SOURCE: McCullough, Kate. “Kate Chopin and (Stretching) the Limits of Local Color Fiction.” In Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women's Fiction, 1885-1914, pp. 185-226. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, McCullough attempts to show how Chopin both challenged and reinforced the status quo of Southern regional writing.]

Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material … let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are … let it show the different interests in their true proportions … let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of unaffected people everywhere.

—William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (1891)

LOCAL COLOR, SOUTHERN FEMININITY, AND THE POLITICS OF CANONIZATION

In May of 1899, a month after Kate Chopin (1851-1904) published The Awakening and at the time when its negative reviews had begun to appear, Chopin responded to her critics:

Having a group of people at my disposal, I thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late.

(quoted in Toth 344)¹

Such a disclaimer is as disingenuous as it is ironic, but even if Chopin knew full well that Edna Pontellier was going to make “a mess” of her life in exploring her self and her erotic desires, one might argue that she could not have anticipated the critical abuse that this most famous of her works was to receive, since she had, in fact, previously published material which, although every bit as outrageous, had not been attacked by the press. On the other hand, given that Chopin was, as Emily Toth has shown, a savvy businesswoman who knew the currents of the pblishing industry, she might have expected the negative critical response to The Awakening, since it was in this novel that Chopin finally abandoned the cover of Local Color fiction to depict an upper-class white woman's discovery of her subjectivity and the role sexuality played in that subjectivity.

Unlike Ruiz de Burton, Chopin is now an accepted member of the American literary canon, largely on the basis of The Awakening. Her membership in this club, however, is fairly recent: in contrast to Jewett, say, who has always been allowed a space (if a diminutive one), Chopin was largely ignored for the first half of the century, then recovered first by the work of Per Seyersted and later, more forcefully, by feminist literary critics of the 1970s and 80s.² These critics celebrated The Awakening for its depiction of its upper-class, white female heroine's erotic desire and for its refusal of motherhood as an all-consuming identity category; by now The Awakening is a text likely to appear in any recent discussion of literary treatments of the female body and female sexuality, not to mention many American literature survey courses. But while feminist literary critics succeeded in bringing Chopin into the canon, the grounds on which they did so, ironically, more faithfully reflect issues central to second-wave (largely white, bourgeois) feminism than to Chopin's work as a whole. As a result her canonical status, I would argue, really only applies to The Awakening. Her earlier work—her first novel, At Fault (1890), her two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and numerous short stories published in national magazines—remains underread and is often seen as simply the apprenticeship leading up to the more “universal” text of The Awakening. But this narrative misrepresents Chopin and her work, for The Awakening is neither fully representative, nor is it the culmination, of Chopin's fiction as a whole. While her short fiction does display an interest in female erotic and maternal desire, it does so in explicitly regionally, racially, and ethnically marked ways. It directly engages—challenging, complicating, and replicating—dominant notions of Southern womanhood in order to offer not a transcendent vision of an emerging female identity (such as Edna Pontellier's) but rather multiple representations of locally grounded Louisiana Creole and Cajun women (among others), representations that both reflect and disrupt Chopin's own positioning as a “local color writer” in a national discourse of American letters.

The discrepancy between the critical reception of The Awakening and the critical reception of Chopin's short stories (in her own day, and, less directly, in ours) locates her work at the center of turn-of-the-century debates over regionalism both as an American literary form and as a part of the broader cultural discourse on national identity. Perhaps more than any other author under discussion here, Chopin consciously entered these debates through both her essays and her fiction; consequently, her work provides an illustrative instance both of the way regionalism, as Richard Brodhead points out, “was so structured as to extend opportunity above all to groups traditionally distanced from literary lives” and of the way it “made places for authors but made them in a certain position. By virtue of its historical situation, when writers came into authorship through this genre they were placed in inevitable relation with the field of forces that structured its social place” (116, 137). In Chopin's positioning as (not) a Local Color writer, the complexities of her relation to regionalism begin to emerge, both in terms of the ways critics—then and now—understood and defined her work and in terms of her resistance to being positioned by this “field of forces.” This resistance can be seen in Chopin's efforts to locate herself by exploiting regionalism as a literary category while simultaneously insisting, on the level of plot, on an American culture made up of internally fractured and marked regions.³ That is, although Chopin had publicly positioned herself as a writer in relation to both Local Color and Realism, disclaiming the former and celebrating the latter, in her early work she concurrently exploited Local Color, using it to subvert the terms of middle-class models of womanhood, dismantling a monolithic image of America and American True Womanhood by representing various “American” women whose identities are marked by a variety of ethnic, racial, regional, religious, and class identifications. Her work and its reception thus illustrate the force of expectation in the reception of Local Color fiction and speak to the genre's power to contain and diffuse the power of women's writing. This same body of work, however, also shows how those same expectations and categorical assumptions can be used against a genre by a self-conscious writer, and how they can be used to produce a body of work that reflects American racial, regional, and ethnic relations through a gendered lens.

The literary context of Chopin's self-positioning might best be exemplified by recourse to William Dean Howells. As editor first of the Atlantic Monthly and later of Harpers', Howells was, of course, one of the most important editors in postbellum America: for roughly twenty-five years he championed Realism and in the process helped both to define its American form and to label that form as particularly American. In his enormously influential work, Criticism and Fiction, Howells defines Realism as implying a mimetic fidelity to “life,” but a fidelity that he demands be “proportional.” He both calls for mimesis and dictates its contents, arguing that what he calls an American literary “tradition of decency” is “truer to life” than a French “tradition of indecency” and that “the study of erotic shivers and fervors,” for instance, is not true realism because it is not proportional to life (72). Finally, Howells dictates the very form of this “proportional” and “decent” Realism, calling for the use of dialect and the continued development of the short story form, a form he saw as a particularly American genre (64). A content that chronicles American life is thus, for Howells, happily wedded to a particularly American form.

Howells's argument is worth tracing because it throws into relief the generic hierarchies that subsequently emerged from it. As Howells charts American literature, Local Color is not merely related to Realism, it represents its apogee. By the end of the century, however, this hierarchy had been inverted, so that Local Color had become a minor subgenre of the privileged Realism. This hierarchy is still enacted by contemporary literary critics such as James Cox, for instance, who calls regionalism “a small-scale representation of the larger reality of national literature” (767). The shift in the valence of regionalism/Local Color occurred as a hierarchy of gendered and geographic literary value emerged in antebellum America. That Local Color became a marginalized literary form on the basis of (racially inflected) gender and that as a marginalized form it has been used to contain and dismiss women writers is by now fairly clear. Although both men and women wrote Local Color fiction, white women make up the majority of Local Color writers, and the authors most celebrated as exemplary Local Color writers then and now have been white women: Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Grace King, to name only a few. As a literary category, this “woman's” subgenre has been represented as a diminished version of canonical Realism: though both attempt to represent lived reality with an attention to detail and common life, Local Color has been dismissed as a quaint, backward-looking, and diminutive form (often short stories) written by women writing on a small scale, a form dismissed as nostalgic and concerned with loss and the rural. Canonical Realism and its heir, Naturalism, in contrast, have been valued for centering on the urban industrialized present/future.⁴ This contrast has often been represented in terms of form as an opposition between the short story and the novel.

Informed by these nineteenth- and twentieth-century gender hierarchies, Local Color is also deeply imbricated in broader national discourses of region and race. Centered in Boston and New York, the postbellum publishing industry (conveniently bodied forth by Howells) contributed to the ideological work of national reconciliation while also confirming the Northeast as America's literary center, in keeping with the North's position as victor of the Civil War. Amy Kaplan, in “Nation, Region, and Empire” goes so far as to read the Civil War as the structuring paradigm for American literature from the war until the turn of the century, calling national reunification “the cultural project that would inform a diversity of American fiction for the following three decades” (240). While this claim needs to be complicated in the case of Western fiction like Ruiz de Burton's, it is certainly tenable for Southern fiction. The Northeast (New England/New York) claim to the cultural primacy of center (de facto defining all other areas as outlying regions) produced a dichotomy that, in the case of the postbellum South, took on other meanings as well: North/South became urban/rural, future/past, masculine/feminine, and victor/vanquished.⁵ Thus, Northern publishers publishing “regional” writers both displayed the North's cultural monopoly and celebrated the complexity of America without any fear of the bitter sectarianism of the Civil War, demonstrating that the South as region had become entertaining rather than threatening. As Helen Taylor has noted, by “the late 1870s the northern magazines were very keen to foster a fresh sense of nationalism, and the major publications adopted a policy of reconciliation that meant deliberately seeking copy from regions hitherto little known or courted for their literary output” (18-19). Simultaneously, this regional discourse intersects with the racial discourse of the period, since part of Local Color's ideological work of postbellum reconciliation, of course, was to play down racial dissent by offering happy portraits of Southern racial harmony at a time when virulent racism was evident everywhere from the rise of lynching to the NWSA's white suffragists' abandonment of African-American women. To this end, as Taylor points out, “the invention through a dialect of a tamed, quaint black folk-hero contributed in large measure to popular complacency about the condition of southern blacks in postbellum America” (20). If Southern Local Color fiction was in the process of being marginalized within literary canons, then, it remained at the center of struggles over representations of national identity.

This marginalizing of the South both in broader cultural terms and in the more narrow terms of its fiction speaks to Chopin's position as a “Southern” writer,⁶ for on the graph of specifically Southern Local Color fiction, gender and geography run on more than parallel lines; their lines intersect in ways that confirm nineteenth-century Southern literature's status as “minor.” Twentieth-century literary history's vision of Local Color fiction as a “female” genre has its analogy in a more generalized feminization of Southern fiction and culture. Anne Goodwyn Jones has shown that the ideal of the Southern Lady, the white, privileged, regional complement to the American Ideal of True Womanhood, operated in nineteenth-century America as the figure for the South itself, embodying “the values by which southerners have defined the region's character through Civil War and Reconstruction, New South and Modernism” (8).⁷ Add to this the fact that the South was emasculated both literally and figuratively by the Civil War: in literal terms, as Taylor notes, by 1890 “there were around sixty thousand Confederate widows in the South; in every state women outnumbered men in all age groups” (6); in figurative terms the South became the powerless, passive captive by its loss. Southern Local Color, then, provided the literary enactment of a larger cultural alignment between the South and femininity, an alignment metaphorized in the postwar fictional plots that showed a war-torn nation reunited by the marriage of the Southern belle to the Northern hero. Through Local Color the South acquired its literary status as one of “America”'s (read the North's) Others: the exotic and often eroticized stranger onto whom was displaced the qualities of violence, passion, and a not-quite-civilized rural world of the past.

Postwar Southern letters in the form of Local Color fiction was thus written out of “real men's” literature, aligned with the losers and the women, providing a space for fiction that was popular but rarely taken seriously. That Southern Local Color fiction came to be gendered female is hardly surprising given the accumulated links between the South and images of femininity, but Chopin's Southern Local Color fiction has a far more important, though less evident, link to gender. Cecilia Tichi argues that “the [American] new-woman writers … rejected the camouflage of domesticity but gained acceptance, many of them, under another rubric—regionalism” (597). But what in Tichi sounds coincidental was, in fact, no accident at all: Chopin was quite aware of the politics of Local Color—both the benefits and costs of being associated with it—and so chose to identify with Realism as a political strategy of self-authorization in the face of the threat of marginalization. At the same time, however, Chopin used both the conventions and the marginalized status of Local Color fiction as a cover: as a marginalized form it allowed Chopin to experiment with representations of American womanhood, rejecting a kind of Northeastern Puritan tradition of non-representation of female sexuality and following Realism's move toward mimesis so as to dismantle models of True Womanhood as well as those of the Southern Lady. In a complex set of multiple positionings, Chopin, the upper-class, white, St. Louis-born, widowed mother of six children, translated her knowledge of Creole and Cajun culture into nationally published fiction. And just as regionalism didn't exclude the exotic but rather translated it into something quaint and safe, Chopin herself, like her subject matter, was regional enough to be taken by Northern audiences as an authentic voice while central enough (by virtue of her race and class positioning and her schooling in high culture) to be perceived as a safe translator by her audience. Within her early work Chopin is constantly in conversation with the conventions of Local Color fiction, both challenging its gender norms and often reinscribing its racial and ethnic stereotypes as she attempts to push at Realism's representational limits. Offering heroines who disrupted a monolithic representation of American womanhood in the multiplicity of their ethnic, racial, class, religious, and regional positioning, Chopin complicates dominant definitions of both what gets to count as Southern and what gets to count as American.

