[In the following essay, Llewellyn examines Chopin's symbolic use of the physical setting of “Beyond the Bayou.”]

Boundaries exist everywhere in the worlds created within short stories and within the experience this genre offers the reader. Generally, we use the word “boundary” in the ordinary sense of demarcation, but I would like to suggest that we use it as a “term of art” in the study of short fiction. Without becoming overly technical, we can borrow from the mathematical notion of boundary as both limit and field. As a beginning I will show how these adjusted definitions give us some new leverage on a particular story by Kate Chopin, and on the nature of storyness itself. “Beyond the Bayou” is a rich illustration because it is about boundaries of the usual sort (physical, temporal, psychological) while it foregrounds the boundary conditions of the reader's experience.

Many writers have described a landscape of the mind, a spatial configuration of physical boundaries that metaphorically reveal a character's state(s) of mind. In “Beyond the Bayou,” Chopin chooses a marshy, sluggish body of water as the real and symbolic boundary for the storyworld in which her heroine La Folle exists. An introduction to the physical setting comes first in the story, as if an orientation to place were somehow more important than anything else. One might argue that any opening is just to “set the stage,” but this cliche obscures the real function of any storyworld threshold, as Susan Lohafer demonstrates in Coming to Terms with the Short Story.¹

At the very least one can say that Chopin wants the reader to notice the bayou, for it is mentioned not only in the title, but also in the first sentence of the story: “The bayou curved like a crescent around the point of land on which La Folle's cabin stood” (175). That the bayou is intended to be seen—and seen as a boundary—is clear from the way the shape of the bayou encloses the world where the character La Folle fives. Mental mapping is an immediate reader response to the narrator's description at this point. The physicality of the boundary is so clear here that the reader can sketch it.

Chopin strengthens this image of the bayou as a delimiting boundary by adding a growth of woods behind La Folle's cabin, to complete the encirclement of her environs:

Between the stream and the hut lay a big abandoned field. … Through the woods that spread back into unknown regions the woman had drawn an imaginary line, and past this circle she never stepped. This was her only form of mania.

(175)

Chopin seems to want the reader to “map” this region, as her choice of words suggests: The narrator speaks of “drawing an imaginary line.” This physical boundary of the bayou is clearly meant to have a shaping effect—on La Folle's experience, on the reader's experience, and thus on the story itself.

The fines between the physical and the psychical boundaries are blurred, however, in this mental mapping. Even as the reader tracks the narrator's description of the physical landscape, so, too, she takes the character's perspective and experiences La Folle's perception of the psychical boundary, the point beyond which La Folle cannot go or beyond which she cannot function because she is terrified of crossing this boundary to her world.² The negative impact of this delimiting boundary is figuratively revealed in the barrenness of the enclosed field and by the threatening strangeness of the woods at the back of her cabin.

When considering the story as a spatial construct shaped by the bayou, the reader sees it as no accident that Bellissime, the white master's house, is at the farthest remove from the cabin of La Folle, a former slave, beloved though she is of his children. Here are dialectically opposed landscapes, a patterning frequently used in short stories and, here, helping to create cultural context. The very real physical distance and barrier between the two homesteads represent the also very real social, economic, and racial separations between the characters. It is also no accident that all the cabins in the quarters are clustered near the bayou; the inhabitants of these cabins—like La Folle, but to a lesser extent—are separated from the main house and kept near the bayou, the dividing line in this storyworld.

Individuation of consciousness in this story also serves to reinforce the divisiveness found in the story landscape. The limiting and shaping factor occurring from the individuation of consciousness is especially evident in La Folle's isolated character. She is always set apart—as her physical confines demonstrate. Separation is also revealed in the relationship between two characters. La Folle's relationship with both the young P'tit Maitre and Cheri, loving though it is, must span a gulf because of the social and economic differences as well as the physical distance between their homes. Separation may also be seen between a character and her community, as La Folle's separation from everyone “beyond the bayou” demonstrates, or as seen in her role as a black woman separated from the white family who live at Belissime, a place she could “never” visit.

