SOURCE: Coyne Dyer, Joyce. “Techniques of Distancing in the Fiction of Kate Chopin.” Southern Studies 24, no. 1 (spring 1985): 69-81.

[In the following essay, Dyer discusses Chopin's technique of appealing to her readers' prejudices to openly discuss in her short stories topics that were normally considered taboo at the time.]

Chopin often made the prejudice of her Southerners (Creoles and Acadians) the subject of her fiction. Madame Carambeau, for instance, “detested dogs, cats, organ-grinders, white servants and children's noises. She despised Americans, Germans and all people of a different faith from her own.”¹ Prejudice often became not only Chopin's topic, but also, curiously, her technique. Chopin relied, almost cynically it seems, on the prejudices of her readership and critics to allow her to talk about female sexuality in a way that otherwise might have been considered offensive or “vulgar.” Along with other important techniques we will examine, Chopin's probably quite conscious method of ascribing strong sexual desire—a trait we know she thought universal—to Indians, gypsies, madwomen, Negroes, and social outcasts provided her with comfortable distance from a message too powerful for her time. The uncivilized or insane could be expected to behave in course, wild, and “unnatural” ways; fringe members of society could be portrayed differently from people in the mainstream of a civilized community. What could a proper white Southern woman possibly have in common with a Naomi Mobry, a Zoraïde, or a Juanita?

In Chopin's earliest short story about female sexual desire, “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” (January 10, 1891), the author equates Naomi Mobry's lust with the final stages of her developing madness. Chopin carefully, symbolically, defines and describes the progressive stages of Naomi's growing insanity, distancing Naomi, step by step, from the region of “normal” emotions and desires. The story, which contains a strong hint of the situation in Ibsen's Ghosts,² proves a fine introduction to one technique of reticence, self-effacement, and subterfuge that would serve Chopin well throughout the 1890s.

Naomi Mobry, daughter of Editha Payne, a woman who knew about the inherited madness in her family and should, perhaps, never have married, never have borne children, is seen in an early section of “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” as an unusually sensitive young woman. While she talks with her supercilious twenty-two-year-old cousin Sigmund, Naomi subtly discloses her heightened sensitivity to the colors of nature. Shortly after Sigmund naively proposes that Naomi read more and take a course at the university to enable her “to define the quality in Chopin's music that charms [her]” (72), Naomi assures her cousin that she would rather romp through the hills than sit closeted in a stuffy room. Exhibiting what Sigmund calls “a veritable savage eye for pure color” (73), Naomi describes the fields and hills which she loves.

What color! Look, now, at the purple wrapping those hills away to the east. See the hundred shades of green spreading before us, with the new-plowed fields between making brown dashes and patches. And then the sky, so blue where it frames those white velvet clouds. They'll be red and gold this evening.

(73)

Naomi's preference for the hills, for the earth and nature, and her ecstatic sensitivity to color begin to hint at her sensuous nature. Curiously, Naomi chooses the “raw” colors, like the Impressionists Chopin referred to in her review “‘Crumbling Idols’ by Hamlin Garland” (undated). Even the color purple is alluded to by Chopin in her review, the very color Naomi admires: “[Garland] admits,” she writes, “that he himself has discovered certain ‘purple shadows’ by looking at a stretch of sand, with his head turned top-side down!” (694) Though others may not, like Naomi and Garland, see the purple which wraps the hills or casts shadows on the sand, or admire the red and gold that accompany the evening, the Impressionistic vision is not thought to be insincere by Chopin. We might guess that the author was using Naomi's description, her choice of colors, to reveal a temperament unafraid of moral and social pressure, unafraid of what the truth might bring: a temperament not unlike that of the daring Impressionists Chopin discusses, “with their individualism; their abandonment of the traditional and conventional in the interest of ‘truth’” (694). It was, after all, a temperament not unlike Chopin's own.