CELEBRATING REALISM, DEPLOYING LOCAL COLOR

Chopin was clearly aware of the hierarchy of genres operating in American literature, and in her essays and critical writing she carefully positioned herself accordingly in relation to Realism and regionalism, as well as to European letters. Of French and Irish family, Kate O'Flaherty Chopin was raised within her mother's extended French family and was widely read in French literature, a national/cultural association that proved influential, as I will discuss, in her marriage and also in the worlds she would portray in her stories. In terms of her literary alignments, this background was influential in that it grounded her in a tradition of French, as well as American, literature.⁸ The only literary influence she ever acknowledged as an adult was Maupassant, traces of whose form and content both can be seen in her short stories. Although she did not like Zola (“his constructive methods,” she complained in a review called “Emile Zola's ‘Lourdes’,” are too “glaringly revealed” [697]), she praised Maupassant in an 1896 essay entitled “Confidences,” for being realistic in form:

I read his stories and marvelled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trappings in that vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw. When a man does this, he gives us the best that he can; something valuable for it is genuine and spontaneous.

(700-701)

For Chopin, Maupassant's value lies in his fiction's proximity to “life” and its distance from “tradition,” “authority,” and “old fashioned” narrative machinery. In contrast, in “As You Like It,” an 1897 essay on Jude the Obscure, she condemns Hardy's novel as humorless, unconvincing, and not lifelike, complaining that its “brutality is an obvious and unhappy imitation of the great French realism” (714), implying that it is the unskilled handling of “brutality,” not the brutality itself, that is objectionable. She concludes that the novel “is detestably bad; it is unpardonably dull; and immoral, chiefly because it is not true” (714). Unlike many of her contemporaries, Chopin objects to what she sees as a nonmimetic content (its lack of “truth” or adequately “real” realism) rather than an immoral one.

In her stories Chopin also ridiculed generic plots that fell back on conventions at the cost of Realism. In “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” (1889, 1891),⁹ for instance, Chopin rehearses the comic plot of the eventual uniting of thwarted lovers, but in doing so she also parodies it, making the “old fashioned mechanism and stage trappings” the butt of her joke. Miss Witherwell's niece Mildred, sent to her aunt to recover from the love her parents have forbidden, fictionalizes her own plight to her aunt, representing it as “a little story” that she is writing. Mildred, under the cover of this fiction, asks her writer aunt's advice on how to resolve the action, claiming that she is stalled at the point where the crossed lovers, deeply in love, have been brought together again by fate. When Miss Witherwell explains that the hero “must now perform some act to ingratiate himself with the obdurate parent,” and recommends having him save the father from a train crash or shipwreck or “avert a business catastrophe,” Mildred objects:

“No, no, aunt! I can't force situations. You'll find I'm extremely realistic. The only point for consideration is, to marry or not to marry; that is the question.”

Miss Witherwell looked at her niece, aghast. “The poison of the realistic school has certainly tainted and withered your fancy in the bud, my dear, if you hesitate a moment. Marry them, most certainly, or let them die.”

(65)

Mildred's realism—she secretly marries her suitor then brings him home and reconciles the family to him—is one of life imitating an art that is really a disguised version of life, a narrative move that suggests Chopin's support of “the realistic school,” as opposed to the “mistake” of Miss Witherwell's school of romantic and rhetorical excess.

Chopin's championing of Realism takes the form not only of an attack on conventional narrative “machinery,” but also of an attack on regionalism, which she characterizes as naïve and unrealistic. And while her defense of Realism includes European fiction (indeed, often citing French literature as the model), her critique of regionalism is specifically focused on American letters. In an extraordinary piece she wrote for the Critic after attending her first literary conference, the 1894 annual meeting of the Western Association of Writers, for instance, Chopin equates regionalism with an American provincialism of the worst kind, despite her opening disclaimer:

Provincialism in the best sense of the word stamps the character of this association of writers, who gather chiefly from the State of Indiana and meet annually at Spring Fountain Park. It is an ideally beautiful spot, a veritable garden of Eden in which the disturbing fruit of the tree of knowledge still hangs unplucked. The cry of the dying century has not reached this body of workers, or else it has not yet been comprehended. There is no doubt in their souls, no unrest: apparently an abiding faith in God as he manifests himself through the sectional church, and an overmastering love of their soil and institutions.

(691)

Her snideness here is striking, as is her disapproval of what she clearly views as a naïve and narrow-minded approach to life and literature. She notes that these writers show “a clinging to past and conventional standards,” then goes on to proclaim that there is “a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana, nor does it lie at the antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it” (691). Rejecting the regional as limited and censored by “ethical and conventional standards” and, like Miss Witherwell, as “too often sentimental” (691), she aligns herself with the Realists, an alignment that clearly implies for her a freedom of representational choice as well as a move toward narrative authority and away from the marginalized status of the regional.

In the same year Chopin more directly acknowledged the geographical politics of American regionalism. In an article entitled “‘Crumbling Idols’ by Hamlin Garland” she responds to Garland's critique of the East as a literary center by viewing his attitude as one “to be deplored.” She goes on to comment,

The fact remains that Chicago is not yet a literary center, nor is St. Louis (!), nor San Francisco, nor Denver, nor any of those towns in whose behalf he drops into prophesy. There can come no good of abusing Boston and New York. On the contrary, as “literary centers” they have rendered incalculable service to the reading world by bringing to light whatever there has been produced of force and originality in the West and South since the war.

(694)

As a native of St. Louis who lived in and wrote about Louisiana and was published by Northern publishers for a largely Northern audience, Chopin clearly had experience of the regionally inflected power structures that organized the publishing world. Her response to Garland reflects this; it is no accident that as a regional woman writer Chopin chooses here to represent Northern publishing of Western and Southern fiction as an “incalculable service” to the public rather than as an act of appropriation or postwar reconciliation. This sort of response was typical of Chopin, indicating a caginess toward the industry that she was to exhibit throughout her career and that suggests a region's strategic response to a center's condescension.

However, if Chopin defended publishing powers and aligned herself with Realism, ridiculing both provincial writers and generic plots as limited and partial, and calling instead for a mimetic depiction of life, she also exploited the “provincial” form of Local Color fiction to get published. Consider, for instance, her choice of Bayou Folk as the title of her first collection of short stories. And certainly, nothwithstanding whatever allegiances Chopin herself claimed, critics had identified her with Local Color as early as 1890 in reviews of her first novel, At Fault. The St. Louis Republic called At Fault “a clever romance of Louisiana life” (quoted in Toth 190); the New Orleans Daily Picayune identified it as a “life of a handsome Creole widow” (quoted in Toth 192); and a St. Louis magazine called Fashion and Fancy linked Chopin to “that bright galaxy of Southern and Western writers who hold today the foremost rank of America's authors” (quoted in Toth 192). But if these Southern reviews celebrated Chopin as a Local Color author and promoted her depiction of their region, national reviews of Bayou Folk shifted the tenor of that label, establishing Chopin as an important Local Color writer but making it clear that Local Color was Realism's poor country cousin. The Review of Reviews called Bayou Folk “realistic” and “direct” and identified the influence of Maupassant (quoted in Toth 625), but reviews such as The New York Times's and The Critic's, among others, not only identified Chopin's work as Local Color but also helped to delineate the genre more clearly for their audience. Taking great pains to set the scene, these reviews explain the “exotic” bayou to the reader as if Louisiana were a foreign country. The Times review, entitled “Living Tales from Acadian Life,” goes on to establish the inhabitants as anachronistic “Frenchmen of the seventeenth century” who are “barbarians softened by Catholicism … showing a pagan primitiveness” (23). For all this, however, the reviewer smugly claims that theirs is “a world easily understood, because it is not in the least affected” (23).¹⁰ Louisiana thus in one sweep becomes a regional Other and inferior to New York while also representing the non-“American” national and religious identity of the French Catholic. As in reviews of Sui Sin Far's representations of Chinese-American communities of the West Coast, a national/ethnic Other is conflated with a regional Other. The regional hierarchy being established here is obvious, but reviewers like The Critic's also conflate this with a genre hierarchy. Calling Bayou Folk an “unpretentious, unheralded little book,” the reviewer remarks upon the book's “queer patois people” and then characterizes both the stories and their contents as diminutive, calling them

simple tales, whose very simplicity increases their verisimilitude and makes in some cases a powerful impression on the imagination. She takes Middle-Upper Louisiana … as the scene of her little dramas and reproduces for us, often very realistically and pathetically, the oddities in life and character which she has observed there. In her sheaf of twenty-three sketches some are like rude cartoons whose very rudeness brings out a more vivid effect. … These are admirable little bits.

(300)

While the reviewer recognizes and praises Chopin's “photographic realism,” such praise operates as a throwaway line in the face of the reviewer's patronizing categorization of both the region and the stories as “little bits.” Toth shows that “charming was a recurring word in later reviews of Bayou Folk” (226): it is a word that aptly indicates a general attitude toward Kate Chopin's short stories, a word gender-coded female and implying a patronizing praise of a marginalized form.¹¹

In addition to establishing Chopin as the author of charming female Southern stories, these reviews also make clear that the exotic nature of her fiction is located not simply in a representation of Southern life, but of a specific form of Southern life and a form specified in ethnic rather than simply geographical terms. That is, although Chopin created a wide variety of heroines—urban, rural, Northern, Southern, African-American, Anglo-American, Native American—she rarely wrote about and was almost never understood as writing about a generic Southerner. In fact, critics generally understood her to be representing Creole or Cajun heroines and cultures, with all the ethnic and racial complexity carried by these terms in the context of nineteenth-century Louisiana. As a term, Cajun is derived from Acadian, a reference to this population's origin in Nova Scotia's Acadian population. In the mid-eighteenth century this population dispersed, with a part of it settling in Louisiana's bayou country. Ethnically French, the settlers brought French language and culture to rural Louisiana. Although they were a complicated and multiply-classed society, by the end of the nineteenth century they had come to be viewed by outsiders, as Carl Brasseaux puts it, “as a monolithic group of honest but ignorant and desperately poor fishermen and trappers, clinging tenaciously to an ancient way of life in the isolation of Louisiana's swamps and coastal marshes” (3).¹² Because they maintained linguistic, religious (Catholicism), and other cultural markers of their French heritage, Cajuns were also seen as un-American. Significantly, they were criticized by both Northerners and other Southerners in terms that replicated the broader stereotypes about the South in the postwar period: Brasseaux notes the terms of the complaints as “laziness, lack of ambition, ignorance, backwardness, and an unrelenting refusal to assimilate” (103). By Chopin's day, then, Cajuns were seen as white ethnics who were regionally specific, always inferior, always of French descent, and always of lower-class standing.

Moreover, by the postbellum period, outsiders often conflated Cajuns with Creoles, a term complicated enough in its own right. Albert Rhodes, in an 1873 article titled “The Louisiana Creoles,” for instance, calls the Cajuns “a small portion of the Creole population” and asserts that they are “the least intelligent of the Creole population, and occupy small patches of land along bayous and the coast, which are just sufficient in extent to satisfy the wants of their simple lives” (254). In fact, the two groups are, in derivation and later identification, distinct. As I discuss in Chapter 2 [of Regions of Identity], the Louisiana usage of “Creole,” while originally signifying the first-generation, American-born offspring of European parents, swiftly became a complicated and contested term. Not originally racially inflected, by the 1830s “Creole” was, as Virginia Domínguez notes, taken to mean a descendent of French settlers although not necessarily white (121). In the postbellum period, however, in part because Louisiana shifted from its original French tripartite legal categorization of race to an American binary system, racial lines became more at issue and two competing definitions came into circulation. As Domínguez explains it, for white Creoles, “Creole” came to mean white “blood” only, of French or Spanish descent, and generally of class privilege, while “Cajun” meant the white descendant of the Acadians; for Creoles of color, however, “Creole” came to mean of racially mixed blood, not necessarily of French or Spanish descent, while “Cajun” meant of Acadian ancestry but not necessarily white (149, 150). Moreover, in addition to these two groups and sometimes overlapping with them, the Louisiana population contained the descendants of what had been known in the antebellum period as the gens de couleur libre (free people of color) as well as in some areas a population known as Redbones, defined by Marcia Gaudet as “people of part-Indian ancestry” (45). Michael Omi and Howard Winant remind us that “the categories employed to differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal themselves, upon serious consideration, to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary” (55); both in the Louisiana of Chopin's day and in her work, these long-complicated categories were deeply intertwined with categories of ethnicity and class and were often contingent on an urban/rural dichotomy that identified New Orleans's “founding families” as Creole while locating Cajuns as specifically rural, sometimes accompanied by Creoles of color.

