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him in his dealings with the slaves” (244).
His fair-skinned wife Désirée represents purity and innocence and is connected to the color white.
She contrasts with her husband and is characterized as “sincere” and “gentle” (242), she wears “soft white muslins and laces” (243) and later, after having been wronged by her husband, she is said to be “a stone image: silent, white, motionless” (246).
When she leaves home with her baby to walk into the bayou she wears a “thin white garment” and “the sun’s rays brought a golden gleam from [her hair’s] brown meshes” (246). This halo effect turns her into a saint-like figure. Interestingly, the color white connects Désirée to La Blanche, i. e. ‘the white one,’ one of her husband’s female slaves, who is also the mother of “little quadroon boys” (245).
Armand Aubigny hears the cries of his newly born baby “as far away as La Blanche’s cabin” (243).
Who has fathered the little quadroon boys?
Mixed ‘race’ is symbolized in “Désirée’s Baby” by yet another color, the color yellow, which also plays a crucial role. Armand’s home, for instance, is a bleak “yellow stuccoed house” (243) and Zandrine, like La Blanche one of Armand’s female slaves, is described as “yellow nurse woman” (243).
The color yellow clearly stands for the violence of interracial sexual relations, which simmer beneath the surface of Chopin’s stories.
“Désirée’s Baby” most intriguing facet is how readily most readers are duped into jumping to the conclusion that it is Désirée who is of African descent, rather than Armand, the ‘whitened’ Creole landowner.
“Désirée’s Baby” with its consistent use of color symbolism and a clear pattern of contrasting images, which contributes both unity and density of meaning, is an example of Kate Chopin’s well-crafted fiction, which secured her a place in the canon of nineteenth-century American literature.
Modernism: Historical and Cultural Background
Boyer’s cultural history The Enduring Vision (ch. 22-25)
Ruland/Bradbury, From Puritanism to Postmodernism, ch. 8-10.
modernity modernism
Modernity is an international (Western) phenomenon which is, however, differentiated along cultural borderlines. Numerous cultural transformations took place in a prototypical manner in the United States of America.
Modernism = artistic response to or against (socioeconomic) modernity
Modernity = the age of acceleration
the tempo of life speeds up
inventions and discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, philosophy -> proliferation of knowledge
industrial progress: industrialization
demographic progress: urbanization
social changes, social conflicts
new forms of corporate power and class struggle
information overload, disorientation
List of main historical events
1914-18: WW I
1929: Stock market crash; Great Depression begins
1936-39: Spanish Civil War; US volunteers among those fighting against general Franco
1939-45: World War II and Holocaust
1941: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor; the US enters WW II
1942: President Roosevelt orders internment of Japanese Americans in camps
1945: German forces surrender in spring; Japan surrenders, US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
List of Key Terms
Industrialization and new forms of production:
-> cf. Charlie Chaplin Modern Times (1936)
mass-production and mass-consumption
standardization of factories
Henry Ford: assembly line
Isaac Singer / Singer Sewing Machines
rationalization and functionalization -> efficiency
chain stores / supermarkets
An ever expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market
urbanization, city/metropolis as new social space (also great migration of African Americans from the rural south to northern industrial cities)
the city as a new social space vs. the city as a new perceptual experience
disorientation, social changes social changes, social conflicts
sexual revolutions
women’s lib
emancipatory potential of modernity
proliferation of knowledge and development of systems of mass communication
-> information overload, disorientation
“The Jazz Age” The movies Standardized entertainment Industry of cultural production Popular culture Immigrant culture Formulaic Frankfurt School: audience as passive recipients, easily manipulated “the culture industry” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno) hedonism 1929 Stock market crash the “Great Depression” the “Roaring Twenties”
Xenophobia
Red Scare (1919)
Re-founding of the Ku-Klux-Klan in the 1920s
Aesthetic Consequences of modernity
crisis I: alienation (as product of modernity)
alienation as central topos of modernism
alienation as reason for “the lost generation” of American writers to leave the U.S.; the term “the lost generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein in connection with the aftermath of WW I.
crisis II: crisis of representation, intensified by abstract painting, photography and cinematography (Armory Show 1913 in New York which introduced postimpressionist painting to America) -> new ways of seeing
modernist response: artistic innovation, experimentation
(Ezra Pound: “Make It New!”)
Barthes: modernist texts = writerly (vs. readerly) texts
Shklovsky: modernist texts = highly defamiliarized texts;
concern with form and mediality
modernist tendency to break up an existing order (hierarchies and causalities)
formal experimentation revolutionizing the forms of representations
collage
montage (=cinematographic technique)
radical formal innovation: the avant-garde
affirmation of machine technology
Freudian psycho-analysis: fragmented self
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
1899 Ernest Miller Hemingway is born in Oak Park,
Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the second child of
Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway, a talented singer and music teacher.
