The Night Came Slowly, By Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was an American writer. She was born in 1850, Kate O’Flaherty. She died in 1904 two days after collapsing at The World Fair. Chopin was ahead of the times that she lived based on her ideas; specifically about how women should be treated. After he father’s untimely death, she was raised in a house with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.All three women were widows, and therefore, lived single and independent lives in which they took care of and provided for themselves. Chopin’s great-grandmother was the daughter of the first woman in St.Louis to gain legal separation from her husband. Her great-great-grandmother then ran her own shipping business on the Mississippi River while raising her five children. It is no mystery …show more content…
She no longer has an interest in what they do, or what goes on in their lives. This sentence alone makes Chopin sound as if she has an introverted personality type. What she is describing sounds like someone who has no more emotional energy left to give to the world. The specific words she uses, “lives and actions,” may indicate that she has been pulled into quarrels that are unrelated to her. Chopin then states a saying, “Some one has said it is better to study one man than ten books.” She ends the sentence here giving her readers a chance to mull over the saying and formulate an opinion for it themselves, before she states whether she agrees or disagrees with it. Chopin then reveals that she disagrees with the quote entirely, stating that she wants neither man nor books- because they make her “suffer.” She has already listed a reason to why man makes her suffer. But how would books make one suffer? Thinking about this in historical context, maybe the stories themselves would have been depressing to a woman who was intelligent and confident in herself. Storylines and character development today are barely scraping the surface of a woman’s depth and individuality. Think about how much worse this would have been when Kate Chopin was writing this story. Or, perhaps books made her suffer because of the flak that women writers, Chopin herself included, …show more content…
The sun sets slowly, so it does make sense that the night would come slowly as well. It is odd that most people focus on the sunset and its beauty- that the light and sun is leaving; while she focuses on the night’s arrival, welcoming the darkness. Did she know prior to this evening that the night come slowly each evening? Did she lay under the maple trees in anticipation of this? Or did she first lay under the maple trees and is discovering that night comes slowly for this first time, as the reader experiences it as well? Chopin describes the darkness as “creeping” and “thinking that (she) did not notice (it.)” Her portrayal makes the reader feel the darkness inch out of the trees, beyond the hills and mountains, like they were laying next to her watching the night unfold firsthand. Reporting that it came “stealthily” out of the valley, indicating that night does not want to be seen or heard. What she is seeing is rare, or maybe even forbidden, and she recounts it for others wishing to know how night comes out of hiding as well. Night does not wait for an invitation. If attention is not paid in this great of detail, she would have looked up and it suddenly would have taken over where the sun had just been. “Thinking that I did not notice.” This indicates that she was waiting for the night. Maybe she did have prior knowledge of how it operates, and this was not her first time experiencing it. She