Chopin's stories reflect this complicated landscape and also reflect her own complicated positioning in relation both to these margins and to cultural centers. Like many of the writers we now view as regionalists, Chopin was not really an “authentic” voice of the communities she depicted—either Cajun or Creole Louisiana—although she had ties to both of them.¹³ She was, first of all, not from Louisiana at all, but from St. Louis, Missouri, a city that although in a free state had had many supporters of the Confederacy during the Civil War, including Chopin's own upper-middle-class slave-owning family. As “the gateway to the West” St. Louis was seen variously as a Western city and as a Northern city, a blurring Chopin reflects in At Fault in her positioning of the protagonist David Hosmer. The narrator reports that Thérèse Lafirme, the Creole widow heroine, “had guessed he was no Southerner,” but just what he is proves harder to identify (744). When he meets Thérèse, Hosmer “introduced himself vaguely as from the West; then perceiving the need of being more specific as from St. Louis” (744), but the flexibility of St. Louis's regional affiliation becomes clear when, in response to the fact that none of the servants on the Lafirme plantation will work for Hosmer's sister Melicent, Thérèse explains that “the negroes were very averse to working for Northern people whose speech, manners, and attitude toward themselves were unfamiliar” (753). Whether viewed as Northern or Western, St. Louis was definitely not Southern.¹⁴

At the same time, however, Chopin, while the daughter of an Irish immigrant father, was also French on her mother's side and was raised largely in that context, so that she was both Catholic and bilingual.¹⁵ As a result, when she married into the French Creole family of Oscar Chopin she was geographically an outsider but not entirely culturally foreign to his world. After spending the first nine years of their married life in New Orleans, Kate and Oscar Chopin moved with their young family to Oscar Chopin's family plantation in Cloutierville, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, where they lived for five years until Oscar Chopin died in 1882. Kate Chopin remained there until 1884, when she returned to St. Louis to live for the rest of her life. Chopin thus might be said to have been neither quite an insider nor an outsider to Louisiana culture. As Roxana Robinson so aptly states, Chopin was “an outsider with inside information” (xi), linked to Louisiana Creole and Cajun culture by language, religion, marriage, and nearly fifteen years residence; separated by a St. Louis origin and upbringing.

Situating Chopin's work in this context allows us to realign both the work and Chopin's attitude toward it. Taking as a starting point that the valence of Local Color was never neutral and that Chopin was well aware of this, one can read her stories as responses to this politics of marginalization. They are manipulations of the very form meant to contain them, a strategy exemplified by “A Gentleman of the Bayou Têche,” a story from Chopin's 1894 collection, Bayou Folk. In the story Mr. Sublet, an artist visiting the Bayou Têche plantation of his friend, sees the Cajun Evariste and wants to draw his picture, for Evariste is, the narrator notes, “rather a picturesque subject in his way, and a tempting one to an artist looking for bits of ‘local color’ along the Têche” (319). Sublet pays the man two dollars in advance, but when Evariste's daughter, Martinette, tells her neighbor, “Aunt Dicey,” the news, the woman interprets the artist's intentions as indicative of patronizing appropriation, claiming that the artist will label the picture “Dis heah is one dem low-down 'Cajuns o' Bayeh Têche!” (320). Hearing this, Martinette convinces her father that to allow his picture to be drawn would be humiliating and then goes in his place to return the money. As she does, her father rescues Sublet's child from a boating accident, a rescue that prompts the artist again to want to draw Evariste and label him “a hero of Bayou Têche,” a label that only further embarrasses Evariste. Finally, in the story's resolution Evariste himself names his portrait, calling for it to be titled, “Dis is one picture of Mista Evariste Anatole Bonamour, a gent'man of de Bayou Têche” (324). Through the battle over the picture's caption, Chopin delineates the artist's appropriation of “local color” and the patronizing condescension at the root of it. Read as a metaphor for the North's consumption of Southern Local Color fiction, it becomes a pointedly political tale that reveals that a romantic objectification of the Cajun (or the Cajun as stereotype of the Southerner in general) strips him of his dignity, his power to name himself, and even, Chopin implies, some of his humanity.

When Sublet first approaches Evariste with his request, Evariste agrees and promises to make himself “fine” for the event. But as Evariste recounts to his daughter Martinette, Sublet “say', ‘No, no,’ like he ent please'. He want' me like I come out de swamp. So much betta if my pant'loon' an' coat is tore, he say, an' color' like de mud” (319-20). Mud-covered and emerging from the swamp, Evariste embodies Sublet's vision of the stereotypical Cajun: more animal than human. But while Evariste is puzzled by this, it takes Aunt Dicey to explain the “eccentric wishes on the part of the strange gentleman” (320) as a covert insult. She does so by means of a story she tells Martinette, the story of how the artist's child tries to photograph Aunt Dicey as she stands at her ironing board:

“Dat li'le imp he come a hoppin' in heah yistiddy wid a kine o' box on'neaf his arm. He say' ‘Good mo'nin', madam. Will you be so kine an' stan' jus like you is dah at yo' i'onin', an' lef me take yo' picture?’ I 'lowed I gwine make a picture outen him wid dis heah flati'on, ef he don' cl'ar hisse'f quick. An' he say he baig my pardon fo' his intrudement. All dat kine o' talk to a ole nigga 'oman! Dat plainly sho' he don' know his place.”

“W'at you want 'im to say, Aunt Dice?” asked Martinette, with an effort to conceal her distress.

“I wants 'im to come in heah an' say: ‘Howdy, Aunt Dicey! will you be so kine and go put on yo' noo calker dress an' yo' bonnit w'at you w'ars to meetin', an' stan' 'side f'om dat i'onin'-boa'd w'ilse I gwine take yo photygraph.’ Dat de way fo' a boy to talk w'at had good raisin'.”

(321)

The boy's request offends Aunt Dicey for two reasons. She is offended first by the kind of representation the boy wants to record: his image of her, which reduces her to a laborer (and might be read as echoing images of house slaves at work). Against this she posits her own image of herself, presented in her best clothes, representing Sunday leisure. The belittling of Aunt Dicey implicit in the boy's image is echoed in the form of his request, where his formal and polite language is read by Aunt Dicey as a disrespectful ridiculing of her. Her comment that the boy does not know his place suggests this, contravening the common usage of knowing one's place, where the phrase carries the connotation of lower status: that is, it is usually people aspiring “above” their place who are accused of not knowing it. While Aunt Dicey's statement might imply this meaning because of the boy's inferior position relative to an adult, in fact, this white boy's “place,” because of race and gender hierarchies, is above hers as a black woman, a hierarchy that leads Aunt Dicey to suspect she is being ridiculed. This incident stands as a metaphor of the story as a whole, foregrounding as it does the question of who controls representation and whose purposes it serves.

In the end, the story hinges not on whether a given representation is positive or negative: Evariste is as distressed at the possibility of being labeled a hero as a “low-down 'Cajun.” Rather, the issue here focuses on who controls the representation. Calling attention to this, Chopin inverts a more conventional plot (a father protecting his daughter's honor) by having Martinette defend her father's dignity, and gives the power of naming to the subject of the portrait. In addition, she gives the power of interpretation, ultimately, to Aunt Dicey, a pointed reminder that the charming and exotic Other both recognizes and resents his/her appropriation. In doing so Chopin offers a critique of the outsider's (Sublet's/the North's) appropriation of the South and the accompanying demand that the South embody Northern stereotypes of backward poverty—the swamp man, the ironing woman. Significantly, this particular plot—especially the incident between Aunt Dicey and Sublet's son—underscores the analogies and intersections among racial, regional, and gender hierarchies. In doing so it simultaneously insists on a recognition of the multiple levels of Louisiana culture that these hierarchies produce, from the plantation owner, to the racially unmarked Cajun, to the African American. Chopin can thus here be read as reappropriating Local Color for her own ends, contesting the image of the South, specifically the Cajuns, as exotic, quaint primitives, and locating them instead in a complex social system composed of various class, race, and gender stratifications.¹⁶

At the same time, however, Chopin might be read as offering an ironic self comment on the position of the Local Color artist: was she, a non-Cajun writing bayou stories in local dialect, any less guilty of appropriation than her character Sublet? Chopin clearly benefited from being seen as an inside chronicler of Louisiana life; certainly, many people read her as just another quaint Local Color writer playing into generic stereotypes and thus saw her early work as part of that “charming” Local Color tradition (and so saw The Awakening as a shocking break from it).¹⁷ But this reading does not do justice to the complexity of Chopin's early work. While her depictions of race and gender relations in a class-stratified Louisiana are often deeply or irreparably flawed by the use of racist discourse (to some extent substantiating accusations that Local Color offers quaint, charming images of a primitive people), Chopin also frequently offers more radical interventions into dominant national discourses of region and gender, sometimes deploying both reactionary and progressive discourses in the same story.

If her early work escaped the censure attached to The Awakening, I would argue that it did so specifically because of the cover of Local Color and the strategies of displacement it afforded Chopin. Critics and readers didn't see Chopin's stories as shocking partly because of their form and the force of expectation: Local Color, as a genre, was seen as quaint and conservative of old values, not suggestive of complicated or new ones. Additionally, however, Chopin's choice of heroines in her short stories also diffused a potentially hostile response to her stories. In choosing for the most part to depict the “exotic” heroines of Local Color fiction—characters who were Cajuns, African Americans, or poor Creoles—rather than simply focusing on white upper-class Anglo Americans (or even, at a stretch, upper-class, white Creoles), Chopin was choosing characters who were already, in the terms of dominant cultural and literary codes, not eligible for the white, middle-class category of the True Womanhood. Moreover, Chopin not only chose to focus on such characters, she also frequently employed a conventionally racist discourse to represent them. Hence, while Chopin was able in her fiction to disrupt certain dominant norms of femininity, she often did so only at the cost of offering images that reinscribed others and thus would have reassured her largely white audience.

Within the context of Local Color fiction, then, one might read Chopin, as Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse do, as a sympathetic insider chronicling Louisiana life, or as just another Sublet: an outsider artist looking for a bit of local color to put into stories about Cajuns, free people of color, New Orleans Creoles, and Cane River Creoles. Alternatively, one might abandon this dichotomy altogether to consider the fact that Chopin also wrote stories featuring Missouri farms and Northern heroines, as well as stories set in St. Louis, and that in most of her fiction, regardless of its setting, her heroines are ethnically, racially, religiously, and class marked, frequently Other, not only to some amorphous Northern readership but, within the world of the fiction, to each other as well. Paradoxically, Chopin's short fiction ultimately broadens certain representations of American identity at the same time as it often replicates easy stereotypes of Southern Local Color fiction. Moreover, these representations are not simply the products of the immature writer who would grow up to write The Awakening as the masterpiece of her late career. Rather, her representations of regional identities are intricately bound up with her representation of female identity (and often, specifically, female desire) in ways that allow us to see The Awakening as thematically overlapping with Chopin's early fiction though in some ways quite distinct from it.

Fetterley and Pryse, in their introductory comments on Chopin in American Women Regionalists 1850-1910, suggest a link between these two concerns by arguing that “regionalist fiction opened up possibilities [for Chopin] that were not publishable—the ‘region’ of women's sexuality” (411), a link that I have suggested that Chopin made by using Local Color as a strategic cover. In this sense the marginalized form serves as a vehicle for a discussion of female sexuality; the protection afforded by marginalization allows the author to push the envelope of what can be represented in fiction. At the same time, however, just as the regional enabled Chopin's representations of female sexuality, her representations of female sexuality serve as the vehicle for an articulation of regional and national identity. In the remainder of this chapter I will examine the ways gender and regionalism intersect in Chopin's short stories, focusing this broad examination on the ways Chopin's reworking of two central components of American Womanhood—passion(lessness) and maternity—recast these often essentialized areas as still important but always in conversation with other equally important identity categories of ethnicity, region, and race. Drawing on the narrative values of Realism, Chopin offered unusually explicit representations of female desire under the cover of Local Color fiction, but her attempts to open a narrative space for the representation of a new sort of heroine ultimately foundered on the racist and sexist discourses underpinning Local Color fiction.

PASSIONATE TRUE WHITE WOMANHOOD

Working within the dominant culture's terms, Chopin's fiction frequently contests the notion of the proper (white) American woman as passionless. She does this in stories that frame white female erotic desire in terms of class while concurrently marking it as regionally inflected.¹⁸ That these stories are also structured in racialized/ethnic terms is often less explicitly marked in the texts, but such structuring is nonetheless central to them, for a combination of racial and ethnic marking becomes the necessary ground for Chopin's representation of white erotic desire. I will look here at only two such stories, “A Shameful Affair” (1891, 1893) and “A Night in Acadie” (1896, 1897), as a way of exploring various of Chopin's versions of white womanhood inflected by erotic desire.

In Mildred Orme, the protagonist of “A Shameful Affair,” Chopin ironically embodies the Northeast as cultural center of the U.S.: Mildred is a white and privileged New England woman whose snobbery is intellectual as well as class-based. Her story interweaves class and gender identities and locates desire on the ground of exoticized ethnicity.¹⁹ The “affair” in question involves Mildred and a nameless worker on the German Missouri farm where Mildred has chosen to vacation. Mildred's patronizing yet clearly erotic interest in the farmhand leads her to seek him out in a confrontation that results in a sudden, passionate embrace and kiss. The nature of Mildred's response—a shamed panic—operates as the core of the story, revealing a class-determined erotic desire as a component part of white female identity.

