The Idea of a “Threshold” in Kate Chopin’s “Beyond the Bayou” and “Ma’ame Pélagie”
International Modernism and Postmodernism Studies Conference 2021, Erzurum, Türkiye, 02 Eylül 2021, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.23-24, (Özet Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
- Cilt numarası: 1
- Basıldığı Şehir: Erzurum
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.23-24
- Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır
Özet
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was
born into an age when the rough frame of the so-called modernist lifestyle has
already crystallised and took its infamous shape. She witnessed the rapid
industrialisation and people’s precarious social, financial, and health
conditions shot through with abject poverty, psychological loneliness, and
social breakdown. One of her aims in writing short novels and stories was her
desire to picture people’s social and psychological wretchedness. Moreover, her
short stories smoothly integrate various geographies and are deeply marked by
her intellectual inheritance. This study will pursue the idea of a “threshold”
in Kate Chopin’s two short stories, “Beyond the Bayou” and “Ma’ame Pélagie”.
Both stories portray characters that are sundered from the rest of the world
and driven to the absolute loneliness until the moment of their inner crisis.
The characters’ lapsing into the crisis moments is intrinsically motivated by
the urge to comprehend and comply with the change-charged reality – the
threshold stage. The reality of the absolute flux and transformation, unity and
coherence that awaits the characters in the future is opposed to the province of
social deficiency and debilitating incapacity for progress in which the
characters are almost suffocated. In Chopin’s short stories, thresholds
inaugurate the renunciation of staunch beliefs and, thus, are the doors to new
beginnings.