As Naomi proceeds to describe her unusual sensitivity to sound, we continue to sense her powerful, sensuous attraction to the earth and natural force. Her initial comment about the subject seems ordinary: “There's nothing that has the meaning for me in this world that sound has” (73). Musicians, singers, and conductors have all made similar remarks. However, as she continues to speak, we realize that it is not the sounds of instruments and human voices that obsess her. The sounds of the earth itself fascinate and haunt her. She hears symphonies played by the wind. She muses, “I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of the earth, the subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches” (73). She even lets Sigmund know that she can hear the rhythmical breathing of the earth. “Have you ever heard the earth breath, Sigmund?” (73), she asks. After she notes the amazement in Sigmund's eyes, she senses the peculiarity and strangeness of her question. In order to change the subject, she merrily challenges her cousin to a mock duel. The real, recognizable, “ordinary” sounds of “the clink and scrape of the slender steels” replace the remote, unnatural sounds Naomi has been describing. Both Sigmund and his cousin temporarily need to hear a familiar noise that returns them to the comfortable realm of safe experience.

Naomi's reactions to sun and heat in section iii also might be read as suspiciously sexual. Naomi's increasing madness, again, continues to serve as the deceptive guise that allows Chopin to record the shocking. Sigmund believes that he and Naomi are falling in love in a purely romantic sense. Indeed, he finds “nothing so good to look upon as Naomi's brown [eyes]” (76) as he and the girl boat along the Meramec. Though to an onshore observer they might look like the boy and girl in a conventional romance, Naomi does not find the scene or the experience as idyllic and refreshing as Sigmund does. The sun intensifies her longing for her cousin. Chopin notes that Naomi is bothered by the “hot and lurid” (76) sun, words that suggest both the flamelike glow of the sun itself and the violent passion Naomi feels. The two have to glide under the shade of willow trees to avoid the sun's penetrating rays. Sigmund was “filled with wonder at the sweet trouble which stirred [Naomi] when she caught his gaze and answered it” (76). As Chopin's symbolism has indicated, Naomi's trouble is hardly as “sweet” as Sigmund thinks. She grows irritated when Editha asks her what is the matter. “I'm sure I don't know, mamma,” she sharply replies. “This heavy heat would make anyone's blood run a little sluggishly” (77). Naomi's sexual desire, symbolized by her response to sun and heat, further detaches her from normal things around her.

In section iv, Naomi's reactions to the sun become even more telling. Unlike Charles Farady's uncomplicated reaction to the sun in “A Point at Issue!” (August, 1889), Naomi's reaction defines intricate components of her mental breakdown—or, as we now might recognize, of her sexual development. In this section, Naomi's full sexual energy is released at the very moment Chopin ushers her into madness. “I went in the boat,” she tells Sigmund after he locates her sitting by the river's edge, “and when I was out there in the middle of the stream—listen, Sigmund—the sun struck me upon the head, with something in its hand—no, no, not in his hand—And after that I didn't care, for I know everything now” (78). The sun's stroke has freed her to express her sexual fondness for Sigmund. She can now passionately kiss him and confess her desire. “Ah, Sigmund,” she cries out, “this is just as I was dreaming it this morning when I awoke. Then I was angry because you were sleeping off there in your room like a senseless log, when I was awake and wanted you. And you slept on and never came to me” (78). But the sun's stroke has, simultaneously, finalized her madness. Naomi can no longer recognize the peculiarity of her statements as she once could when she told Sigmund about hearing the earth breath. “I know what the birds are saying up in the trees,” she tells her cousin, “like Siegfried when he played upon his pipe under a tree, last winter in town. I can tell you everything that the fishes say in the water. They were talking under the boat when you called me—” (78).

