Chopin, Kate - Sandra Gunning (essay date autumn 1995)
Sandra Gunning (essay date autumn 1995)
SOURCE: Gunning, Sandra. “Kate Chopin's Local Color Fiction and the Politics of White Supremacy.” Arizona Quarterly 52, no. 3 (autumn 1995): 61-86.
[In the following essay, Gunning examines issues of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and male aggression in “In Sabine,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” and “A No-Account Creole.”]
In Kate Chopin's 1894 local color story “A No-Account Creole,” Euphrasie Manton charts a course to economic and romantic happiness with Wallace Offdean, the New Orleans businessman whose company holds the mortgage on a local plantation in Manton's native Natchitoches parish. But while Chopin seemed to have originally conceived her story around the life of a woman, the plot centers squarely on a man's struggle with destiny and (dis)empowerment, since Euphrasie's discarded Creole lover, the plantation's former owner, Placide Santien, produces much of the story's...
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