That Chopin locates this story on the Kraummer farm is not incidental, for this specifically German site, in combination with Mildred's class privilege and extreme class-consciousness (both of which Chopin satirizes), positions Mildred in the space of the patronizing outside observer of local color. Mildred sits on the porch of the farmhouse, reading Ibsen or Browning and watching, for her amusement, the work of the farm going on around her. Rhetorically erasing the actual work of the farm, Mildred views it as simply a backdrop for herself, describing herself, as the narrator reports, as “Mildred Orme, who really ought to have been with the rest of the family at Narragansett—who had come to seek in this retired spot the repose that would enable her to follow exalted lines of thought” (133). The story emphasizes that Mildred's is not a curiosity based simply on rural or class difference but also on the ethnic “difference” of the farm; Chopin includes conversations between Mildred and Mrs. Kraummer that underscore both Mrs. Kraummer as Other and Mildred as outsider, as, for instance, when Mildred asks Mrs. Kraummer about her farmhands:

“Who are these men, Mrs. Kraummer, that work for you? Where do you pick them up?”

“Oh, ve picks 'em up everyvere. Some is neighbors, some is tramps, and so.”

“And that broad-shouldered young fellow—is he a neighbor? …”

“Gott, no! You might yust as well say he vas a tramp. Aber he works like a steam ingine.”

(132)

The use of dialect for Mrs. Kraummer's speech marks her as the “exotic other,” her local color ethnic rather than regional or racial. And it is precisely in this space of the Other that Mildred first experiences desire, in a scene that also underscores her status as outside observer. The narrator tells us that Mildred never looked at the workers because “farmhands are not so very nice to look at, and she was nothing of an anthropologist” (131), then goes on to offer the following:

But once when the half dozen men came along, a paper which she had laid carelessly upon the railing was blown across their path. One of them picked it up, and when he had mounted the steps restored it to her. He was young, and brown, of course, as the sun had made him. 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.

(131)

Mildred's position, as the leisured and privileged outsider observing the “not unpicturesque” local worker, recalls that of Sublet as he goes looking for “bits of ‘local color’ along the Têche” (319). It also recalls Richard Brodhead's claim that “the late nineteenth-century American elite, self-defined through its care for high art, was also identified by its other distinctive leisure practices … particularly its arts of leisure travel” as well as its “habit of mental acquisitiveness” (125, 133), but the privileged tourist's voyeuristic acquisitiveness here is specifically marked as erotic, charged with a desire the story suggests is only accessible to the proper lady in the context of an ethnically and class-marked margin. From her seat of repose Mildred plans to offer the laboring farmhand a “condescending little smile” (132) and is offended when he refuses to drive her to church. Played out in gendered terms—the man's refusal to perform social courtesies for the woman—this snub operates as a class-based insult as well. As a woman whose family summers in the moneyed classes' seaside resort of Narragansett, and who clearly has literary pretensions, Mildred may summer with the “farmhands” but only as the lady who expects to be served.

The depictions of Mildred's direct interactions with the man are similarly structured by a combination of class and gender codes in which she casts him as the lower-class Other. In a scene where Mildred engineers a confrontation with him, the narrative establishes her motives grounded both in erotic desire and in a desire to reassert class superiority. While she speaks “politely and with kindly dignity, which she supposed would define her position toward him” (133), the narrator points out that at the same time Mildred's hat has “slipped disreputably to one side” (133) and her eyes “gleamed for an instant unconscious things into his own” (134). Her response to his embrace and kiss is equally shaped by her class positioning, her immediate reaction purely conventional shame, articulated in conventional middle-class language: “her chaste lips had been rifled of their innocence” (134). The shame of violation later gives way, however, to the shame of an admission of a pleasure forbidden to the proper lady, as she admits that his kiss was the “most delicious thing she had known in her twenty years of life” (135). Class, both in terms of the power hierarchies it establishes and in terms of the behavior and interpretations it dictates, permeates this erotic encounter.

In a rapid denouement Mildred learns that the man is not an ordinary farmhand but rather one Fred Evelyn, a man of her own class, a “crank” who “likes to live more lives than one kind” (135) and so is spending the summer living life as a farmhand in his own particular version of the privileged tourist in search of local color. But the revelation of this identity is followed by a more salient plot twist, as Mildred realizes that the class status of her object of desire, ultimately, is not the problem: her shame lies more in her own desire than in his class background. Even the knowledge of his class status cannot “take somewhat of the sting from the shame that tortured her” (135). Ultimately, the story suggests that whether Mildred desires an eccentric gentleman or a sexually aggressive lower-class stereotype is irrelevant in the face of her transgression of middle-class female ideals in desiring at all.²⁰ Chopin's representation of the unmarked American lady, the white, class-privileged New England “passionless” woman, thus foregrounds class as the structuring determinant of that woman's (lack of) desire. Moreover, while the story works to call into question the passionlessness of its proper lady, it does so only by drawing on the inverse of that model, which links desire to the cultural Other. That is, to ascribe erotic desire to Mildred, the story must borrow it, as it were, from the space of the exotic Local Color setting that is marked as class and ethnically Other. The story thus calls into question one stereotypical representation only by reinforcing another.

In contrast to this representation of the Northern white lady, Zaïda Trodon, the protagonist of “A Night in Acadie,” provides a portrait of a white Cajun woman, a country girl from Avoyelles Parish, the setting of most of Chopin's Cajun stories.²¹ The story's plot traces Zaïda's secret plan to marry one André Pascal, as seen through the point of view of her new suitor, Telèsphore Baquette. Unlike Mildred, Zaïda is explicitly ethnically marked, both by her name and her language—a mixture of English and Cajun French—as well as by her affect. That is, Chopin attributes Zaïda's independence, spirit, and sensuality to her Cajun identity, using this ethnic/regional tag to define the character as a special category of American Womanhood—“American” but not precisely embodying the values of the proper lady. In other words, Chopin simultaneously rehearses conventional images of Cajun/French character and insists on the regional specificity and distinctiveness of that character. Telèsphore's initial encounter with the young woman on a train establishes this: “he wondered if she would speak to him. He feared she might have mistaken him for a Western drummer, in which event he knew that she would not; for the women of the country caution their daughters against speaking to strangers on the trains. But the girl was not one to mistake an Acadian farmer for a Western traveling man. She was not born in Avoyelles parish for nothing” (486). Zaïda here embodies the dominant culture's conventional female traits of modesty and discretion in public, but at the same time she emerges as Cajun specifically because of her quick-witted discernment and her ability to identify those of her own community. This community further serves to dismantle a homogenized version of regional others and to replace that with a version of multiple regions that are in relation to each other rather than in relation to the center. Although Acadian community would function for a Northern readership as implicitly set against the North and as easily conflatable with or representative of the South as a whole, Chopin explicitly sets it here against the wildness of the “West” (a space generalized here but marked more specifically in many of Chopin's stories by Texas). This narrative move insists on the differentiation of various regions and puts Avoyelles Parish in relation to, say, Sabine Parish (to the west, near Texas) or Nachitoches Parish (to the north), marking this intraregional differentiation through the characterization of Acadian women, specifically Zaïda.

The protagonist's character is revealed through her conceiving and enacting a plan to marry the lover forbidden her by her family: she slips out of a Cajun ball at midnight and, accompanied by the hapless Telèsphore, drives through a dark countryside to meet her lover, whom she then rejects because he turns up late and drunk. Zaïda's power and agency in choosing the object of her desire are coded by the narrative as Cajun and as positive, but they remain grounded in the body, a conventional source of female power, and grounded in the specifically ethnically marked body. As a result, like Mildred Orme's, Zaïda's desire ultimately reinforces racist, dominant cultural alignments of racially/ethnically Othered women with the sensual and the erotic even as it claims that same erotic for the white (ethnic) woman. The clearest instance of this is the fact that the narrator signals the heroine's combination of self-assurance and sensuality by noting that she “carried herself boldly and stepped out freely and easily, like a negress. There was an absence of reserve in her manner; yet there was no lack of womanliness. She had the air of a young person accustomed to decide for herself and for those about her” (487). Martha Cutter argues that this description associates freedom with blackness (20); I would more directly point out that “negress” here functions as a racist shorthand, evoking, through its alignment with “boldly,” “freely” and “easily,” the stereotype of the eroticized African-American woman. Michele A. Birnbaum, in a perceptive study of the role of race in The Awakening, contends that Edna “first discovers the erotic frontiers of the self by exploiting the less visible constructions of sexual difference associated with the blacks, quadroons, and Acadians in the novel” and that she “employs as well their tropological potential, their associations with the marginal, and ultimately, with the erotic” (321, 324): Chopin's representation of Zaïda, I would suggest, performs the same movement. Ironically, then, at the very moment when Chopin posits an alternative to the model of proper white femininity that denies female sensuality or desire, she falls back on the inverse of this image: the stereotype that assigns all sensuality and desire to African-American womanhood. Although it is clear that this description is meant to function as positive, just as Zaïda's courage and spirit function as positive within the context of the story as a whole, as Birnbaum points out, “white women's desire for sexual expression … may lead to a sympathetic admiration nevertheless predicated upon racialist notions of sexuality” (332). Simply put, Chopin here stakes a claim to white female erotic desire only by way of reinscribing a racist eroticizing of black women.

The ending of the story, however, complicates this set of alignments somewhat. In the original version of the story, as Toth points out, after Zaïda watches Telèsphore and André fight, “the original Zaïda, her will as strong as ever, had demanded that Telèsphore marry her on the spot” (283), a demand that leaves Zaïda with her desires unpunished and with control over her life. (Control, of course, is here limited: in the original ending Zaïda remains within the structure of the heterosexual marriage, where control translates to the choice of a husband.) But this ending was unacceptable to Century's editor Richard Watson Gilder, to whom Chopin submitted the story, so she produced a revised ending that, significantly, reworked her heroine into a far more conventional “good” American girl. In this version Zaïda's experience with her drunken fiancee André serves as a cautionary lesson, so that, as Chopin wrote to Gilder, “the girl's character [is] softened and tempered by her rude experience” (quoted in Toth 283). The story then follows a more conventional plot line, as an overly exuberant girl is taught to dampen her spirits, to become passive and to rely on men for her rescue and direction. By the story's close the revised Zaïda is described as submissive, and the narrator notes that her “will, which had been overmastering and aggressive, seemed to have grown numb under the disturbing spell of the past few hours” (498). Numbness gives way to a proper female passivity, so that in the story's closing lines, when Telèsphore announces that he is taking her home, “she was like a little child and followed whither he led in all confidence” (499).

However, because desire and agency in this story function as part of the definition of the Cajun woman, when Chopin writes them out, the protagonist becomes unconvincing: by the story's end Zaïda reads less like a Cajun girl than like an imitation of a Northern-magazine-story, white heroine dressed unconvincingly in Cajun trappings.²² Roxana Robinson contends that Chopin's Cajun women are wilder, more dramatic, and less conventional than her Creole women (xiii), and that within the collection of stories Robinson edits, “social status is inversely related to female power: Chopin's black women are more powerful than the whites, and Cajun women more powerful than Creoles” (xx). While this is not true in terms of social, economic, or class power, in terms of emotional and erotic force and/or agency, it is certainly true of Chopin's Cajun and Creole women at least. (The argument is more complicated with respect to Chopin's African-American female characters.) Rather than linking female power to social status, however, I would reformulate Robinson's claim to read “female erotic power is inversely related to ethnic/regional status”: that is, the degree of erotic agency and power Chopin grants her female Creole and Cajun characters is directly related to their ethnic/regional identities. In inverse proportion to their proximity to the category of unmarked but implicitly Northern, class-privileged, white womanhood, this power thus replicates conventional racialized thinking of the period, locating erotic desire in the Othered woman and offering the white ethnic woman access to this desire via her status as ethnic. The category Cajun thus does double labor in Zaïda's story: it signals white and also ethnic, the latter a category that can slide from safe, entertaining difference to cultural Other. And just as Chopin played this doubled valence as it applied to Local Color fiction, she plays it here as well, for one might read the rewriting of Zaïda as a process of moving from one aspect of Cajun to the other: the original version of the story emphasizes traits that Chopin ascribes to Zaïda's ethnicity, while the final version with its revised ending emphasizes traits associated with whiteness as the category of conventional femininity. Thus, when Chopin rewrote Zaïda as less powerful and more conventional—closer to dominant norms of white femininity—she also made her, in the logic of the story, less ethnic and more “white.” Because Chopin left the character's regional and ethnic marking intact, however, she ended up with a heroine who is internally inconsistent on the plot level and yet still unqualified for True Womanhood. Ultimately, what both Zaïda's and Mildred Orme's stories show, then, is that both the dominant American ideals of femininity and Chopin's challenge to them are compromised by the terms of the racial discourse out of which they emerge and are defined not simply by behavior and race, but also by regional identity, class, and ethnicity.