But the knowledge of the sun, the knowledge of her passion, is too bright, too intense for Naomi's day. Even Sigmund, who for a moment moves his “wooden” arms that hang at his sides to embrace her, kisses her only once—“he sought no further kiss” (78). Naomi's insights are now too candid and her spirit too erotic for people such as Sigmund to understand, or even for Naomi herself to comprehend. As Susan Wolstenholme has noted, Naomi and Sigmund have reversed sex roles: “Naomi plays what would conventionally be the male role in the relationship by initiating activities and even making sexual advances.”³ The intensity and confusion of her vision, a vision as we see, closely connected to her discovery of “abnormal” sexual and sensuous craving, burns the very light out of her eyes. Naomi will never again be able to return to the world her cousin inhabits. In the final sequence of the story, we see Naomi sitting upon a lounge, playing like a little child with scraps of paper that she tears and places in rows upon the cushion beside her.

It is significant, as well, to look closely at the frame Chopin provides for Naomi Mobry's story. The piece begins and ends with scenes that focus on Editha Payne Mobry, Naomi's mother. Chopin uses her, as she does her daughter, to talk about passion in a permissible way. The mother confesses her crime to John Mobry at the story's end: “[Madness] has been in the blood that is mine for generations, John, and I knew it, and I married you” (79). With terror in her eyes, she continues, “Oh, God! if it might end with me and with her—my stricken dove! But, John … Edward has already a child. Others will be born to him, and I see the crime of my marriage reaching out to curse me through the lips of generations that will come” (79). Editha's crime, her sin, like Naomi's madness, is carefully associated with desire and lust; its consequence and Editha's remorse make its discussion allowable.

In section i, Chopin records details of Editha and John's courtship. We see, through them, that Editha's weakness is more than that of simply wanting what other young girls were thought to desire: a safe marriage, a home. Editha agrees to John's offer, after three years of obstinate refusal, because of her passionate sexual need for John Mobry. She weakens “in the springtime and under the blossom-laden branches of an apple tree” (71). “Chance,” we are told, “brought him to her that spring day out under the blossoms, at a moment when inward forces were at work with her to weaken and undo the determination of a lifetime” (71). The apple tree, of course, recalls the original Garden, the original sin and sexual shame, but the equation of Editha's “sin” with sexual passion increases as we observe the symbolism Chopin uses to define her response to the world and to men. The images surrounding the discussion of her “sin” are the very images that surround the discussion of Naomi's madness. The common images suggest the common sexual content of both women's experiences. Sensuous imagery is important to both accounts; perhaps even more important, the sun, with its heat and intensity, becomes the figure central to the experiences of both females. Editha, we are told, looked away from John for a moment before accepting his long-standing proposal, “far away across the green hills that the sun had touched and quickened, and beyond, into the impenetrable mist” (71).

Chopin, then, avoids making a threatening statement about female passion in “Mrs. Mobry's Reason.” Editha Payne is punished for her “sin”; Naomi cannot be held responsible for aberrant sexual behavior that is inextricably connected with her madness, can she? And yet, as we have seen, although Chopin evasively avoids offending, she still manages to make a forceful, stunning statement about the erotic. Wolstenholme suggests that “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” suffers from Chopin's making Editha Payne's “crime” the giving way to her desire and passion for a good man; such behavior is, the critic notes, “rarely a crime in a Chopin story.” “The punishment fate metes out is disproportionate to the crime,” Wolstenholme feels, whereas in Ibsen's Ghosts Mrs. Alving's sin is proportionate to her betrayal of her own desires and feelings.⁴ Perhaps the inconsistency Wolstenholme notes was intended by Chopin: in such an early piece she might have felt a special need to distort her true judgment of female passion in order to allow her simply to broadcast its presence. Chopin's inconsistency might be seen as still another way she veils herself from direct responsibility for objectionable remarks and conclusions.

