by Mina Smith

Created on: January 18, 2008   Last Updated: January 20, 2008

Domesticated Girl: A Reflection of Kate Chopin's Women

"Athenaise was not one to accept the inevitable with patient resignation, a talent born into the souls of many women" (Forkner, 78). Mrs. Athenaise Cazeau is a very typical female character of Kate Chopin's, a well-read feminist writer of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Her blatant feminist outcries for women's "psychological, physical, social and sexual emancipation" (Toth, 242) was not well accepted in the 1800s when she began writing, but was embraced wholeheartedly by the feminist movements of the 1950s (Introduction). Her characters were colorful, regionalized, and her stories were rife with "social criticism and the strong and independent female characters" (Vocation, xiii).

With feminist movements propagating Chopin's many stories, one would expect her independent-minded and "modern" female characters to be witty, thoughtful, and strong, necessary qualities for a true feminist; however, Chopin's so-called "strong and independent female characters" (Vocation, xiii) are nothing of the sort. In the short stories "Athenaise," "Regret," and even in the novel The Awakening, Kate Chopin's women are irreverent, silly, and unbelievably childish.

In "Regret," the lead female character is a rough woman in her fifties. She lives on a farm alone, except for the slaves who work her fields, and her many animals and her gun. "Aurlie had never thought of marrying. She had never been in love. At the age of twenty she had received a proposal, which she had promptly declined, and at the age of fifty she had not yet lived to regret it" (Regret). She is forced by unforeseen circumstances to watch her neighbor's five children, of whom she has no affection for. However, the children begin to grow on her, after a few days. "The excitement was all over, and they were gone. How still it was when they were gone... But she could still faintly hear the shrill, glad voices of the children. She turned into the house. There was much work awaiting her, for the children had left a sad disorder behind them; but she did not at once set about the task of righting it. Mamzelle Aurlie seated herself beside the table. She gave one slow glance through the room, into which the evening shadows were creeping and deepening around her solitary figure" (Regret). In Aurlie's obsession with being unmarried and alone, she finds herself crying alone in the twilight, suddenly growing up and regretting the choice she "knew" she wanted all of her life.

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