The only real bridge across this chasm of individuation is through the reader's active participation in tracking the story. It is the reader who undergoes, like La Folle, that movement from closure to openness captured in the changing values of the bayou boundary. It is the reader who experiences La Folle's emotional trauma each time she confronts a bloody child. Chopin structures the time frames of these confrontations as temporal boundaries that further shape both La Folle's and the reader's experience.

The reader is introduced very simply to two parallel time frames: La Folle when she is past 35 and then La Folle as a child. This dual time frame allows the reader to register an emotional trauma from La Folle's childhood and, at the same time, an emotional limitation in her subsequent adult life. The reader enters the bayou-country storyworld through the narrator's auspices before, meeting the then 35-year-old La Folle “… fixed in her mania.” Next the reader is introduced to the precipitating trauma La Folle experienced as a child, when she saw a young man she knew, covered in blood, being pursued from the “unknown” woods into the haven of her mother's cabin.

Chopin, or rather the narrator, summarily describes the impact on the small black child: “The sight had stunned her childish reason” (175). After this moment, the cabin and its immediate environs represent the only security La Folle knows, one she would not leave even as an adult. Yet always at her back are “the woods that spread back into unknown regions” from which the bloody young man had run, threatening psychological regions containing the terrors of her youth as well as (or having become perhaps) the “unknown.”

The narrative strategy of embedding time frames creates a number of different effects as the reader activates each time frame. The reader activates the first time frame with the words, “She was now …,” the temporal marker now signaling time in the present. In this time frame, the reader tracks La Folle's perspective on her world where she is “a large, gaunt black woman, past thirty-five,” living in isolation upon her point of land (175). It is an experience of barrenness, of fear, of a life lived in almost total isolation, broken only by visits from P'tit Maitre's children.

The second time frame is activated with another temporal marker, “It was when …”; the marker when places the reader in some past time. In this second time frame, experienced so dose upon the first time frame, the reader holds the perspective of the child Jacqueline while she watches a younger “P'tit Maitre, black with powder and crimson with blood stagger into the cabin of Jacqueline's mother, his pursuers close at his heels” (175). In the exterior time frame, the experiences of innocence and terror fuse into an immobility that is still evident in La Folle's adult time frame.

Taken simply as a structural device, the embedding of one time frame within another has the effect of compressing time for the reader, allowing the reader to trace “in a moment” the psychological scarring of the young black girl and the barren experience of the adult woman imprisoned by her fear. As a grown woman, La Folle has never crossed the bayou even though she loves the family of P'tit Maitre and is beloved by them. Nor does she cross the bayou when all the other slave quarters are moved across to the master's side of the river. Chopin describes La Folle's psychological trauma, its after-effect, and the community's consequent acceptance of it so matter-of-factly that all the drama seems simply part of the landscape, again blurring the distinction between the physical, temporal, and psychological boundaries.

Thus far, the boundaries being activated in the story function mainly in patterns of exclusion or compression. The bayou functions as an enclosing, even imprisoning force, while time serves to compress and consequently intensify the reader's experience. It is when the reader activates parallel experiential structures in the story that the boundaries begin to function most evidently in that manner peculiar to the short story.

In a dramatic parallel to her early experience, the adult La Folle is once more traumatized by the arrival of a bloody child. Cheri, her favorite of P'tit Maitre's children, shoots himself in the leg while hunting behind her cabin, again in the “woods that spread back into unknown regions.” Alone with the wounded child whom she loves devotedly, and trapped by the physical and psychical boundary of the bayou, La Folle is confronted for the first time by the absolute limits of her existence: “… of the world beyond the bayou she had long known nothing, save what her morbid fancy conceived” (175). A grown woman, with “more physical strength than most men,” La Folle is still prey to her fancies, and, holding the injured child, she stands by the bayou screaming for help.

Here is a nexus in the flow of time, a single moment in time that holds all other moments in careful balance and is the basis of all short stories. Will La Folle cross the bayou? Will she remain trapped in her fear? Finally, when no one responds to her cries, La Folle is forced by her fear for the child's safety, a fear larger and finally more powerful than her own fear of everything “beyond the bayou,” to cross the almost dry stream-bed. La Folle faces the “[e]xtreme terror [that] was upon her” and runs across the bayou to take the child home, and, once the child is safe, collapses (177-78), The transcendence of her fear and her subsequent collapse mark a pivotal moment in the story.