“A Lady of Bayou St. John” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” stories written a month apart (August and September 1893) and both included in Bayou Folk, have a strong dependence on techniques of distancing, including Chopin's reliance on stereotypical racial attitudes as well as her use of connections between two stories, connections that offer sexual information but are so subtle they might be missed. In “A Lady of Bayou St. John” we meet Madame Delisle, a very young woman whose husband, Gustave, “was away yonder in Virginia somewhere, with Beauregard” (298), fighting for the Confederates in the Civil War. The story deals primarily with Madame Delisle's perverse, romantic loyalty to the dead (after her husband is killed in battle, she erects an altar to his memory, letting that memory “crowd and fill [her] life” [301] for the remainder of her days). This behavior is an essential psychological mystery in the narrator's exploration of what she calls “that psychological enigma, a woman's heart” (302). At first the story seems to resemble other Chopin stories about characters who live in the past: “Ma'ame Pélagie,” “The Return of Alcibiade,” “The Bênitous' Slave.” But there is something else enigmatic—and disturbing—about Madame Delisle's psyche: suggestions about her sexual nature are included. As we will see, the most powerful statement about her sexuality, ironically, appears not in “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” but, rather, in a later piece, “La Belle Zoraïde,” that seems not to be about Madame Delisle at all.

Robert Arner has noted that in “A Lady of Bayou St. John” “Mrs. Chopin was not ready to say yet what she saw [in a woman's heart].”⁵ However, Chopin does not feel timid about recording the presence of male passion in her story. Sepincourt—a Frenchman who visits Madame Delisle during Gustave's absence, falls in love with her, and vigorously proposes that she and he hurry off to Paris—Chopin comfortably, graphically describes his desire. We see it “in the glance that penetrated [Madame Delisle's] own; in the quiver of his sensitive lip and the quick beating of a swollen vein in his brown throat” (299). Chopin's description of Madame Delisle's own sexual response is less direct. Reading a letter from the Frenchman, Madame Delisle discovers it to be “a voice from the unknown, like music, awaking in her a delicious tumult that seized and held possession of her whole being” (300). She kisses him many times when he visits next, agreeing “in a fainting voice that he could scarcely hear” to go with him—“Anywhere, anywhere” (300). The embrace, the kisses, and her words (delivered, Chopin suggests, on the very verge of a swoon) remind us, in subtle ways, more of the typically romantic woman in nineteenth-century fiction than of some of Chopin's more daringly presented passionate females. The possibility of continued sexual exploration ends altogether with the next stroke of Chopin's pen. “But she did not go with him,” the narrator explains. “Chance willed it otherwise. That night a courier brought her a message from Beauregard, telling her that Gustave, her husband, was dead” (300). We hear no more about Madame Delisle's emerging sexuality.

As has been mentioned, the “delicious tumult” hinted at in “The Lady of Bayou St. John” is, cleverly, defined in more exact terms—terms approximately as direct as those used by the author in her description of Sepincourt—in “La Belle Zoraïde.” The story is a tale told by Manna-Loulou, Madame Delisle's Negro servant, and seems to have relatively little to do with Madame Delisle herself. We know the story must have been told before the proposal by Sepincourt. Before his arrival, we learn in “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” Madame “could not fall asleep at night unless old black Manna-Loulou sat beside her bed and told her stories” (298). After he lets his passion for her be known and she experiences the fright of her new feelings of love, Madame Delisle does not want Manna-Loulou by her side: “She would not hear Manna-Loulou's stories. She wanted to be alone, to tremble and to weep” (299-300). The reference to Manna-Loulou is so brief and so casual that it would be easy to miss it altogether or to ignore its significance. Yet, we cannot fully appreciate what Chopin is telling us about Madame Delisle's sexuality without understanding the association between Madame's reluctance to hear Manna-Loulou's tale, expressed in “The Lady of Bayou St. John,” and the specific content of one such tale told by the Negro servant in “La Belle Zoraïde.”

“La Belle Zoraïde” is a tale rich with disguised and veiled parallels. Robert Arner has noted one such significant ambiguity: “the teller of the tale and her listener stand in precisely the same relationship to each other as Zoraïde and Madame Delarivière do: slave-mistress.” Arner perceptively asks, “Is the story intended as an act of rebellion, however non-violent, by Manna Loulou?”⁶ Another parallel of importance also quietly begins to surface between Zoraïde's situation and that of Madame Delisle.

