[In the following essay, Dyer discusses the ways in which Chopin's use of setting in “A Shameful Affair” prefigures the symbolism of The Awakening.]

“A Shameful Affair,” written on June 5th and 9th of 1891, represents an exciting thematic prelude to The Awakening. In it Mildred Orme, for a moment in her life at least, trades volumes of Ibsen and Browning for the broad, brawny shoulders of Fred Evelyn, a farmhand. She suffers more from guilt than Edna Pontellier seems to. Nevertheless, she makes discoveries about her physical nature that are as overwhelming, forceful, and important as Edna's. She awakens eight years before Chopin's best-known heroine. She prepares the way.

“A Shameful Affair” anticipates The Awakening's technique as well as theme. The story explores Mildred's desires symbolically. The setting—the lush Kraummer farm on the Iron Mountain—is as important to our understanding of Mildred Orme's awakening as the sea, the night, and the Grand Isle oaks are to our understanding of Edna Pontellier. The Kraummer farm, where Mildred Orme spends a summer, is indeed “no such farm as one reads about in humorous fiction.”¹ Images of fertility—undulating wheat fields and streams of clear water full of fish—continually remind us of the force and insistency of Mildred's passion. In each of the story's three sections, Chopin juxtaposes or integrates lush descriptions of nature with scenes in which Mildred Orme discovers what James E. Rocks calls “the violent physical and mental effects of repressed desire.”² “A Shameful Affair,” then, introduces us to a technique—the extensive and elaborate use of symbolic setting to describe the unconscious—that permits subtle exploration of Mildred's desires and later helps to make The Awakening one of the unique and vital novels of the nineteenth century.

Mildred Orme, as Chopin's mildly ironic attitude toward her suggests, knows far less about herself than she thinks she does. In the story's first sentence, the reader finds this twenty-year-old bronze-haired beauty sitting in the “snuggest” corner of the Kraummer's big front porch, content. Mildred Orme has chosen not to accompany the rest of her family to Narragansett, hoping to find time in this safe and restful (“snug”) retreat to pursue “exalted lines of thought” (p. 133). She lounges in her “agreeable corner” (p. 131) reading Ibsen and Browning. Mildred believes that her reading and twenty years of experience have given her considerable wisdom. Already she has refused six offers of marriage and formed her philosophy: life is a tedious affair. Certain of her superior nature and intellect, Mildred views the farmhands as members of a different species: intellectually inferior, coarsely mannered, gracelessly inarticulate.

Mildred soon begins to recognize that she still has much to learn about her biology. Chopin's description of the Kraummer farm prepares us for this recognition. Early in section i, Chopin introduces symbols of natural growth and fertility, symbols that will help us understand the force that drives Mildred toward Fred Evelyn. Chopin's juxtaposition of the images with Mildred's own first sensations of desire suggests that the reproductive urge drives all life. In the second paragraph of the first section, Chopin writes:

Here were swelling acres where the undulating wheat gleamed in the sun like a golden sea. For silver there was the Meramec—or, better, it was pure crystal, for here and there one might look clean through it down to where the pebbles lay like green and yellow gems. Along the river's edge trees were growing to the very water, and in it, sweeping it when they were willow.

(p. 131)

The wheat is ripe. Here, observes Chopin, were “swelling acres.” The grain is so thick that when it waves, the fields look sea-like. Trees are so abundant that they grow to the very edge of the water and beyond. Overgrown branches of willows scrape the surface of the river. The wheat is ready for harvest. The willows continue to grow and thrive, nourished plentifully by the Meramec's water.

Two paragraphs after this description, Mildred's previous contentment is violently disturbed by the presence of Fred Evelyn. Mildred feels strangely uneasy after an accidental meeting with this man. Although he detests Ibsen and Tolstoi (“he doesn't read ‘in books’—says they are spectacles for the short-sighted to look at life through” [p. 135]), Mildred finds him overwhelmingly attractive. He is tanned from outdoor work, young, and strong. “He had nice blue eyes. His fair hair was dishevelled. His shoulders were broad and square and his limbs strong and clean. A not unpicturesque figure in the rough attire that bared his throat to view and gave perfect freedom to his every motion” (p. 131). She decides she will honor him with a smile, but he never looks her way. Slighted, Mildred convinces Mrs. Kraummer to ask Fred to take her to church. Fred, however, has already made plans to go fishing and refuses. Mildred fails to understand why she is vexed by being snubbed by one so far below her, “a tramp, perhaps” (pp. 132-33). Nevertheless, she cannot ignore or forget Fred. The conditions are now exactly right for Mildred's awakening: “It was summer time; she was idle; she was piqued” (p. 132).