1913 Attends Oak Park and River Forest high school, where he distinguishes himself as an aspiring journalist/writer.
1917 Graduates from high school in June, takes job as cub reporter on the Kansas City Star in October.
1918-19 On May 23 sails to Europe to assume duties as Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy; badly wounded in Fossalta July 8 while distributing chocolate and cigarettes to troops.
1920 Quarrels with mother, who banishes him from Windemere shortly after his twenty-first birthday.
1921 Marries Hadley Richardson September 3; provided with letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, the newlyweds leave for Paris after Thanksgiving, where Hemingway writes dispatches for the Toronto Star and begins to hone a distinctive American prose style.
1922 In Paris meets expatriates Ezra Pound—“he’s teaching me to write,” Hemingway reported, “and I’m teaching him to box”—and Gertrude Stein, who reads a fragment oh his novel-in-progress and advises him to “Begin over again and concentrate.”
1923 Goes to Spain for the bullfights at Pamplona; briefly returns to Toronto for the birth of his son John Hadley (Bumby) in October; publishes Three Stories and Ten Poems in limited edition.
1924 Assists Ford Madox Ford in editing the transatlantic review, which prints “Indian Camp” and other early stories, brings out slim in our time volume.
1925 In Our Time appears, containing several stories set in Michigan about the maturation of a semiautobiographical character named Nick Adams and concluding with “Big Two-Hearted River”; in May meets and befriends the somewhat older and more established writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1926 Fitzgerald send him to Scribner’s and editor Maxwell Perkins for a career-long association, beginning with The Torrents of Spring, a satiric attack on Anderson, and The Sun Also Rises, his famous novel about expatriate life in Paris and Pamplona.
1927 Publishes Men without Women, a story collection including “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Killers”; divorced by Hadley, marries Pauline Pfeiffer.
1928 Leaves Paris, moves to Key West; son Patrick born; Dr. Hemingway kills himself with a .32 revolver.
1929 A Farewell to Arms—a novel of love and war in Italy during world War I—published in September to good reviews and sales, despite Boston censorship of the serialized version in Scribner’s magazine.
1931 Son Gregory Hancock born.
1932 Brings out his book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon.
1933 Publishes Winner Take Nothing, a book of stories including “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; goes on safari to Africa, the setting for his two long stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (both published in 1936).
1935 Green Hills of Africa
1937 Serves as war correspondent during Spanish civil war; works on propaganda film The Spanish Earth; contributes funds to the Loyalist cause; publishes To Have and Have Not, his most overtly political novel.
1938 Publishes The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories.
1939 Separates from Pauline; moves to Finca Vigia, a house near Havana, Cuba.
1940 Marries writer Martha Gellhorn; publishes For Whom the Bell Tolls.
1942 Outfits his boat the Pilar to hunt down German submarines in the Caribbean; none found.
1944 As correspondent, observes D-day and attaches himself to the 22nd Regiment, 4th Infantry Division for operations leading to the liberation of Paris and the battle of Hürtgenwald; begins relationship with newswoman Mary Welsh.
1945 Divorced by Martha in December.
1946 Marries Mary in March; they live in Cuba and in Ketchum, Idaho.
1950 Publishes Across the River and into the Trees.
1952 The Old Man and the Sea, his short book about the trials of the Cuban fisherman Santiago, printed in its entirety in a single issue of Life magazine.
1953 Returns to Africa for safari with Mary.
1954 In January, severely injured by two successive plane crashes in Africa, reported dead in some erroneous accounts; awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
1959 In declining health, follows the Ordoñez-Dominguín bullfights and observes his sixtieth birthday in Spain.
1961 Undergoes shock treatment for depression; on July 2, kills himself with shotgun; buried in Sun Valley, Idaho.
1964 A Moveable Feast
1970 Islands in the Stream
1972 The Nick Adams Stories
1981 Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, edited by Carlos Baker.
1985 The Dangerous Summer; Dateline Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches
1986 The Garden of Eden
1987 The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway: “Hills like White Elephants” (1927)
“Hills like White Elephants” (1927): difficult relationship between a man and a woman who are a couple but not married
very little seems to take place
a deceptively simple story: a couple sits at a train station in a small town in Spain, waiting for the train to Madrid. Yet within this quiet scene lies gender trouble and an investigation into the spiritual barrenness of modern love that is piercing in its precision.
salient feature: the futility of the couple’s communication: he cannot see the white elephants, and she cannot see abortion as an “awfully simple operation.”
In this story, Hemingway displays his true art, namely his scathingly precise language which he uses to anatomize human feelings and emotions.
Hemingway’s style and syntax: Apart from three descriptive passages the whole story consists of a dialogue between the two protagonists, “the American and the girl.”