In “La Belle Zoraïde,” as Per Seyersted observes, Chopin examines “the theme of activated passion.” Zoraïde, he writes, “catches fire.”⁷ But she is a Negro, and her passion, therefore, is permissible. The dark, sexual content—the account of Zoraïde's desire for Mézor, Doctor Langlé's servant—is announced through a description of the night that precedes the commencement of Manna-Loulou's storytelling. “The summer night was hot and still” (303) the story begins. This stillness and heat are the sort that precede a storm—a release of energy. Symbolically, the heat and stillness suggest that a release of sexual energy is also about to occur. The heat makes a riverman lazy and languorous and causes “a lover's lament for the loss of his mistress” (303) to form upon his lips. Chopin stresses that “not a ripple of air swept over the marais” (303). She also emphasizes the unusual darkness of the night, hinting at mystery. “Yonder, across Bayou St. John,” she observes, “lights twinkled here and there in the darkness, and in the dark sky above a few stars were blinking” (303).

Although the stillness, heat, and darkness of this night are not mentioned again after Manna-Loulou begins narrating, the reader quickly senses that in the Negro servant's story he will discover the “release” of tension and energy that the night images foreshadow. Indeed, the stillness breaks when Zoraïde sees Mézor dance the Bamboula in Congo Square, “the sensual nature of [which dance] caused its prohibition.”⁸ Zoraïde, Chopin tells us with language far more explicit than that used to describe Madame Delisle's desire for Sepincourt, feels the music's primitive rhythms and longs to touch Mézor's body, “bare to the waist, … like a column of ebony, … [and glistening] like oil” (304). She desires this man “from the moment she [sees] the fierce gleam of his eye, lighted by the inspiring strains of the Bamboula, and [beholds] the stately movements of his splendid body swaying and quivering through the figures of the dance” (304).

Mézor, unlike M'sieur Ambroise, the mulatto “with his shining whispers like a white man's” (304) whom Zoraïde's mistress, Madame Delarivière, wants her to marry, is a figure of immense sexuality. He stands “as straight as a cypress-tree and as proud looking as a king” (304). When he is not dancing in Congo Square, he is hoeing his master's sugar cane, “barefooted and half naked” (305). Zoraïde cannot resist his appeal; though prohibited by her mistress from seeing him again, she disobeys and bears his child.

But Chopin has carefully distanced us from Zoraïde's behavior. Zoraïde is not a civilized white Southerner; she is, rather, a Negro and, later, like Naomi, a madwoman. Making the lovers both Negro (Zoraïde the color of cafe-au-lait and Mézor of ebony) makes the explicitness of the narrator's remarks more acceptable: Negroes, to nineteenth-century Southerners, were thought, primarily, to be sexually different from whites—promiscuous, primitive, lustful, fierce. Chopin even has the narrator who frames the story, Manna-Loulou (a woman “herself as black as the night” [303]), disapprove of Zoraïde's behavior, reinforcing many of the prejudices of white Southerners and moving us another step away from Chopin's true assessment of the situation. “But you know how the negroes are, Ma'zélle Titite,” Manna-Loulou says, smiling sadly as she seems to support the common prejudice about racial sexuality. “There is no mistress, no master, no king nor priest who can hinder them from loving when they will. And these two found ways and means” (305). Zoraïde and Mézor's behavior was not offensive because the color line permitted a strikingly different sexual code. Too, we find that Zoraïde, heartbroken because of her mistress's lie that her baby had died, becomes mad, forever clasping a rag bundle to her breast. She becomes “Zoraïde la folle” (307), and, as with Naomi Mobry, we have even more difficulty recognizing her mental state as in any way approximate to our own.