VERSIONS OF A REGIONAL MATERNAL

Just as representations of female agency and erotic desire in Chopin's short fiction emerge from a complicated matrix of racial, gender, and ethnic discourses and so intervene in both radical and reactionary ways in dominant discourse on women, Chopin's representations of the maternal both draw on and discredit conventional universalized models of motherhood. While using certain elements of the maternal to link her Southern heroines to Northern ideals, Chopin simultaneously uses the category as a means of differentiating among various Southern heroines and among various enactments of the maternal. In doing so she disrupts monolithic representations of Southern womanhood by disrupting the absolute meaning of maternity and emphasizing the wide variety of forms motherhood can take. In Chopin's stories the space of the maternal takes on wildly varying meanings according to who occupies it where and when. There is here no idealized type for the American mother or even the Southern mother; instead, there are mothers: a range of identities that make it impossible, ultimately, to essentialize maternity. One result of this recasting of the maternal is that white, class-privileged motherhood is no longer celebrated as innate and natural but rather revealed to be socially constructed within a discourse of power, contextual, and contingent on other aspects of female identity—race, region, and class, primarily. A second result of this deessentializing of the maternal is that Chopin's stories foreground and to some extent challenge the strategies by which slavery attempted to strip enslaved black women of access to the category of the maternal. Taken as a group, the stories that focus on maternity make visible the fact that motherhood, like erotic desire, is neither “natural” nor unmarked but rather ultimately determined by factors such as region, race, ethnicity, and class. In what follows I will attempt to trace the ways and places in which these discourses interrupt each other, tracking the intersection of a racist and reactionary racial discourse with more progressive gender and regional discourses, as well as the degree to which a focus on ethnicity allows Chopin to sidestep a direct confrontation with race.

In “La Belle Zoraïde” (1893, 1894) the representation of maternity is specifically inflected by race and racial discourse's relations to a maternal that might arguably be seen as regional, that is, Southern. The story focuses on slavery's structuring impact on the maternity and erotic desire of both the African-American and the white Creole women in the story, establishing that the maternal is a highly contingent rather than natural category.²³ As my discussion of Hopkins in Chapter 3 indicates, maternity and erotic desire were, of course, already imbricated in a racial discourse by Chopin's day. The category of the Southern lady constituted her as always chaste and white, but moreover the category also always demanded that her sexual excess be projected onto her racial Other, the African-American woman. At the same time, maternal instinct was attributed to the Southern lady but denied to all Others, particularly the enslaved (and even at times the free) African-American woman. Thus, maternal and erotic desire functioned as mutually exclusive. As Anna Shannon Elfenbein cogently notes in her article on The Awakening, “for much of Chopin's audience the troublesome issue of female desire was resolved through a racist conception of passion and purity according to which passion was projected onto ‘dark’ women while purity was reserved exclusively for ‘white’ women” (304). In setting “La Belle Zoraïde” in the antebellum South, Chopin participates in this American cultural discourse, which occurred at the crossroads of racial, regional, and gender discourses. While such a story contributes to postwar regional reconciliation by offering images of racial conflict safely located in the antebellum past, it simultaneously complicates the terms of the racialized discourse on femininity, revealing it as regionally inflected and never fixed.

The story reworks the plot of the slave woman parted from her lover by her “owner”:²⁴ Zoraïde is the beautiful and privileged mulatto slave of Madame Delarivière. She is well-treated until she defies Madame by falling in love with the handsome black slave Mézor rather than the mulatto M. Ambroise, whom Madame has chosen for her. When Zoraïde becomes pregnant by Mézor, Madame, first angry and then pained, has him sold by his “owner,” her own suitor, then lies to Zoraïde at the child's birth, telling her that the child is dead. Zoraïde grows demented in response, so much so that when Madame finally returns the child to her in an attempt to cure the madness, Zoraïde does not recognize the child and clings instead to the bundle of rags she has substituted for her baby. Hence, she dies an old, mad, unmarried woman, known as “Zoraïde La Folle” instead of “La Belle Zoraïde.” Her story is presented within a frame in which Manna-Loulou ministers to her mistress Madame Delisle, ministerings that include the telling of the bedtime story of La Belle Zoraïde. The frame story insists that Zoraïde's story is fact, for Madame Delisle, Chopin notes, “would hear none but those [stories] which were true” (304). Set in the antebellum south, Zoraïde's tale thus works in tandem with the frame tale to produce the story's effect.

Zoraïde's history, as told by Manna-Loulou, emphasizes slavery's impact on both female erotic desire and maternal “instinct.” Because she is a slave, Zoraïde is not attributed the maternal “instinct” that is culturally assigned to white women, and her “owner” views neither Zoraïde's desire nor her reproductive potential as her own; both are, rather, commodities belonging to her “owner.” Manna-Loulou's version of Zoraïde's story, however, offers a counternarrative to this one. Manna-Loulou represents Zoraïde as bearing an erotic desire that is linked to romantic love, racially inflected, and self-directed. She also attributes to Zoraïde a form of maternal “instinct” that is in keeping with idealized models of white womanhood but is forcibly redirected by slavery. These competing versions of the enslaved African-American woman's relation to erotic and maternal desire stand alongside the story's representation of Madame Delarivière, who, as an upper-class white woman, is assumed to have maternal “instinct”—enacting it metaphorically with her non-offspring, the enslaved young woman—and to lack overt erotic desire. Manna-Loulou's narrative also counters this particular, racially inflected version of womanhood, revealing that the white slaveholding woman's maternal sense is simply another form of ownership, and her passionlessness is accompanied by the knowledge of her erotic power. Chopin's choice of an enslaved woman as narrator thus provides a space for a complicating of both black and white racialized narratives of American womanhood, although ultimately this counterdiscourse is contained both by the fate of Zoraïde (madness) and by Chopin's safely locating the story in the antebellum past.

Racial location structures the face of maternity and desire in the Creole white woman, Madame Delarivière. In a combination of class and racialized gender expectations—a combination of a sort of noblesse oblige and maternal “instinct”—she initially poses as a surrogate mother for Zoraïde. As the “privileged” slave, Zoraïde is raised in comfort by her mistress, who is also her godmother; her “fingers,” Manna-Loulou recounts, “had never done rougher work than sewing a fine muslin seam” (304). But while Zoraïde's “mother” makes plans to have Zoraïde married in the prestigious New Orleans Cathedral and promises to provide her with a fine wedding gown and corbeille, the maternal role is merely a fiction, a cover for what is in fact a relationship grounded in power and economics: Madame's power over Zoraïde comes not from a “natural” mother-child bond but from a legal master-slave bond. When Zoraïde refuses to marry the man Madame has chosen for her, Madame drops the fiction of maternal love and exposes her power as a white woman and slaveholder. Trading on her own position as desirable white woman and revealing it as an economic/social location, she induces Mézor's owner, who is in love with her, to sell Mézor (Manna-Loulou explains that Mézor's owner “had long wanted to marry Madame Delarivière, and he would willingly have walked on all fours at noon through the Place d'Armes if she wanted him to. Naturally he lost no time in disposing of le beau Mézor” [306]). She then manipulates Zoraïde for her own convenience by lying, telling Zoraïde that her newly born child is dead. This is the action of the irritated slave owner, not the concerned mother: Manna-Loulou explains that “Madame had hoped, in thus depriving Zoraïde of her child, to have her young waiting-maid again at her side free, happy, and beautiful as of old” (306). This comment at once divests Madame of her maternal role and locates her as part of the racist dominant culture that denies the enslaved woman an affectional bond to her child. Continuing to think of the off-spring of a slave mother as chattel rather than child, Madame cannot understand why Zoraïde becomes “demented” at the loss of her child; mystifying the cause of this dementia, Madame thinks of it as “this terrible affliction that had befallen her dear Zoraïde” (307). Manna-Loulou's tracking of Madame's coercion and controlling of Zoraïde's sexuality—her denial of both Zoraïde's choice of erotic object and her status as mother—makes it obvious that Madame Delarivière's behavior mirrors the actions of white male slaveowners toward their female slaves rather than those of a mother toward her child.²⁵ Manna-Loulou's narrative thus exposes this white woman's maternal instinct as neither instinctual nor even real. At the same time, this narrative reworks dominant images of white female passionlessness, acknowledging white female erotic power but detaching it from the innate or bodily realm and relocating it as a social power relation.

In contrast, Manna-Loulou's narrative attributes to Zoraïde a kind of innate maternal love while also claiming erotic desire for her. Zoraïde's love for Mézor offers the first instance of this particular racial counter-narrative, both in Zoraïde's object choice and in her story's complicated relation to stereotypes of African-American female desire. The description of Zoraïde falling in love, for instance, locates this love within a discourse of race:

Zoraïde had seen le beau Mézor dance the Bamboula in Congo Square. That was a sight to hold one rooted to the ground. Mézor was as straight as a cypress-tree and as proud looking as a king. His body, bare to the waist, was like a column of ebony and it glistened like oil.

Poor Zoraïde's heart grew sick in her bosom with love for le beau Mézor from the moment she saw the fierce gleam of his eye, lighted by the inspiring strains of the Bamboula, and beheld the stately movements of his splendid body swaying and quivering through the figures of the dance.

(304)

This description represents Zoraïde's love as both erotic and romantic and as specifically racially inflected: Zoraïde loves the “ebony” Mézor, whose body here signifies pride, grace, and stately power. This power is directly linked to his race; significantly, Zoraïde first sees Mézor dancing in Congo Square, a New Orleans gathering place where slaves celebrated their traditional cultural identities through dance and ritual. In contrast to and underscoring this point, Manna-Loulou describes Monsieur Ambroise, the man Zoraïde's owner wants her to marry, as a “little mulatto, with his shining whiskers like a white man's and his small eyes, that were cruel and false as a snake's” (304). As Elfenbein points out in Women on the Color Line, the fact that the object of Zoraïde's desire is the blacker of the two men itself inverts a conventional fictional representation of a hierarchy of racial value.²⁶ Yet the fact that Chopin ascribes erotic desire to Zoraïde and that she focuses in the passage above on the eroticized body of the black man also opens the possibility that Chopin is simply rehearsing stereotypes of the hypereroticized African American or of a primitivized “savage” who is closer to natural rhythms. Although these stereotypes lurk in the margins of this story, I would argue that the representation of Zoraïde's desire complicates, if not disrupts, that racialized discourse in several ways: by involving “true love”; by aiming that love at the African man; and by being self-directed—Zoraïde actively chooses Mézor over Ambroise.

Through Zoraïde, Chopin explicitly marks race as determining the cultural meaning of romantic or erotic agency: race is the structuring axis of the slave system, and because Zoraïde is a mulatta slave rather than a white lady, she does not have ownership of her own desire. At the same time, however, the story charts Zoraïde's resistance to this equation, as when, after confessing her love of Mézor, she rhetorically asks Madame if she is white and answers her own question: “‘I am not white,’ persisted Zoraïde, respectfully and gently. ‘Doctor Langlé gives me his slave to marry, but he would not give me his son. Then, since I am not white, let me have from out of my own race the one whom my heart has chosen’” (305). This momentary rhetorical doubt over Zoraïde's race (like the uncertainty over whether the heroine of “Désirée's Baby” is a white aristocrat, or a tragic mulatto) produces a moment in which Chopin subversively uses one woman to represent the possibility of both the black woman's and the white woman's desire. Ultimately, however, regardless of the privileges her owner might bestow on her, Zoraïde recognizes that in occupying the place of “mulatto slave” she by definition has only limited rights and has access to privilege only at the discretion of a white patron. In an act that is doubly transgressive, however, Zoraïde opts for autonomous choice, a choice within her “own race,” telling Madame, “I have chosen a husband, but it is not M'sieur Ambroise; it is le beau Mézor that I want and no other” (305).