The man in “Hills” is characterized by his language which is full of euphemisms and circumscriptions: “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”
The whole story is just a fragment, and Hemingway famous for his “iceberg theory” which only shows a tiny piece of the whole.
Language is a central theme of this story.
William Sydney Porter alias O. Henry (1862–1910)
1862 O. Henry, pseudonym of William Sidney Porter , is born in Greensboro, North Carolina. Following his mother’s death in his early childhood, he is brought up by his grandmother and aunt.
1882 Goes to Texas and works on a ranch, in a general land office, and later as teller in the First National Bank in Austin.
1887 Marries Athol Estes.
1894 Founds a comic weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone, which embraces political satire, ethnic humour, and parody of small-town life. The paper collapses after a year.
1896 Is indicted for embezzlement of bank funds and goes into exile in Honduras.
1897 Returns because of his wife’s fatal illness and is sentenced for five years.
1898 He enters the penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio. His sentence was shortened to three years and three months for good behaviour. In the penitentiary he begins to write short stories published under the pseudonym of O. Henry.
1902 Is released from prison and moves to New York City, where his short stories appear in various well-known magazines.
1904 Publishes his first book of stories about Honduras, entitled Cabbages and Kings.
1906 The Four Million
1907 Heart of the West
1907 The Trimmed Lamp
1908 The Gentle Grafter
1908 The Voice of the City
1909 Roads of Destiny
1909 Options
1910 Whirligigs
1910 Strictly Business
1910 Dies; despite his popularity, O. Henry’s final years were marred by ill-health, a desperate financial struggle, and alcoholism.
1911 Sixes and Sevens
1912 Rolling Stones
1917 Waifs and Strays
1920 O. Henryana
1922 Letters to Lithopolis
1923 Postscripts
1939 O. Henry Encore: Stories and Illustrations
1953 The Complete Works of O. Henry
1979 The Collected Stories of O. Henry
O. Henry has played a very important role in this development, and up to this very day the “O. Henry Award” is given to the best American short story writer.
O. Henry as local color writer
journalistic style and his witty, stunningly inventive endings
more than 250 short stories
sensationalism, superficiality and hastiness, however, one cannot ignore that this writer was extremely successful with his “slice-of-life” stories
For Walter Evans (“‘A Municipal Report’: O. Henry and Postmodernism”, in: Tennessee Studies in Literature 26 (1981), 101-116) O. Henry is a postmodernist avant la lettre, and his name thus to be linked with those of the most prominent American postmodernist writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Barthelme etc.
“It would appear that, as far as O. Henry’s current reputation is concerned, he made the mistake of writing too innovatively half a century too soon. We may condemn him on traditional grounds, but must…praise him on Postmodernist grounds.” (102) O. Henry shares with the other postmodernists these features:
a pervasive and intense self consciousness;
a fondness for significant allusions, often copious or extended, to art/literature which exist in the “real” world;
innovative structural patterns irrelevant to “plot” in the traditional sense;
deliberate use of stereotypes, particularly of character;
style marked by evident artificiality and verbal play
metafictional references to storytelling (metafiction = fiction about fiction, self-referentialiy);
parody (102).
“The Gift of the Magi” (1905), O. Henry
“The Gift of the Magi” (1905) is one of O. Henry’s most famous stories
its setting is New York; its characters, Della and Jim, are New Yorkers, this time a young, tenderly loving, yet poor married couple living in a gray eight-dollar New York flat; its plot is extremely well constructed; the dénouement is clever; its action is compact and swift
this staple of high-school reading programs and inspiration of countless plays and films
An excellent Christmas read….
Luther S. Luedtke and Keith Lawrence point out (“William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), DLB 78, 288-307, here 304-5) a few stock elements of O. Henry’s short stories:
- a brisk opening that pulls the reader into the action with a surefire “hook”;
- a confiding [omniscient, G.R.] narrator who, nonetheless, withholds crucial information until the last possible moment;
- a pleasant and worldly wise tone comprised of chitchat, wit, satire, philosophy, and swank;
- liberal use of a “humane renegade”;
- a healthy dose of coincidence, usually with a deus ex machina reversal in which everything is rescued and set right again; and
- a “surprise ending.”
“A Dinner at ––” (1903?)
“O. Henry often stands on the brink of parodying the short story itself.” (Éjchenbaum, Boris M. O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story. Ann Arbor: Univ. 1968. (= Michigan Slavic Contributions; 1))
Published in the posthumous collection Rolling Stones.
“A Dinner at ––” provides a sort of theoretical commentary to the story “The Badge of Policeman O’Roon,” a commentary with ironical pint directed at those custodians of banality –– the editors. It is likely that “The Badge of Policeman O’Roon” had once been rejected by an editor and that O. Henry wrote “A Dinner at ––” by way of reaction. In it the author enters into a conversation with his character, Van Sweller, who is supposed to be the hero of a story in progress.