Chopin has even more carefully distanced us from the important parallel between Zoraïde and Madame Delisle that, when recognized, allows us to see that Zoraïde's eroticism is shared by Madame. The similarity between what Zoraïde felt and Madame Delisle was feeling becomes evident only if, after reading both stories, we remember Zoraïde's refusal to have Manna-Loulou continue with her nightly ritual of storytelling. One must have read “The Lady of Bayou St. John,” and read it carefully, to discover the connection Chopin is making. From “La Belle Zoraïde” alone we have no suggestion that the feelings Manna-Loulou ascribes to Zoraïde are shared by Madame Delisle, a young, wealthy, white Southern woman, but in Madame's refusal to listen further, we find the specific nature of the “delicious tumult” Madame Delisle experiences defined. Had Madame Delisle, after the overtures of Sepincourt, in some way sensed a parallel between her new sexual excitement and Zoraïde's? Was she afraid to admit it? Did she vaguely fear that Manna-Loulou's stories would give her own feelings too much clarity and intensity? Certainly Madame Delisle's sacrifice of self and passion to the memory of Gustave suggests that the guilt of her momentary desire for a man not her husband was of an extreme variety. Once again, Chopin avoids a direct message in favor of ambiguity, apparent stereotyping, and the most subtle sorts of clues.

We find similar as well as new techniques to establish distance from the truth of female passion in “Juanita” (July 26, 1894). The Juanita figure, we know, was a real person in Chopin's life, the daughter of the local postmaster in Sulphur Springs, Missouri.⁹ Chopin revised this story for Moods magazine from a diary entry about Annie Venn, the original “Juanita.”¹⁰

Although “Juanita” appeared first as a diary item, we cannot help but guess that Chopin began consciously working toward narrator distortion as she began to see the potential of her observations. We know this happened with “Cavenelle,” and we know that no matter how true events are that appear in Chopin's first person stories (of which there are remarkably few), the narrator often is treated with mild or intense irony. Seyersted, for example, observes that “Vagabonds,” as the manuscript at the Missouri Historical Society indicates, “describes an actual incident in the life of Kate Chopin, the Cloutierville widow.”¹¹ Yet we have seen, with the help of critics of “Vagabonds,” that the storekeeper is hardly Kate Chopin: she is, rather, a repressed woman overly concerned about respectability and unaware of her true desires.¹²

The narrator of “Juanita” is “respectable” as well. She does have a sense of humor, though often at others' expense. She laughs at Juanita's appearance and peculiar taste in men. She thinks of herself as superior to the low-life behavior of Rock Spring's (originally Sulphur Spring's) town character. “For my part I never expected Juanita to be more respectable than a squirrel; and I don't see how any one else could have expected it” (368), she concludes.

Chopin's use of a distorted first person is an especially fine and effective distancing procedure, perhaps in some ways even more ambiguous and interesting than a Manna-Loulou type frame. Chopin, ironically, gains distance from the Juanita figure and her peculiar sexual behavior and preferences by associating herself closely with the details of Juanita's history. Disapproval of a character's behavior by the supposed “author” of an autobiographical fragment would naturally be more forceful and convincing than that of a storyteller who is named and apparently fictional, a Manna-Loulou. Chopin avoids the imputation that she approves of or understands Juanita's behavior by telling us, herself, that Juanita is no more moral than a squirrel. This assessment of Juanita's peculiar conduct would have been shared by countless numbers of Chopin's readers.

Another device Chopin uses here is similar to a distancing procedure described in the discussion of the previous short stories. “Juanita,” like “La Belle Zoraïde,” is coupled with a companion piece. That companion piece, “The Night Came Slowly,” lets us know more about the true identity of the narrator (and Chopin's hidden comment about female sexuality) as “The Lady of Bayou St. John” lets us know more about Madame Delisle and her obvious similarity to Zoraïde. Again, Chopin cleverly keeps part of the truth buried in a separate story, away from the reader's immediate experience.

