[In the following essay, Dyer analyzes the symbolism in Chopin's little-known late story “The White Eagle.”]

Few critics discuss Chopin's fiction written after April 1899—the publication date of The Awakening—with any degree of seriousness. Kenneth Eble writes that her last stories “lack distinction.”¹ Per Seyersted regrets the “tame,” uncourageous nature of the bulk of her final manuscripts.² And Robert Arner observes, “Only a few of her final tales are worth serious discussion.”³ Certainly one aspect of Chopin's fiction that suffers in her late stories is her imagery. Unlike the metaphors in The Awakening (as well as in several excellent stories) that enhance and often expand theme and meaning, those in her final short stories most frequently function either to decorate a sentence or to provide a convenient backdrop.

In “The Wood-Choppers” (October 1901), for example, Chopin describes a storm very unlike the one in her masterful 1898 story (“The Storm”). It adds melodrama rather than psychological insight. The rain that pelts “upon the shingle roof”⁴ and the mud that creeps up Léontine's ankles fail to become metaphors for the young girl's unconscious, as they do in stories such as “The Storm” and “Vagabonds.” The driving rain only intensifies the pathos of Léontine's immediate predicament: since the local woodchopper has not come to cut firewood, she must carry a stout heart and cut it herself, cut it so that her poor, white-haired, “feeble-looking and much bent” (p. 675) mother might avoid a fatal chill. In the dashing rain, a rich man, Mr. Willet, conveniently appears to rescue both Léontine and her mother from their “downpour” of ill luck. And in “Polly,” a story that ends with the embarrassingly trite injunction “Polly, put the kettle on!” (Seyersted notes the irony that these were the final words Chopin gave to the public),⁵ banal, superfluous images decorate her prose. For instance, Chopin comments that after Polly's sisters receive new books bought for the girls by Polly herself, they “hovered over the books like bees over a clover path in June” (p. 683). Such examples, unfortunately, are far too plentiful and easy to find in Chopin's work between November 1899 and 1903.

“The White Eagle,” however, a story about a woman who develops an unusual relationship with a cast-iron bird, suggests that at least at one time after The Awakening Chopin was eager to explore the variety of symbolism that today makes The Awakening so remarkable. The white eagle that dominates Chopin's May 9, 1900, story is an image that recalls the symbolic ambiguity and density of Edna Pontellier's ocean.

The eagle is wonderfully ambiguous. In some ways it represents the past of the woman in the story, her youth and the dreams it once held. When the woman was a child, the eagle had sat on the lawn of her parents' estate and “sheltered … [her] unconscious summer dreams” (p. 671). After her parents died and her brothers and sisters parted, the girl took the white eagle and moved it to her new lodgings. It was the only remainder from her childhood that the girl had. “People,” says Chopin, “wondered at the young woman's persistence in carting him about with her when she moved from place to place” (p. 672).

But the eagle also becomes a substitute for the lover the woman never has. “No mate came to seek her out” (p. 672), we learn, except the eagle. As she grows older, “she fancie[s] the white eagle blink[s] at her from his sombre corner on the floor, an effect produced by remnants of white paint that still stuck in his deep eye sockets” (p. 672). She seldom leaves her room, preferring to spend most of her time sewing at her machine and watching the eagle. But only death brings consummation and union. Just before her final breath, the woman has a vision: “The eagle had blinked and blinked, had left his corner and come and perched upon her, pecking at her bosom” (p. 672). After she dies, a relative decides to use the bird as the woman's tombstone marker. The woman and the bird are at last physically united.

The eagle, too, seems intended to remind us of the woman's static condition. Like the bird, the woman spreads her wings but never takes flight. She was young and vital once, but she never knew how to direct her energy. She never married, she never made friends, she never enjoyed her days. Like the cast-iron eagle, she is all frozen potential. Years of bending over her sewing machine in a stuffy room cause the woman to acquire the eventual posture of the bird. The eagle, sinking deeply into the woman's grave, “dipped forward as if about to take his flight. But he never does” (p. 673). Nor does the woman.

But this brief analysis does not exhaust the symbolic implications of the white eagle. The symbol defies quick translation. For example, there are suggestions of supernatural properties in Chopin's remark, “That was the last she knew of her white eagle in this life” (p. 672). Other times, the bird seems to possess some great, mysterious knowledge we can only guess at. It has a “venerable” head and wears “an expression which, in a human being, would have passed for wisdom” (p. 671). Also, Seyersted notes that the eagle appears to be the woman's “alter-ego.”⁶ Indeed, there seems adequate evidence for his observation: the woman begins, uncannily, to look and behave more and more like her grotesque companion (“Her hair began to grizzle. Her skin got dry and waxlike upon her face and hands”; “she uttered a shriek in the night” [p. 672]). Peter James Petersen chooses to call the story “reminiscent of Flaubert's ‘Un coeur simple,’ in which a woman who is systematically deprived of human contact sublimates all her longings in her relationship to a parrot, which is stuffed after it dies.”⁷ Too, the eagle, a flesh eater, a bird of prey, might be thought of as Death's messenger, if not Death himself. His corner is “gloomy” and he waits patiently for the woman to grow old. And, one wonders, as he must about Melville's whale, why is the eagle white?

The sea in The Awakening and the strange bird in “The White Eagle” resist paraphrase. They invite speculation, encourage wholesome intellectual puzzlement, and remind the reader that very few characters and situations, in life and fiction, are as simple as they may first appear. But the images also produce some regret in Chopin devotees. They serve as evidence that if Chopin had lived longer, if she had received some slight encouragement from contemporary reviewers of her 1899 novel, she might have chosen to further develop the richly ambiguous symbol and, perhaps, to write fiction like, if not greater than, The Awakening and “The White Eagle.”

Notes

1. Kenneth Eble, “A Forgotten Novel: Kate Chopin's The Awakening,” Western Humanities Review, 10 (1956), 261.

2. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), p. 182.

3. Robert Arner, “Music from a Farther Room: A Study of the Fiction of Kate Chopin,” Diss. Pennsylvania State University 1970, p. 229.

4. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), II, 674; hereafter cited parenthetically.

5. Seyersted, p. 185.

6. Seyersted, p. 184.

7. Peter James Petersen, “The Fiction of Kate Chopin,” Diss. The University of New Mexico 1972, p. 263.