Chopin, Kate - Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt (essay date spring 1993)
Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt (essay date spring 1993)
SOURCE: Shurbutt, Sylvia Bailey. “The Can River Characters and Revisionist Mythmaking in the Work of Kate Chopin.” The Southern Literary Journal 25, no. 2 (spring 1993): 14-23.
[In the following essay, Shurbutt maintains that in her fiction Chopin “revises accepted myths about duty, marriage, and sexuality in order to achieve a more realistic understanding of the human condition.”]
One of the threads weaving its way through the writing of women from Amelia Lanier to Virginia Woolf is the attempt to recast into a more palatable form traditional Western myth with its patriarchial point of view—a point of view which molds our realities, fixes our values, and limits the vision of individual possibilities. A sizable portion of feminist literary criticism in recent years has been devoted to discovering and decoding those female retellings of archetypal human experience and to explaining...
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