“The Night Came Slowly” was originally, like “Juanita,” a diary entry. Written two days before the Annie Venn account, it was published with “Juanita” under the title “A Scrap and a Sketch.”¹³ In it we find the use of the first person, but the voice of the “I” in Chopin's “scrap” is very different from that of the “I” in “Juanita.” This is the voice of a woman strongly drawn to the sensuous. Though the sensuous in the piece is never directly equated with sexual awareness and desire, the language the narrator uses to describe her feelings is lush, provocative, mysterious, and interestingly metaphoric. The charm of the night to which she abandons herself is “soothing and penetrating” (366). The wind is called “the caressing wind” (366). It curiously “rippled the maple leaves like little warm love thrills” (366). This narrator casts aside respectability with disdain. “Why do fools cumber the Earth!” she asks excitedly. “It was a man's voice that broke the necromancer's spell. A man came to-day with his ‘Bible Class.’ He is detestable with his red cheeks and bold eyes and coarse manner and speech. What does he know of Christ?” (366) She confidently concludes, “I would rather ask the stars: they have seen him” (366). The thoughts might have been Edna's own as she fled the church of Our Lady of Lourdes on the Chênière Caminada for Madame Antoine's.

It is the person who can respond sensuously (and, it is hinted, sexually) who is happiest and closest to wisdom and fulfillment. Or so we learn in “The Night Came Slowly.” The mood of the piece and its message—so much closer to Chopin's prevalent thesis throughout her canon—informs our reading of “Juanita,” but only if we recognize that here is another instance of Chopin's subtle pairing of stories that appear, on first look, to have little to do with each other but, more closely examined, become absolutely inseparable, providing essential—and, perhaps, to many, objectionable—information in a highly discreet and wonderfully clever way. Juanita, though apparently far less articulate than the narrator of “The Night Came Slowly,” shares her fondness for and attraction to nature and the life of the senses. She has an “inflamed moon-face” (368); she spends her time when living with her parents close to the earth, “preparing vegetables for dinner or sorting her mother's flower-seed” (367), and she wanders frequently with her curious lover from the village to the secretive woods, a journey familiar to that of many of Hawthorne's outcasts.

Chopin adds still another technique to make Juanita's behavior seem irregular, to distance her from the normal and the ordinary. An effect comparable to the use of Negroes in “La Belle Zoraïde” and a madwoman in “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” is achieved by making Juanita the grotesque town character. Her appearance, her choices, her actions are so bizarre that we immediately see little of ourselves in her. She is enormous. She stands five-feet-ten and weighs over two-hundred pounds. Her wardrobe consists of a single garment—a soiled calico “Mother Hubbard.” Yet, men literally swarm around her, as they do Hemingway's enormous Alice in “The Light of the World.” Young and old, “They hung on her fence at all hours; they met her in the lanes; they penetrated to the store and back to the living-room” (368). She becomes involved with a number of attractive suitors: a rich South Missouri farmer and a Texas millionaire who owns a hundred white horses, one of which “spirited animals” (368) Juanita, significantly, begins to ride in her village.

Juanita's final choice is neither the wealthy farmer nor the Texas tycoon. In a passage highly reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's “Good Country People,” we learn that Juanita has chosen a puny, helpless, poor, ragged, one-legged man. Juanita tries to seel subscriptions to buy him a “cork-leg” (originally a “wooden” leg in the diary version [1018]). She also, later, produces a baby, “whose father, she announced, was her husband, the one-legged man” (368). No one could ever prove a marriage had occurred: “the story of a wandering preacher was told; a secret marriage in the State of Illinois; and a lost certificate” (368), but the propriety and appearance of her relationship with the one-legged man concerns Juanita not at all. Villagers, including the narrator, become accustomed to the common sight of Juanita mounting her husband upon a sorry-looking pony and leading it by the bridle into the woods—where Juanita “lavishes the wealth of her undivided affections upon the one-legged man” (368).