When La Folle crosses the physical (spatial) boundary of the bayou, the boundaries of time are also transcended, for she is able to shed her past, or, at least, the traumatic effect of that past. La Folle's two confrontations with a bloody youngster create a dramatic parallel that allows the reader to comprehend two emotionally traumatic experiences, widely divergent in time, almost simultaneously. The story begins in the present and ends in the present, enclosing within that narrative time frame past events that have structured—or, at least, have affected—the present; the narrative flashback thus allows the reader to experience both time frames “at once.”

This significant moment is a formative and transcendent one for La Folle that frees her from her earlier limits. Again we have that tension peculiar to the short story, a tension activated by the reader's crossing that bayou with La Folle. It is the same tension seen, for example, in Faulkner's stories—when one moment itself ultimately shapes the larger continuum of time implied in the storyworld, thus creating the singular integrity of the story.³ La Folle's crossing of the bayou is of course a classic example of overcoming a fear by facing it. La Folle has crossed the extreme limit of her experiential domain because her love for Cheri, (and her fear for his safety) is larger than her fear of the “beyond,” and once she crosses that boundary, she is no longer bound by her fears. When La Folle crosses the bayou, all the time frames come together and hinge upon that one moment. It is thus that the story coalesces, pulls in to this moment and takes on a singular integrity.

In dealing with symbolic values such as the bayou or the bloody child, it is necessary, I feel, to differentiate between the heuristic of boundary-created tensions and the standard notion of symbolic values. The first is a product of a text-processing approach and the second need not be. The primary difference is in the movement of the reader's awareness. Symbolic value may attach itself to any element in the text, a bloody child or the bayou itself, boundary or not. But when the reader's awareness must move between boundaries, whether spatial, temporal, or experiential, then that movement creates vibrations which themselves establish a network of tensions. It is the invocation of these tensions, rather than the more static evocation of associations, that I am attempting to model here.

For a more concrete look at the reader-activated, boundary-created tensions, we can examine different views of Chopin's storyworld. Two spheres of physical experience are available to La Folle in this story, each comprising the main realities of her life at different periods. The larger sphere, spatially depicted, radiates out from La Folle's cabin and includes the field in front, the woods in back, the bayou that virtually islands her land, as well as the land beyond the bayou where are found: first, the cabin quarters of P'tit Maitre's servants and then, at the farthest distance, Bellissime, the family home of the formerly slave-holding white family. In contrast, the inner concentric sphere includes only that space that lies inside the bayou, La Folle's cabin with its barren field in front.

When the time frames are activated, the bayou becomes part of a continuum rather than just a limit. One can consider the bayou functioning as a threshold into a larger domain of experience, or, perhaps, as a permeable membrane, shaping rather than confining some portion of the continuum of La Folle's experience (as well as the reader's). The notion of transcending to a larger field or continuum of experience is significant here. Even though La Folle's experiences had once been limited by the bayou, crossing the bayou expands her experiences in such a way that she can not only move beyond the bayou but also sees the world anew, where “the white, bursting cotton with the dew upon it, gleamed for acres and acres like frosted silver in the early dawn” (Chopin 261).

Her experience is remade. The world formerly forbidden to her by her fears is now a sensual delight for her: “When La Folle came to the broad stretch of velvety lawn that surrounded the house, she moved slowly and with delight over the springy turf, that was delicious beneath her tread” (179). An edenic expression of her newly-made experience continues:

She stopped to find whence came those perfumes that were assailing her senses with memories from a time far gone.

There they were, stealing up to her from the thousand blue violets that peeped out from green, luxuriant beds. There they were, showering down from the big waxen bells of the magnolias far above her head, and from the jessamine clumps around her.

There were roses, too, without number. To right and left palms spread in broad and graceful curves. It all looked like enchantment beneath the sparkling sheen of dew.

(179-80)

Chopin's spare prose shifts to a rich, flowery piling of sensual image upon sensual image, springing out at the reader in its abundance.

