Beauty In Love And Death

Kate Chopin (1851-1904), American woman writer, was excavated and revived dug up by the feminists for her writing mainly on woman issues. The Awakening (1899), her signature novel now, is considered to be a classic in the history of American literature. So on top of being concerned with woman issues, she is a top-ranking writer in her own right, and her stories are no doubt first-rate ones that we can interpret from many different perspectives. In fact, more and more critics have undertaken to explore the hidden significance in her works. This dissertation tries to rediscover Chopin's deep meaning based on the predecessors'investigation.The aesthetic impression which her works gives us focuses on two motifs: love and death. To begin with, she herself is an indefatigable pursuer of love and beauty, with well-developed ability in literature and music of art, and profound thoughts on love and death. Her sharp perception and insight was gained from the losses of several members of her family, from the family education given by her matrilineal great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, from the influence of French culture, also from that of some great minds such as Emerson, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Darwin. Therefore, she can cultivate hypersensitivities to the beauty in life and express it in her works, which is conveyed in her loving reflections variously on religion, on harmonious marriage, on equal racial relations, and on ecology that man is an integral part of nature. Thus, aesthetically, to the protagonists in her works, the death of their relatives, lovers, or others, represents a transcendence of the actual deaths of their own in their life.In short, the aesthetics perception on love and death in her works has not only elevated the two motifs above the mundane, but also succeeds on a broader scale in keeping with great thinkers of mankind philosophically and aesthetically. Some of her ideas, for instance, echo those of ancient Chinese thinkers such as Confucius, Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, Guo Xi in Song Dynasty and modern Chinese aesthetician Zong Baihua, of the Pythagorean School and Platonism in ancient Greece. Hers even serve to revise and enrich some of Darwinism, the Nietzschean, the Schopenhauerian and Emerson's thought, reminding us of Heidegger's Existentialism. The depths she has thus reached, among other things, teach man how to inhabit harmoniously, poetically and aesthetically on earth.