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Regret Kate Chopin Analysis

Decent Essays

Mamzelle Aurélie, the main character in “Regret”, has never been in love nor had the thought of marrying. Why is this you may be wondering? Well, it is hard to say why Mamzelle Aurélie would choose a lifestyle like this, but maybe she never found the right man to fit her wants and needs or maybe she liked to be independent and live her life without having to think of someone besides herself. In “Regret”, Kate Chopin illustrates how Mamzelle Aurélie, a fifty year old woman who has never been in love, becomes engulfed with emptiness after experiencing a new found joy. Mamzelle Aurélie‘s new found joy does not appear right away. One morning Mamzelle Aurélie‘s neighbor drops off her four children in a hurry saying she must go attend to her sick mother and her husband had gone to Texas. Mamzelle Aurélie had no choice to say no because before she knew it their mother was gone and she was left on her porch with four children that she did not want. Mamzelle Aurélie was ill prepared to give the attention children required and demanded (Chopin 98). She was not prepared because she had never once been around children and did not know how to treat them or even know what to do with them. Chopin writes, “She was, indeed, very inapt, in her management of Odile’s children during the first few days” (98). This meaning Mamzelle Aurélie was not suitable for the circumstances she had come to be in. The wording Chopin used in this paragraph, for example saying inapt, is trying to explain how

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