title: A Shameful Affair
author: Kate Chopin
genre: short story fiction
source: http://www.americanliterature.com/
published: 1891
first line: Mildred Orme, seated in the snuggest corner of the big front porch of the Kraummer farmhouse, was as content as a girl need hope to be.
Kate Chopin's A Shameful Affair is a short story about a woman named Mildred who lives on a farm. One day she notices a farmhand named Fred Evelyn when he picks up a paper that has gotten out of her reach and hands it to her.
The handsome young farmhand is simply being polite, and doesn't pay Mildred the attention she wants, so she feels snubbed by him.
Until one day he gives her a long stare that makes her heart skip a beat.
Soon enough she comes upon him in the woods fishing by a river on a hot summer day.
When he suddenly kisses her, Mildred is shocked. She feels really guilty afterwards and decides to act like it never happened. When Fred approaches her to apologize, she tells him she will forgive him once she is able to forgive herself.
why was that kiss the most delicious thing she had known in her twenty years of life? The sting of it had never left her lips since it was pressed into them. The sweet trouble of it banished sleep from her pillow.
This story was really short, and Chopin had me wanting more. The shameful affair was a simple kiss, yet Mildred hated herself for enjoying it so much.
Chopin has a way of packing alot of meaning into a few simple words.
It was summer time; she was idle; she was piqued, and that was the beginning of the shameful affair.
Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was born in St. Louis and, upon marriage, settled in New Orleans. The mother of six, Chopin did not begin writing until her husband’s death left her in debt. The Awakening (1899), Chopin’s best known work, was so far ahead of its time in its portrayal of a dissatisfied wife, that it was overlooked. Today Chopin is considered the forerunner of twentieth-century feminist authors.