Just as Chopin represents Zoraïde's desire as both constrained by and in resistance to slavery, the enslaved woman's occupation of the space of the maternal here takes on meaning both through its erasure within slavery and through Zoraïde's ironic deployment of it at the story's end. Zoraïde's rejection of her child once Madame relents and brings the little girl back to Zoraïde, her “sullen suspicion,” and her reading of the strategy as “a plot to deprive her of” her rag bundle surrogate child—all these signal Zoraïde's awareness that Madame would control and redirect Zoraïde's maternal desire just as she has attempted to do with Zoraïde's erotic desire (307). Further, through the rag bundle fantasy child, Zoraïde not only reclaims the maternal, she also evades a forced marriage to M. Ambroise. In a key moment near the end of the story, we learn that despite the “death” of the child and Zoraïde's paralyzing grief in the face of it, M. Ambroise continues to want to marry Zoraïde, information Manna-Loulou glosses by noting, “and she seemed to consent, or rather submit, to the approaching marriage as though nothing mattered any longer in this world” (306-7). But immediately after this, Manna-Loulou presents Zoraïde in her dementia, sitting with “a look of strange and vacuous happiness” next to the rag baby (307). This juxtaposition, along with Manna-Loulou's comment that Zoraïde was known ever afterward as “Zoraïde la folle, whom no one ever wanted to marry—not even M'sieur Ambroise” (307), points to several conclusions at once. It first stakes a claim to an innate maternal on behalf of Zoraïde, suggesting that the African-American woman has, just as the white woman is assumed to have, a mother's love that she cannot be forced to surrender. Secondly, this scenario forces the recognition that slavery has reformed and deformed the maternal for the enslaved woman, as represented here by Zoraïde's being forced to rechannel her maternal love from her child to the surrogate rag doll child. Finally, Manna-Loulou's telling of the story suggests an ironic or canny deployment of the maternal on Zoraïde's part, a claiming of a “demented” version of it in order not only to defend her right to the maternal but also to defend her right to erotic agency against the controlling of her desire through a forced marriage to M. Ambroise. By linking these two rights, this claim also challenges dominant notions of erotic and maternal desire as mutually exclusive.

As a foil to this image of the slave woman nursing a fantasy child, the story framing Zoraïde's presents another form of a rechanneled maternal allowed to black women under slavery: the role of surrogate mother to the white child. The opening of the story establishes Manna-Loulou's relation to Madame Delisle as one of intimacy structured by a racial power hierarchy, for Manna-Loulou is presented as a “Mammy” figure to her infantilized white owner. At the opening of the story Manna-Loulou, “herself black as night,” has already, we are told, bathed and kissed her mistress's feet, and she has “brushed her mistress's beautiful hair, that was as soft and shining as satin, and was the color of Madame's wedding ring” (303). The alignment of whiteness with economic privilege signaled by the gold of Madame's hair and ring stands in contrast to the “black” Manna-Loulou's position of servitude, as she actively waits on the passive, infantilized Madame, “who lay in her sumptuous mahogany bed, waiting to be fanned and put to sleep to the sound of one of Manna-Loulou's stories” (303). This image of white power over the faithful black slave demonstrates Chopin's rehearsal of nostalgic racism, gesturing toward post-Civil War fantasies on the part of the white South to the pre-war slave order.

However, this image might also be read as one of passive white dependence on black agency, a reading that is mirrored on a certain narrative level. For while Manna-Loulou is the servant, she also has control of the narrative, which grants her a kind of authority, particularly when compared with Madame Delisle's obvious misinterpretation of the tale, her listening to “the sound of one of Manna-Loulou's stories” rather than understanding the meaning of it. Manna-Loulou's interpretive authority gets enacted initially over the issue of Zoraïde's desire, as Manna-Loulou locates Zoraïde's actions within a plot of “true love”: the comic plot of the two lovers overcoming obstacles in order to be together. Following this, once Chopin has opened the story with the introduction of Manna-Loulou and Madame Delisle, these characters interrupt Zoraïde's story only once before their reappearance at the story's close. Significantly, Manna-Loulou interrupts just after Zoraïde asks to choose her own husband. In an important and complicated passage, Manna-Loulou tells Madame Delisle,

“However, you may well believe that Madame would not hear to that. Zoraïde was forbidden to speak to Mézor, and Mézor was cautioned against seeing Zoraïde again. But you know how the negroes are, Ma'zelle Titite,” added Manna-Loulou, smiling a little sadly, “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)

Elfenbein reads this interjection as Manna-Loulou's implication that “whites envy [black] passion forbidden them and would control it or appropriate it if they could (132):²⁷ one might also read this as Manna-Loulou's support of the “negroes’” resistance to white authority's attempt to coerce their desire, as well as her recognition (signaled by her sad smile) of the costs of such resistance. At the same time, however, extratextually, of course, Manna-Loulou's interpretive authority is still in the hands of the white woman writer, and so this passage must also be read reinscribing the stereotype of “natural” African-American female erotic desire uncontrollable by church or state. Moreover, this alignment of Zoraïde and sexuality is echoed in the terms of Manna-Loulou's relationship to Madame: Birnbaum rightly argues that women of color tend to serve as “sexual coaches” for white women in Chopin's work, that “the experienced women is always of a lower racial or ethnic status than her novitiate; if the heroine is white Creole, her mentor may be Acadian; if she is Acadian, her guide may be ‘black’.” She points to Manna-Loulou as an example of this (327).

Yet Manna-Loulou's understanding of Zoraïde's story also offers a foil to Madame Delisle's self-protective and equally racist misreading of it. That is, both Manna-Loulou's and Madame Delisle's versions of Zoraïde's story are written in the terms of the dominant racial discourse, and although Chopin ultimately critiques Madame's version, she does so only by means of the version to which Manna-Loulou gives voice. At the story's close Madame Delisle comments, “… Ah, the poor little one, Man Loulou, the poor little one! better had she died!” (307). By shifting the focus of the story from Zoraïde to her child, Madame Delisle reveals that she has missed the point entirely, but such a misreading works in her favor. For by turning Zoraïde's story into the story of a poor orphaned baby, Madame Delisle erases Zoraïde, sidesteps the issue of a white woman's power over a slave woman's life, and thus avoids identifying with Madame Delarivière. Ironically, however, this comment also aligns Madame Delisle with Madame Delarivière in that it positions Madame Delisle in the same space of false maternal solicitude that Zoraïde's “owner” occupies. The narrative itself further produces this identification by the imposition of one last narrative level to frame the frame.

After recounting Manna-Loulou and Madame Delisle's final conversation, the story closes by re-presenting it in Creole patois, prefaced by the statement that “this is the way Madame Delisle and Manna-Loulou really talked to each other” (308). Recalling Converse's claim to be translating her characters' French, this narrative strategy is a model of efficiency, operating both without and within the story to structure an understanding of that story. Exterior to the narrative, the patois positions the story as a deferential yet exotic Local Color tale. Comforting to a Northern reader, this strategy produces maternity as an issue in the South and in the past, an issue familiar to the Northern reader yet rendered safe by distance. At the same time, however, this strategy also insists on a recognition of regional difference: the patois forces an understanding of the story and its representation of the maternal as regionally specific because of the conditions of slavery, while that same patois distances the non-patois speaking reader from an identification with the story's characters. It is, after all, on the reader's behalf that Chopin has ostensibly served as translator, rendering the story in English. At the same time, however, the patois breaks down the monolithic image of the “South,” showing that even within the South there are a variety of regions and, moreover, that even within a given region, there are a variety of both identifications and splits. That is, internal to the story the patois links both Manna-Loulou and Madame Delisle to Zoraïde and her mistress (who, the reader might assume, would also speak patois), thus indicting Madame Delisle for her refusal to identify with Madame Delarivière's structural position of power. The use of patois also represents a regional identification across racial and class lines between Manna-Loulou and Madame Delisle, indicating both their difference from the reader and their similarity to each other. The patois, then, both differentiates among and links the characters, underscoring the regional and racial specificity of this version of maternity within the larger context of white-black power hierarchies in the postbellum South. As it does in both Pauline Hopkins's and Sui Sin Far's works, motherhood emerges here as not “natural” to white women; as not alien to Othered women; as not necessarily a source of joy; and as not mutually exclusive of erotic desire. What it does emerge as is contingent, visibly reworked by slavery and race, and no less determined by the less explicitly violent factors of regional and class location.

As in “La Belle Zoraïde,” the impact of racial positioning on the maternal is also at stake in “Désirée's Baby” (1892, 1893), but “Désirée's Baby” also foregrounds class status (as influenced by race) as a determinant of the maternal. Where Zoraïde's final deployment of a fantasy maternal saves her from a coerced marriage, Désirée's accession to the place of the maternal destroys her marriage, reassigns her racial status, and indicates just how fragile and contingent both racially and class-privileged identities are. As Pauline Hopkins would go on to do in a more optimistic vein, Chopin in this story reworks the “tragic mulatto” plot to foreground the doubled powerlessness of a “black” woman while also commenting on the dangerous force of the maternal.²⁸ Désirée, found as an abandoned child by the Valmondés at their plantation gate, provides Madame Valmondé with the opportunity of figurative motherhood: Madame believes that Désirée “had been sent to her by a beneficent Providence to be the child of her affection, seeing that she was without child of the flesh” (240). Once grown, Désirée marries the proud and wealthy Armand Aubigny but finds her idyllic life destroyed by the birth of her son, who is visibly of mixed “blood.” Aubigny casts off his wife, who disappears into the bayou rather than heeding her mother's plea to “come home to Valmondé; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child” (243). The story ends by establishing that Aubigny himself is the offspring of a white man and a mulatto mother, but Désirée's parentage is never clearly established.

As Anna Shannon Elfenbein has so skillfully demonstrated in Women on the Color Line, the “white” man's is the only real position of power here: even as the apotheosis of white womanhood, Désirée, as her name implies, has only a tenuous power, one that is dependent on her being desired (127) and, I would add, on an always unstable myth of purity of blood.²⁹ Even maternity serves only to reveal just how tenuous even the privileged white Southern woman's power is: both Désirée's desirability and her blood's “purity” are called into question by the birth of her son. “Désirée's Baby”'s thematizing of issues of “blood” and maternity echoes antebellum narratives (Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for example), which protested against slavery on the basis of its disruption of a “natural” mother-child bond. Motherhood in these texts is depicted as far more dangerous for the slave woman than for the free woman, both because the slave woman's child was not legally her own and because it was often born of white man's rape,³⁰ Chopin frames the issue slightly differently; maternity in intersection with race in “Désirée's Baby” becomes the site of danger for both mother and child both because Désirée's becoming a mother puts her into the space of the “black” woman, figuratively if not literally enslaved, and because her becoming a mother shows just how uncertain racial identity can be. Maternity, that is, here destabilizes not only the child's but also the mother's racial identity: it is the birth of the son that calls Désirée's racial “purity” into question. Nevertheless, the danger here is posited as a threat only to the privileged white woman, revealing racial logic that here as elsewhere limits Chopin's achievement; as Ellen Peel points out, the story “directs sympathy less toward black characters than toward characters on the margin between black and white,” and it “invites sympathy for Désirée partly on the sexist grounds that feminine women are weak and on the racist grounds that white members of the master class do not deserve to be treated like slaves” (64, 66).³¹ Hence, while “Désirée's Baby,” like “La Belle Zoraïde,” denaturalizes an idealized version of the maternal in which maternity is the highest fulfillment of a woman's life (for Désirée, maternity proves to be not her fulfillment but her ruin), it does not challenge the conventional hierarchies of the racial discourse out of which it emerges.

Further, the image of unconditional maternal love in this story is white, embodied in the figure of Madame Valmondé. But in contrast to Armand Aubigny's love, a love that is dependent on racial “purity,” Désirée's adoptive mother's love is not only loyal, it is also independent, in two senses, of fictions of “blood.” Whereas Désirée's mother's love is not dependent on Désirée's having “white” blood, it is also independent of literal mother-child bloodlines: that Désirée is “the child of her affection” rather than “the child of the flesh” has no impact on Madame Valmondé's love. Chopin thus implicitly retains dominant racial hierarchies while she links maternity to questions of shifting racial identity and prizes it apart from essentialized claims of blood ties, locating it in the realm of social power relations rather than in an apolitical, universalized bodily space.

“Athénaïse” (1895, 1896) similarly foregrounds the maternal as a sphere of social power, linking it, as does “La Belle Zoraïde,” to erotic desire, and coding it, as does “Désirée's Baby,” as determined by class and race. Unlike in “Désirée's Baby,” however, where the maternal reveals the tenuousness of even the privileged white Southern lady's class positioning, in “Athénaïse”'s story of the white Creole woman, the protagonist's move into the space of the maternal both produces her erotic desire and secures her class position. The story traces a fairly conventional plot: the move of the unhappy newlyweds to a state of marital accord as a result of the wife's discovery of her pregnancy, a discovery that produces a sense of family unity and, less predictably, the wife's erotic response to her husband. Through focusing most of the story on Athénaïse's unhappiness in and rebellion against her marriage, Chopin offers a critique of that institution that anticipates that of The Awakening, but by giving “Athénaïse” the particular happy, if abrupt, ending that she does, Chopin not only mitigates the threat of her critique, but also implicates maternity in the construction of female erotic desire and depicts maternity as the site of the solidifying of class and racial privilege.

The story opens with Athénaïse's fleeing from her marital home and husband Cazeau to return to her family, then charts her eventual return to the place of wife. It concurrently traces her move from child to woman, innocent to self-conscious (including an awareness of her own erotic desire) adult. Near the opening of the story the narrator notes that “people often said that Athénaïse would know her own mind some day, which was equivalent to saying that she was at present unacquainted with it” (433). By the narrative's close, however, this narrator notes that “no one could have said now that she did not know her own mind” (452). Knowing her own mind, it turns out, means locating herself in the social/economic/racial context of the Creole planter world, a process that occurs through Athénaïse's realization that she is pregnant and her consequent recognition of erotic desire for her husband.