Chopin begins section ii with another description of the Kraummers' wheat. This time Mildred (who, like the wheat, is ripening) merges with the grain. On Sunday, the day after the first encounter with Fred, Mildred walks through the bending, heavy wheat toward the river. For a moment, Mildred and the grain coalesce, forming a single image reminiscent of J. G. Frazer's Corn Goddesses—Demeter and Persephone of Greece and the Corn-Mother and Corn-Maiden of northern Europe and North America: “High above her waist reached the yellow grain. Mildred's brown eyes filled with a reflected golden light as they caught the glint of it” (p. 133). Her eyes “reflect” the force of the wheat—the “golden light” that radiates from it. She even looks like a fertility goddess: “Her straw hat had slipped disreputably to one side, over the wavy bronze brown bang that half covered her forehead. Her cheeks were ripe with color that the sun had coaxed there; so were her lips” (p. 133).

The reader watches Mildred's passion unfold through the dramatic and symbolic fishing scene that follows in the same section. Mildred's impatience with the fish symbolically indicates her sexual impatience. Fred, who, like Hemingway's Nick Adams and Jake Barnes, has apparently gone fishing because he has found that “Eden without Eve is not only possible but preferable,”³ is interrupted by Mildred as she emerges from the wheat, “holding tight to the book she had brought with her” (p. 133). Fred continues to fish after Mildred arrives, but his tireless patience with the fish annoys Mildred. She wonders how long, how many hours, he can sit still, waiting for a fish to bite his hook. Mildred wants to catch the fish to symbolically satisfy her sexual urge. Her need is urgent and immediate. She wants something to happen; she wants to change a situation that is beginning to “pall.” She convinces Fred to let her hold the pole. As we might expect, a fish immediately clings to her hook, and Mildred is “seized with excitement upon seeing the line dragged deep in the water” (p. 134). Fred, not as sexually eager as Mildred, shouts, “Wait, wait! Not yet” (p. 134), but Mildred has her way.

Ironically, Fred Evelyn is now awakened by Mildred's excitement. As he grasps her pole to prevent her from drawing the fish, he starts violently “at finding himself so close to a bronze-brown tangle that almost swept his chin—to a hot cheek only a few inches away from his shoulder, to a pair of young, dark eyes that gleamed for an instant unconscious things into his own” (p. 134). Mildred's dark eyes still reflect the glint of the wheat and gleam “unconscious things” into Fred's own eyes, secrets long buried or never known. For a moment, both Fred and Mildred give way to the impulses they share with the wheat. Fred kisses Mildred; bewildered, “she did not know if it was ten times or only once” (p. 134). Then, suddenly, they separate and run from each other. Fred Evelyn disappears down the field path. Mildred, ashamed and confused, wonders if she should tell the Kraummers about the kiss that still burns her lips. She decides, as rationally as she can, to consider the situation calmly at a later time.

Chopin begins section iii by noting how confused Mildred is by her new physical turmoil. Because her previous sanity has been disturbed, Mildred begins to wonder if she is mad. Indeed, why should a kiss—something she thought she had long ago outgrown—be so delicious? “The sweet trouble of it banished sleep from her pillow” (p. 135), notes Chopin. The phrase “sweet trouble” well represents Mildred's state. Ambiguously, the forces that upset and confuse her bring both sweetness and trouble, both pleasure and shame. The “sweet trouble” continues to bother Mildred even after she discovers that Fred Evelyn is not a poor illiterate, but a member of her own social class who enjoys spending summers doing unconventional jobs.

