The other day while I was reading Julio Cortazar's novel, Hopscotch, I stumbled upon a few phrases that caught my attention. The reason for this was because they were I French. I realized that was not been the first time it happen. A few weeks later, I began reading Kate Chopin's, The Awakening, and to my surprise, the usage of french expressions was also present. The reason of having french influence in Cortazar's novel was because he himself had lived in France and in the novel, the intellectuals lived in Paris. In Chopin's novel, I would guess the reason behind the french phrases would be because many people with French and Spanish roots lived in Louisiana during Kate Chopin's time. Most of the characters in The Awakening speak French, Spanish, Creole, or all three, in addition to English. But the protagonist Edna Pontellier does not, as she points out in chapter two, "a small infusion of French which seemed to have been lost in dilution." (Chopin,19) As a matter of fact, “Mrs. Pontellier, though she had married a Creole, was not thoroughly at home in the society of Creoles; never before had she been thrown so intimately among them.” (Chopin, 28)
No comments:
Post a Comment