La Folle's embracing of this new world of rich, varied sensory experience provides the story's closure: “A look of wonder and deep content crept into her face as she watched for the first time the sun rise upon the new, the beautiful world beyond the bayou” (180). The world of “morbid fancy” has become a rich potential for delight, a representation of that notion in the definition of boundary that limit and potentiality are somehow intimately connected, perhaps even the same, that one is somehow a product of the other in a reflexive way. This final sentence in the story, with its implicit openness, is in direct contrast to the confining and binding description of the bayou found in the opening sentence discussed earlier.

Because the reading time between the first and last sentence is so short, the contrast between them is registered in a special way peculiar to the aesthetics of short stories. The reading experience conflates—yet contains—duration. Of course, there is a certain unidirectional flow to time in the story. It is, after all, the story of a woman's life. But, as with many stories, the reader's experience follows a pattern of flow different from just a chronological countdown. Although La Folle does move from childhood to adulthood within the story, the path that the reader follows is more circular, time turning back on itself and, paradoxically, only then being able to flow forward once again.

If we look at the time line of La Folle's life from the reader's perspective, a wave pattern is more apt for tracing that experience than outlining a straight linear progression, despite the very real presence of a cause and effect sequence to account for her trauma. The wave pattern of La Folle's life as the reader experiences it cannot flow simply from childhood to adulthood, because very early on that flow runs into an outside interference that results in an immobilizing trauma: the bloody child emerging from the “unknown woods.” At that point, the energy and direction behind the flow of her life line is obstructed and the flow can only lap back upon itself. In fact, the energy of the flowing wave is almost canceled out, as can be witnessed in the barrenness of the enclosed field. It takes another outside influence, Cheri's accident, to open that channel and once again permit the flow of time. La Folle's life energy is diffracted. Her wave is freed and “passes into the region behind”—or beyond, we might say, given Chopin's title.⁴ The bloody child image may resonate in the reader's experience as a classic image or symbol of rebirth, a way of returning to full knowledge of oneself, but it is a boundary marker of experience even as the bayou is. The reader is tensely caught up in La Folle's predicament and feels an appropriate release later when La Folle collapses after crossing the boundary of the bayou. The child has been merely an impetus to the awakening (or rebirth) of La Folle's emotional self, more symbolic than participatory. Here, perhaps, is a touch of the old notion of catharsis in these shared emotional confrontations and release, for the reader does track La Folle's emotions, but the reader's role also involves more than simple emotional identification.

It is in the reader's awareness that all the boundary conditions of the short story become activated, all within a very short span of reading time. It is in the reader's awareness that the compression or coalescence peculiar to the short story occurs. It is here that the dual meaning of boundary comes most into play. For it is the shift from limit to field or the manifold capacity of the short story to be both at once that creates the dynamic tension that pulls the story in on itself and into a short form. It is that sharply drawn tension between a single moment and its larger continuum. It is that singular nexus between potentiality and limit. The reader is pulled by the story into experiencing both the fullness and the limits of experience in a “single cognitive moment.”

Chopin's narrative in “Beyond the Bayou” demonstrates the relationship between these two impulses of expansive field and narrowing limit. The narrative not only showcases the notion of boundary in its major symbol, but, at the same time, reveals the workings of boundary dynamics in terms of time and space and human experience. A reader experiences these boundary conditions in moving through the text. Like La Folle, the reader is then freed, freed to discern any number of readings within the texts, whether in psychological, socioeconomic, spiritual, phenomenological, or whatever other terms.

Notes

1. Susan Lohafer convincingly makes the case that the sentence unit is more important to the short story than to “either the most discursive poem or the most poetic novel.”

2. Bower and Morrow, among others, discuss the dynamics of how a reader tracks a character's experience.

3. One notable example is when Isaac sees the “Grandfather” buck in Faulkner's story “The Old People.”

4. In discussing the mechanics of a wave function, Giancoli describes the process of diffraction in which a wave that meets an obstruction passes around and into the region behind the obstacle.

Works Cited

Bower, Gordon H. and Daniel G. Morrow. “Mental Models in Narrative Comprehension.” Science 5 Jan. 1990: 44-48.

Chopin, Kate. “Beyond the Bayou.” The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. 2 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969. 1: 175-80.

Faulkner, William. “The Old People.” Go Down Moses. New York: Random, 1940. 163-87.

Giancoli, Douglas C. Physics: Principles with Applications. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice, 1985.

Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983.