It is appropriate that Mildred Orme and Fred Evelyn meet a final time amidst the wheat, for the wheat has consistently informed us that physical forces have led to Mildred's confusion and awakening. “In the gathering twilight she walked again through the wheat that was heavy and fragrant with dew” (p. 135), notes Chopin. Although Mildred never senses that the heavy, fragrant grain throbs with the same forces that pulsate within Mildred herself, she does sense that something she cannot stop is at work inside of her. As she sees Fred Evelyn approaching, Mildred knows that she cannot run away as a small child might. She must face her emotions. As Fred begins to apologize, to call himself “the most consummate hound that walks the earth” (p. 136), she urges him to remain quiet. She wants to forget what happened on the Meramec's bank. But Mildred Orme's final words let Fred and the reader understand that although she will try to repress the incident, Mildred will no longer foolishly think of herself as a woman who cannot be touched by passion. She promises to forgive him “Some day … some day—perhaps; when I shall have forgiven myself” (p. 136). Fred is puzzled by her words. Suddenly, a “quick wave came beating into his brown throat and staining it crimson, when he guessed what it might be” (p. 136). She had wanted that kiss more than anything in her life. And she knew it.

Why did Chopin decide in 1891 to let the Southern landscape give us information about Mildred Orme's unconscious? Why did she continue to use the technique in stories throughout the 1890s such as “A Harbinger,” “Caline,” “Azélie,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” “At Chênière Caminada,” “A Respectable Woman,” “Vagabonds,” “The Storm,” and “A Vocation and a Voice”? Why did she rely on it so heavily in The Awakening? Because Chopin never discussed or tried to justify her use of symbolic settings (except indirectly, when she said that the excessive regional delight of James Whitcomb Riley, Mrs. Catherwood, and Lew Wallace for “native streams, trees, bushes and birds, the lovely country life about them” produced “too sentimental songs,” not art [“The Western Association of Writers,” p. 691]) we can only guess. Perhaps she sensed that it was artistically efficient. With it she could achieve the indirection and variety necessary to create “subtle, complex, true” portraits of men and women (“The Western Association of Writers,” p. 691).

One may hypothesize that perhaps Chopin's use of terrain symbolic of the unconscious was dictated by the censoring instinct. The 1890s, a decade that chose James Whitcomb Riley as its favorite poet and Reverend Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps as its best-selling novel, would not tolerate an explicit discussion of the subconscious. R. W. Gilder, Century's editor and the decade's literary spokesman, for example, consistently forced Chopin to soften her realism with idealism and to “sweeten” her heroines. One might guess that Chopin may have discovered that by using symbolic settings she could explore “unacceptable” impulses in a form “acceptable” both to her publishers and to herself.

Perhaps Chopin also sensed that by using symbolic descriptions she would not alienate readers who demanded and praised local color regionalism. Readers who wanted to find verisimilitude in her fiction could find it. Many of Chopin's symbolic nature descriptions were so lovely and “realistic” that they superficially resembled the non-functional descriptions of Ruth McEnery Stuart about the splendors of Brake Island, of Alice French about the scenic autumn beauty in the Black River bottoms, and of Mary Noailles Murfree about the majesty of the Tennessee Mountains. She was careful to use native flowers, trees, and landscape. Chopin's stories DID satisfy the regional curiosity of readers of Edward King's The Great South, Charles Nordhoff's The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875, and the magazine articles of Charles Dudley Warner, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Lafcadio Hearn.

Or, perhaps Chopin chose the technique for some other reason. Maybe she recognized that the technique was one of self-effacement and protection. She could always answer her critics with the phrase, “Sex is in your mind.” On the other hand, possibly Chopin, like Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, actually felt that nature was practically sentient—or, at least, closely related to the mind and soul of man. Finally, maybe the technique was far less the result of conscious decisions than the above explanations suggest. Perhaps it was simply a part of her instinctive, personal style.

For whatever reason, Chopin found early in her career a technique that served her well. In The Awakening the Meramec becomes the Gulf of Mexico, the fields of wheat become orange groves, water oaks, and acres of camomile. The symbolic power of the Grand Isle symbols increases: Edna's sea awakens both soul and body. Although the landscape in “A Shameful Affair” is neither as exotic nor as symbolically complex as the landscape in The Awakening, it is vitally important to her 1891 short story and to the development of her symbolic technique. Without the careful descriptions of the Kraummer farm, “A Shameful Affair” would be interesting, but not as subtle and artistically satisfying as it is in its present form. And The Awakening? Without such early experiments with symbolic descriptions, one wonders if Chopin's 1899 novel would have been the same.

Notes

1. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, Per Seyersted, ed. (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1969), I: 131; hereafter cited parenthetically.

2. “Kate Chopin's Ironic Vision,” Revue de Louisiane 1 (1972), 116.

3. Arthur Waldhorn, A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1972), 107.