We have only to glance quickly through a list of Chopin's other stories to see that techniques discussed here, especially social and racial stereotyping, were used with uncommon frequency. In “Vagabonds” (Dec. [2?], 1895) and “A Vocation and a Voice” (November 1896) vagabonds and gypsies inform us about the instinctive life. In “Loka” (April 9-10, 1892) it is an Indian girl who desires to flee irresponsibly to the woods as she sniffs the sassafras leaves and “pungent camomile” (215), unlaces and removes her brogans, and stands “a-quiver, panting, ready for flight” (215). Calixta in “At the 'Cadian Ball” (July 15-17, 1892) is Spanish: “that little Spanish vixen” (219), Chopin calls her.¹⁴ In “Fedora” the titular figure is an extremely repressed woman seen by all around her as a sorry, pathetic, narrow-visioned spinster.

And in The Awakening there is some veiling. For example, Chopin conveys sexual knowledge through the use of lush, symbolic landscape descriptions; through the appearance of minor characters, such as Tonie and Gouvernail, whose relationships with women in earlier stories quietly, silently inform the novel; through the omission of poetic lines, a technique also important to our understanding of “A Respectable Woman”; and through the creation of Mariequita, another Spanish girl, as a symbol of the fully sensuous life. However, Edna herself is not Spanish. Nor is she a Negro, an Indian, a madwoman, or a town character like Juanita, she was too much like her readers for them to permit her erotic, sensual, shameless behavior.

In The Awakening there could be no doubt about Chopin's true message: female passion is universal, touching all equally, overwhelming women of every economic and social class, every race. But Chopin, like Edna, was to learn that society would not tolerate such unconventional and bold remarks. Contemporary reviews of the novel, now so familiar, condemned Chopin's masterpiece as “vulgar,”¹⁵ and “not healthy.”¹⁶ The reception, as we now know, “froze the creative impulse within her,”¹⁷ “killed her literary creativity.”¹⁸ Chopin knew the novel, with its directness, was a risk, but she probably thought that her public, like Chopin herself, was ready to look into the very face of truth. Perhaps by her use of distancing techniques throughout the 1890s Chopin hoped, in an artistically interesting way, to prepare her readers, her critics, and herself for the powerful, more direct message of her 1899 novel. Unfortunately, only she was ready to walk closer to the universal truth of female sexuality in 1899.

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, “A Matter of Prejudice,” in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge, 1969), I, 282; hereafter works from volumes I and II of this edition will be cited parenthetically.

2. For a thorough discussion of the Ibsen parallel (as well as the story's debt to Wagner's Ring cycle) see Susan Wolstenholme, “Kate Chopin's Sources for ‘Mrs. Mobry's Reason,’” American Literature, 51 (January 1980), 540-43.

3. Ibid., 541.

4. Ibid., 543.

5. “Music from a Farther Room: A Study of the Fiction of Kate Chopin,” Diss. The Pennsylvania State University 1970, 77.

6. Ibid., p. 91.

7. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge, 1969), 108-09.

8. Workers of the Writers' Projects Administration in the State of Louisiana, Louisiana: A Guide to the State (New York, 1941), 98.

9. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, p. 217.

10. Kate Chopin, A Kate Chopin Miscellany, ed. Per Seyersted and Emily Toth (Natchitoches, 1979), 99.

11. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, p. 217.

12. See Robert Arner, “Characterization and the Colloquial Style in Kate Chopin's ‘Vagabonds,’” Markham Review, 2 (May 1971), 110-12; Joyce Coyne Dyer, “Night Images in the Work of Kate Chopin,” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, 14 (Autumn 1981), 224-25.

13. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, 217.

14. Chopin may have sensed that her later description of Calixta in “The Storm” was even too powerful to be veiled by her Spanish heritage. “When [Alcée] touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips” (595), she had written. The author never tried to publish the piece because, as Seyersted noted, she was “quite aware of how daring she had been in this tale” (Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, p. 164).

15. “Fiction,” Literature, 4 (23 June 1899), 570.

16. “Notes from Bookland,” St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, 13 May 1899.

17. “Kate Chopin (O'Flaherty),” American Authors, 1600-1900: Biographical Dictionary of American Literature (New York, 1938), 156.

18. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, 183.