Initially, Athénaïse is represented as unhappy despite the social and economic benefits her marriage brings her, and the story suggests that she has traded her sense of autonomy, privacy, and independence for the class comfort and protection her husband embodies. Cazeau comes from a white, privileged, slave-owning family, so that marriage to him signals for Athénaïse a move up from the social position of her family, who are “running” the “old Gotrain place” for an absentee owner (428). But Athénaïse is unhappy, offering complaints that form a critique of marriage as an institution that confines and limits women. Employing the image of wife as slave, Chopin draws on a problematic parallel frequently evoked in nineteenth-century white women's texts and simultaneously marks her story as specifically Southern: Cazeau, bringing Athénaïse back from her parents' home, is reminded of his father's driving a captured runaway slave home. But indicating his status as ultimately a good husband, when Athénaïse runs away a second time, he decides that although he has the legal right to do so, he will not again “compel her to return to the shelter of his roof, compel her cold and unwilling submission to his love and passionate transports” (438), and so he waits instead for her voluntary return.

As this reference to the wife's “unwilling submission” to her husband implies, what Cazeau recognizes as Athénaïse's “growing aversion” (427) and her brother Monteclin calls her “constitutional disinclination for marriage” (431) is based on physical distaste as much as psychological confinement. For Cazeau, by Athénaïse's own admission, has never mistreated her: his “chief offense seemed to be that he loved her” (434), a love, clearly, that is meant to be understood as physical as well as emotional. Speculating about an acquaintance's romantic history, for instance, Athénaïse, we are told, “could not fancy him loving any one passionately, rudely, offensively, as Cazeau loved her. Once she was so naïve as to ask him outright if he had ever been in love, and he assured her promptly that he had not. She thought it an admirable trait in his character, and esteemed him greatly therefor” (449), while she assesses her marriage by stating,

“No, I don't hate him,” she returned reflectively; adding with a sudden impulse, “It's jus' being married that I detes' and despise. I hate being Mrs. Cazeau, an' would want to be Athénaïse Miché again. I can't stan' to live with a man; to have him always there; his coats an' pantaloons hanging in my room; his ugly bare feet—washing them in my tub, befo' my very eyes, ugh!” She shuddered with recollections, and resumed, with a sigh that was almost a sob: “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu! Sister Marie Angélique knew w'at she was saying; she knew me better than myse'f w'en she said God had sent me a vocation an' I was turning deaf ears. W'en I think of a blessed life in the convent, at peace! Oh, w'at was I dreaming of!” and then the tears came.

(431)

That Athénaïse's complaint against marriage is grounded in Cazeau's physical presence in her room (especially when read against the contrast of the “blessed convent”) suggests that part of the process traced by the story—the process of Athénaïse “knowing her own mind”—involves Athénaïse's coming to terms with the physical, heterosexual relationship implicit in marriage, a shift here figured not simply as the passive acceptance of her husband's desires but also as a recognition of her own: Athénaïse moves from feeling repugnance at her husband, synecdochically represented by his feet, to a moment of desire for him; at the story's end the narrator notes that as Cazeau “clasped her in his arms, he felt the yielding of her whole body against him. He felt her lips for the first time respond to the passion of his own” (454).

This potentially radical claim to erotic desire on the part of the white lady is made further disruptive by Chopin's identifying it with maternal desire. For it is on learning that she is pregnant that Athénaïse first thinks of Cazeau with a newfound sense of desire:

One mood quickly followed another, in this new turmoil of her senses … Cazeau must know. As she thought of him, the first purely sensuous tremor of her life swept over her. She half whispered his name, and the sound of it brought red blotches into her cheeks. She spoke it over and over, as if it were some new, sweet sound born out of darkness and confusion, and reaching her for the first time. She was impatient to be with him. Her whole passionate nature was aroused as if by a miracle.

(451)

But in fact the language of the story represents this transformation not as an inexplicable “miracle,” but specifically as the result of pregnancy and the new knowledge and maturity it implies. Chopin first employs the abstract language of the passage above in describing Athénaïse's response not to Cazeau, but to the news of her pregnancy itself, which is figured as a fall into knowledge as well as a sensuous experience in its own right. The narrator comments that in the conversation where Athénaïse learns she is pregnant, the “extent of her ignorance and the depth of her subsequent enlightenment were bewildering,” and describes her as “stunned” and “still” in response, as “her whole being was steeped in a wave of ecstasy” (451). Interestingly, after Athénaïse's realization of both her pregnancy and her desire for her husband, the narrator describes her as “silent and embarrassed as Eve after losing her ignorance” (453). That Chopin retreats to metaphoric and abstract language to describe the topics of pregnancy and erotic desire is not especially surprising given the literary codes of her day, but the fact that she uses the same sort of language to describe the two is significant, for the effect of this shared rhetoric is to link erotic desire/knowledge with the maternal, a link rarely made in Chopin's day.

The disruptiveness of this representation of the erotic and maternal and of their conjunction, however, is ultimately compromised by the story. The claim to essentialized erotic desire is mitigated in part through that desire's being legitimated by being aimed at a husband and in part through Athénaïse's status as Creole; as the use of dialect in her speech signals, Athénaïse, like Chopin's Cajun women, is ethnically marked and so more easily conflatable by a white audience with the eroticized female Other. Further, the fact that it is her “quadroon” landlady Sylvie—whom, we are told, “was very wise” while Athénaïse “was very ignorant” (451)—who reveals Athénaïse's pregnancy to her both supports Birnbaum's claim that Chopin's women of color do the work of “teaching” white women about their sexuality and helps to further code the erotic as the province of the racially/ethnically marked woman.

This intersection of racial and gender discourses is further complicated by the introduction of a discourse of class: the story dilutes the Othering effects of Athénaïse's alignment with erotic/maternal desire by framing that desire in an economic context as well, a context that partly determines the desire and simultaneously locates Athénaïse in the space of the privileged white lady. The connection between economic desire and erotic desire is raised early in the story, when the unhappy Athénaïse tries to explain why she married Cazeau. The narrator comments:

Why indeed? It was difficult now for her to understand why, unless because she supposed it was customary for girls to marry when the right opportunity came. Cazeau, she knew, would make life more comfortable for her; and again, she had liked him, and had even been rather flustered when he pressed her hands and kissed them, and kissed her lips and cheeks and eyes, when she accepted him.

(430)

Athénaïse responds dually, being physically “flustered” and economically reassured. The story's conclusion reiterates this yoking of determinants. While hiding in New Orleans, Athénaïse cannot find a means of support “with the exception of two little girls who had promised to take piano lessons at a price that would be embarrassing to mention” (451); but the return to Cazeau made possible by her discovery of her pregnancy and her erotic desire implies an insertion into not only the position of the maternal, but also that of the white plantation mistress; like the conclusion of Zaïda's story, the ending of “Athénaïse” emphasizes that she occupies the cultural space of class and racial privilege. Following the description above of Athénaïse's passionate reunion with Cazeau, the story closes by grounding this passion in local circumstance:

The country night was dark and warm and still, save for the distant notes of an accordion which some one was playing in a cabin away off. A little negro baby was crying somewhere. As Athénaïse withdrew from her husband's embrace, the sound arrested her.

“Listen, Cazeau! How Juliette's baby is crying! Pauvre ti chou, I wonder w'at is the matter with it?”

(454)

The story's end thus conflates Athénaïse's erotic desire with her identification with the maternal and a concurrent noblesse oblige that signals her status as the white lady who stands, like Madame Delarivière, in the position of pseudo-mother toward her “dependents.” As the use of dialect in Athénaïse's comment suggests, however, this story allows its heroine ethnic specificity as well as the status of white and class-privileged; or perhaps Chopin can afford to allow Athénaïse her ethnicity because of that privileged racial and class status. Athénaïse's identification with the cultural place held by the maternal ultimately secures her racial and class locations, locations that shore up each other and enable her erotic desire. Michael Omi and Howard Winant remind us that “racial dynamics must be understood as determinants of class relationships and indeed class identities, not as mere consequences of these relationships” (34): “Athénaïse” demonstrates the intertwined, determining effects of both racial and class discourses on femininity.

The use of the maternal as the vehicle for the enactment of regionally specific, class-privileged, white female identity occurs as well in “A Matter of Prejudice” (1893, 1895), a story that, like “Athénaïse,” focuses on Creole womanhood but in this case on its urban version: the upper-class New Orleans Creole woman. The maternal here serves to foreground white ethnic difference within New Orleans culture while providing the means for family reunification in the face of the ethnic prejudice that has divided it. As Florence Converse does with her portrait of the Dumarais family, Chopin, in Madame Carambeau, depicts the old-guard French Creole privileged class of New Orleans:

Old Madame Carambeau was a woman of many prejudices—so many, in fact, that it would be difficult to name them all. She 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. Anything not French had, in her opinion, little right to existence.

She had not spoken to her son Henri for ten years because he had married an American from Prytania street.

(282)³²

The story traces the transformation of Madame Carambeau's “prejudice”—a combination of elitism, racism, nativism, and assorted other biases—into a willingness to accept her son and his family, a transformation that occurs through an “American” child's triggering of Madame's maternal feeling. A skilled nurse, Madame Carambeau transcends her prejudice in the exercise of this talent; the narrator notes dryly that Madame “would have treated an organ-grinder with tender consideration if one had presented himself in the character of an invalid” (283), so that when faced with a small, sick “American” child, she nurses her back to health.

Similar to Florence Converse's representation of Roma Campion, Chopin's depiction of Madame Carambeau and her interaction with the child provides the opportunity to display some of New Orleans's ethnic/cultural diversity to a Northern readership. At the same time, Chopin traces the impact of Madame Carambeau's maternal feeling on her ethnic prejudices. The child does not understand French, and “prattle[s]” in what the narrator describes as “that language which madame thought hideous” (284), an identifying tag that leads Madame to identify the little girl as “American” and to complain that “Americans” do not deserve children because they are unable to care for them properly. Predictably, however, the child is “a sweet child, gentle and affectionate” (285), and so undermines Madame's biases:

Madame … had never before nursed so objectionable a character as an American child. But … after the little one went away, she could think of nothing really objectionable against her except the accident of her birth, which was, after all, her misfortune; and her ignorance of the French language, which was not her fault.

But the touch of the caressing baby arms; the pressure of the soft little body in the night; the tones of the voice, and the feeling of the hot lips when the child kissed her, believing herself to be with her mother, were impressions that had sunk through the crust of madame's prejudice and reached her heart.

(285)

As a result of this experience Madame crosses into the Garden district, the “American” quarter of the city, to visit her son, his wife, and her granddaughter, who turns out to be the little “American” girl she has nursed. The story ends with an image of family reconciliation that might also stand as a metaphor for the unification of diverse white ethnic American traditions: Madame Carambeau says of her granddaughter, “her grandmother will teach her French; and she will teach her grandmother English” (288). This happy image of a polyglot American family achieved through maternal love reflects a nativist national rhetoric of white ethnic assimilation, a sort of “melting pot” version of U.S. society. At the same time, Chopin uses this implicitly racist model to participate in American discourses of region and gender. For this plot device also allows Chopin to have the maternal, as it were, both ways: Madame Carambeau's nursing of what turns out to be her own granddaughter can be read as the innate enactment of maternal love and recognition of kinship, or it might be read as the embodiment of a French Creole sense of noblesse oblige, a regionally and class-specific form of social power relations that resists a homogenizing national pressure to identify “American” as Northern and Anglo.

Ultimately, understanding Chopin's representations of both erotic and maternal desire as contingent can help us reassess her work and its importance. Viewing femininity not as the central focus of Chopin's fiction—as critics of The Awakening have been wont to do—but rather as a site of the convergence of a number of different vectors enables a fuller appreciation of both the complexity and the importance of her early work. Using Local Color as a cover to write about female identity and sexuality, Chopin also exploited the form and many of its racist conventions to publish. Simultaneously, she used female identity and sexuality to write about regional identity and, implicitly, national identity. Taking the short stories as a group, it become clear that Chopin both challenged and rehearsed regional stereotypes in her representations of Southern women. Implicitly dismantling certain norms of white American femininity by revealing their regional, class, and religious inflections, Chopin's short fiction offers female characters who are specifically not New Englanders, also not generic Southerners, generally not Protestants, and not even unmarked Anglo-Americans, but who, instead, are explicitly racially, ethnically, regionally, religiously, and class marked, and who rewrite narratives of female purity and passionlessness. At the same time, however, these revisions of white femininity are grounded in the rehearsal of racist alignments of women of color and eroticism. As a result, while Chopin's use of realist literary strategies in her depiction of regionally marked heroines does allow for more narrative space for the representation of white female erotic desire and (at points) both black and white maternal desire, her manipulation of Local Color leads her to draw on a racist discourse of sexuality in her search for a language and form to represent such desires. Ultimately trapped within the literary conventions that she in some ways set out to overthrow, Chopin demonstrates the limits of any literary endeavor grounded in the racial, regional, and sexual discourses of her day.

Notes

1. Publication information is taken from Emily Toth's recent biography (412). Toth's biography supersedes both Daniel S. Rankin's Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932) and Per Seyersted's Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). Toth provides much needed information on the class and, to a lesser extent, race relations that shaped Chopin's life.

2. Daniel S. Rankin did publish his Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories prior to Seyersted, but his framing of Chopin's work simply reinforced her earlier dismissal as a Local Color writer. He describes her collection Bayou Folk, for instance, as depicting “a little world, it is true, but full of fresh life and interest,” as chronicling “the quaint and picturesque life among the Creole and Acadian folk of the Louisiana bayou” (136; 136-37). He goes on to contend that Chopin “seems to have gone straight to the heart of the Nachitoches folk. She has heard their little confidences of joy and grief” in these “… simple stories simply told” (139). See Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

3. There was and still is some confusion over the distinction between Local Color and regionalism as literary categories. Chopin's contemporaries often used the two terms synonymously to describe fiction focused on a particular region and community within it. Twentieth-centur critics, however, have differentiated the two categories on the basis of point of view. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have been the driving forces behind this differentiation process, through their Norton Anthology, American Women Regionalists 1850-1910 (New York: Norton, 1992). There they define local color as satirical or dismissive of the community it portrays, written by outsiders who make fun of the community for an audience of outsiders. Regionalism, in contrast, they see as emerging from within the community, written by insiders from a sympathetic point of view. They also argue that regionalism, defined in these terms, was a particularly female genre. Fetterley and Pryse explicitly note that they are establishing these categories, acknowledging that the writers themselves probably did not draw these distinctions. I will use the term Local Color to refer to the literary category known variously as Local Color and regionalism, in part because most of the references to it by Chopin and her critics use this term. In addition I use Local Color to describe the specifically literary category, because by regionalism I want to suggest a broader usage of the term that carries the sense of cultural (rather than exclusively literary) categories loosely based on geographic regions.

4. Thus, even women writers writing of the privileged geographic area, New England, could be dismissed by twentieth-century critics as non-canonical. Sarah Orne Jewett, as I discuss in Chapter 1, despite writing of New England, became known as a Local Color nostalgic writer. For more on what Michael Davitt Bell calls the “heavily gendered assumptions at the heart of American realist thinking” (66), see his “Gender and American Realism in The Country of the Pointed Firs; see also Brodhead.

5. Helen Taylor provides a very helpful discussion of regionalism and Northern publishing practices. Cox also offers useful information but ultimately replicates a nineteenth-century hierarchy of value, locating America's “essence” in New England. My thinking here has also been shaped by Raymond William's The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).

6. This description, it is important to note, is one that is relevant to the content of her stories rather than to her own geographic origins, as I will discuss below.

7. This figure was one that Chopin herself employed. See, for example, Bayou Folk's “Ma'ame Pelagie,” whose title character stands as a memorial not just to Southern womanhood but also to the antebellum South itself. Jones further argues that the ideal of Southern manhood—the planter gentleman—itself involved feminized values: the image invoked a man who was “gentle and genteel, leisurely and cultivated, a lover of beauty, goodness and grace” (41).

8. Or as Howells might have put it—and as critics did in objecting to The Awakening as showing French influences—Chopin was schooled in both a tradition of indecency and a tradition of decency.

9. Although much of Chopin's work is now available in a variety of editions, for consistency's sake I take all of my citations from Per Seyersted's two-volume edition of The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Cited dates are the year the story was written, followed by the year of its first publication or, if the two are the same, the single year.

10. For a more in-depth reading of the reviews, see Toth. She points out that the New York Times review makes a number of factual mistakes in the long description of Acadian Louisiana, not the least of which is the misspelling of “Cajun.”

11. Reviews of Chopin's second collection, A Night in Acadie, only confirmed both her categorization as a Local Color writer and the generic marginalization that it implied. The Critic's review, for instance, described the volume as centered on “the simple childlike Southern people” (266).

12. My redaction of Cajun and Creole positioning in Louisiana is taken largely from Brasseaux and Domínguez, both of whom offer extremely clear and helpful discussions of these complicated categories.

13. While most of the New England writers (Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, for instance) considered regionalists were, in fact, generally born and raised in New England, other writers considered regionalists were outsiders to the regional community about which they wrote, either because of class (Mary Noailles Murfree, for instance), or because of some combination of geographic origins, ethnicity, or race (Chopin, Mary Austin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala-Sä). The question of being an authentic voice of the community in geographic terms also dovetails for many of these writers with the question of authenticity in ethnic or racial terms, particularly for women of “mixed” racial or ethnic identity (Alice Callahan, Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, or Zitkala-Sä, for example).

14. This shifting positioning of St. Louis testifies to the fact that it is not only the center that is able to collapse its “Others”: here, the South collapses other regions into what is, essentially, the not-South.

15. Biographical information on Chopin is readily available; the most complete source, however, is Toth's biography.

16. Taylor makes a similar point in claiming that New South writers used Local Color “as a means of setting straight a record which, it was felt, had been left to the north to write” (18). She reads this revision as a nostalgic recreation of the “good old days” before the Civil War. While Chopin participates in such racist nostalgia, I am more interested here in her representations of her contemporary South and the ramifications of the intersection of racist discourse with more radical discourses of gender and region in these representations.

17. Given that critics insisted on viewing Chopin as a recorder of quaint, charming primitive people, it is not surprising that they were so offended by The Awakening, for not only does this novel fail to conform to Local Color standards, it also presents an upper-class white heroine whose identity is constituted at least in part by her various levels of desire.

    In this overt representation The Awakening resembles its contemporary British New Woman fiction far more than Chopin's contemporary American women's fiction. Certainly, the rhetoric of The Awakening's reviews bears out this identification: reviewers describe it in the same terms as critics used for New Woman fiction. The Globe Democrat describes The Awakening as “not a healthy book” (quoted in Toth 341); the Chicago Times-Herald states that with this novel Chopin “enter[s] the overworked field of sex fiction” (quoted in Toth 347); the Providence Sunday Journal calls Chopin “another clever woman writer” and claims that The Awakening “fairly out Zolas Zola” (quoted in Toth 347). It is the Los Angeles Times's review, however, that most plainly signals The Awakening's affinity to New Woman fiction, for the reviewer likens the novel to “one of Aubrey Beardsley's hideous but haunting pictures with their disfiguring leer of sensuality, but yet carrying a distinguishing strength and grace and individuality … it is unhealthily introspective and morbid in feeling, as the story of that sort of woman must inevitably be” (quoted in Toth 349). This is the language of British reviewers of New Woman fiction, from its invocation of Beardsley to its accusation of sensuality, morbidity, and illness. Thus, I would suggest, The Awakening fits far better into the New Woman novel genre than American Local Color fiction, and had it appeared in England, would not have caused such a stir, for critics would have been able to read it as part of a generic scandal. That is, rather than being an isolated and seemingly anomalous threat, it would have been labeled (and, at least partly, so contained) as a New Woman novel.

    Taylor makes an analogous point in identifying Chopin with her French influences over her American ones, claiming that “St. Louis newspaper editors were happy to publish Maupassant and other European writers, but found Edna Pontellier too hot to handle; this heroine was, after all, an American woman” (151). While I would link The Awakening more closely to British New Woman fiction than French fiction, I would certainly agree with Taylor's point that Mrs. Pontellier's behavior was seen by American critics as appalling particularly because of her nationality.

18. For a particularly cutting depiction of the class privilege on which the model of proper “American” Womanhood rests, see Chopin's “Miss McEnders” (1892, 1897).

19. Although the story does not identify Mildred's origins explicitly, the fact that her family summers in Narragansett, Rhode Island, suggests that she is from New England or at least the (North) East Coast.

20. “At the 'Cadian Ball” (1892) offers a useful comparison here: the privileged Creole heroine of this story, Clarisse, responds as a proper lady to Alcée Laballière's declaration of love. Regardless of the fact that he is a Creole plantation owner, and so her social equal, when he “panted a volley of hot, blistering love-words into her face” (220), she responds with a disdainful dismissal.

21. Chopin generally codes her Cajun characters as white, usually by leaving them racially unmarked while marking other characters in the story. Thus, in “A Gentleman of the Bayou Têche,” the Cajun Evariste and his daughter Martinette are left racially unmarked, while Aunt Dicey is identified as black; similarly, in “A Night in Acadie,” Zaïda is unmarked while Douté, the cook, is marked as black.

22. Interestingly, in this case, in the face of Northern editorial opposition, even the marginalized shelter of Local Color could not provide a space for Chopin's original representation.

23. Almost completely ignored by early Chopin criticism, the issue of race in Chopin's work has recently come under scrutiny in a number of important studies. These works assess her representations of race and sometimes subsequently evaluate her character accordingly. Toth, for instance, reads Chopin's representations of race as “liberal in her day” compared to those of her contemporaries, whom Toth claims were “far more committed to the ‘happy darky’ stereotype” (269). Helen Taylor, on the other hand, argues that “Chopin's racism is a central element in her writing and cannot be ignored or simply excused … her inability or refusal to confront it created critical problems and severely limited her achievement” (156). As should be evident, I concur with Taylor and am indebted to her work.

    Chopin's racial politics are hardly surprising, given her background. As Taylor usefully points out, Chopin was in New Orleans for the last seven years of Reconstruction, and there and in Natchitoches she witnessed racial tensions and the rise of white supremacy groups. Indeed, both her husband and her brother-in-law Phanor Breazeale were members of such a group—the White League—and at least briefly supported a rebellion against the government in 1877. Whether or not Chopin herself supported the White League is unknown: unfortunately, she left almost no documentation in her papers or her work of her explicit position on political and, more specifically, racial issues. She did, however, produce a number of “loyal slave” stories that articulate a romanticized version of conventionally racist attitudes, among which “For Marse Chouchoutte” (1891), “The Bênitous' Slave” (1892), and “Tante Cat'rinette” (1894) stand out as perhaps the most obvious examples. She also offered slightly more complicated, though ultimately equally conciliatory, versions of interracial relations in stories such as “Ozème's Holiday” (1894, 1896), “A Dresden Lady in Dixie” (1894, 1895), and “Odalie Misses Mass” (1895). Toth's biography provides important background information on race relations in Chopin's New Orleans and Nachitoches. For contextualized information combined with literary analysis, two recent books are particularly nuanced in their readings: Taylor's Gender, Race and Region in the Writing of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin and Anna Shannon Elfenbein's Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Kate Chopin. Elfenbein traces with exceptional clarity the complicated history of New Orleans's racial mixture. See also Birnbaum's excellent article and Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

24. I have enclosed owner in quotation marks in this section to underscore not only the story's discussion of the impossibility of owning someone else's desire, but also the more fundamental paradox on which it is based: the idea of one human being's “owning” another.

25. Moreover, Madame's coercive actions, especially over Zoraïde's marriage partner, also mirror aristocratic actions conventionally attacked by the middle classes.

26. Chapter 4 of Elfenbein's book focuses on Chopin and provides what may well be the definitive reading of “Désirée's Baby” as well as an extremely nuanced reading reading of “La Belle Zoraïde.”

27. Elfenbein's reading here becomes more convincing when “La Belle Zoraïde” is read against Chopin's “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” where Madame Delisle is shown renouncing the present and its promise of love and passion to focus upon her past and her dead husband.

28. Paradoxically, in this story Chopin both exploits the stereotype of the “exotic,” “erotic” mulatta—naming her heroine Désirée, for instance—and undermines both the “purity” of categories of racial identity and the stability of the racist alignment of “erotic” and “African American.”

29. Further, the story suggests that even the woman whose racial purity has not been called into question—Madame Valmondé—is powerless to save Désirée in the face of the white man's power.

30. The painful and vexed relation of slave women to maternity, as well as the legacy of that relation, remains at issue for many contemporary African-American women writers. See, for instance, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose.

31. And significantly, maternity here calls into question the racial “purity” of the “white” lady but not that of the “black” slave: if “La Blanche,” the mulatto slave, is expected to have “little quadroon boys” (242) following Aubigny's visits to her cabin, Désirée is not.

32. Toth claims that Chopin was drawing on her father-in-law, Jean Baptiste Chopin, in this portrait (122). In more general terms one might see this characterization as the St. Louis outsider Chopin's sarcastic depiction of the New Orleans Creole culture for which she could never quite qualify.