[In the following essay, Cutter explores the differences in Chopin's portrayal of women in her short stories from that in The Awakening.]

When Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening was published in 1899, it was condemned as vulgar, morbid, and unwholesome. The book was allegedly banned from some libraries, and Chopin was ousted from social clubs. She eventually lost the contract for her next collection of fiction, A Vocation and a Voice, and it was not published until almost a hundred years later. About the whole furor, Chopin commented ironically: “I never dreamt 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” (“Aims and Autographs” 612). Despite the flippancy of these remarks, according to Per Seyersted the scandal “hurt her to the core of her being” (“Kate Chopin's Wound” 73). After publication of The Awakening Chopin faded almost into oblivion; as Seyersted explains: “At her death in 1904 she was nearly forgotten, and a book published in 1905 on Southern Writers does not even include her name” (“Kate Chopin” 153).

Why did The Awakening present such a radical challenge to Chopin's society? Neither Freeman nor Cooper were rejected when, like Chopin, they demonstrated that women's language has the potential to unhinge patriarchal discourse. Unlike Freeman and Cooper, however, Chopin suggests that feminine desire is an aspect of women's search for voice; Edna Pontellier drowns herself partially because she can find no one who understands the new sexual and social identity she is attempting to articulate. Like the New Women described in chapter 1, Edna connects an unruly feminine language of self-assertion to the enunciation of a self-defined desire. That Chopin's text speaks this new sexual and social identity made it shocking and also connects her to later writers like Cather and Fauset, who too insist that feminine desire plays a crucial role in women's struggles for identity, voice, and art.

The protagonist of The Awakening understands that the cult of domesticity offers her no viable mechanism for a self-defined subjectivity or voice, and she reaches beyond it toward a new theory of language and identity. But Edna seeks a feminine, maternal language that is represented as existing outside of patriarchy; therefore she never finds a voice that functions in the everyday world she inhabits. In her short fiction, however, Chopin mediates the conflict between feminine discourse and patriarchal language through assertion of a covert voice that attempts to undermine patriarchal discourse through mimicry and through hollowing out patriarchy from within its own structures. Thus while some of Chopin's characters still seek a purely “feminine” voice beyond patriarchal discourse, others have found a metalinguistic one that traverses and deconstructs patriarchal language, a voice that can be heard through the widening cracks of hegemonic discourse. This metalinguistic voice is, finally, one that Chopin (unlike mid-nineteenth-century writers) refuses to silence, repress, or erase.

In 1896, Kate Chopin wrote a short poem that was first titled “To a Lady at the Piano—Mrs. R—n.” It goes as follows:

I do not know you out upon the street
Where people meet.
We talk as women talk; shall I confess?
I know you less.
I hear you play, and touched by the wondrous spell—
I know you well—

(731)

This poem implies that the commercial spheres of a patriarchal world (“the street”) inscribe women within constricting roles, roles that mean that they cannot know each other well. Moreover, when women talk in a conventional, patriarchal mode (“we talk as women talk”), their conversation only means they “know” each other “less.” Yet music creates a nonpatriarchal language that allows them to move beyond cultural and linguistic inscriptions: “I hear you play, and touched by the wondrous spell / I know you well.”

Throughout The Awakening, the protagonist searches for a realm like that created in this poem by women's music—one beyond patriarchal stereotypes of femininity, beyond the realm of the symbolic (the established order of patriarchal language and culture). Edna attempts to undo her inscription within patriarchal language by returning to a maternal, pre-symbolic discourse. In the voice of the sea, in Mademoiselle Reisz's piano playing, and in her own art, Edna seeks what Julia Kristeva has called a poetic or semiotic language. The poetic language that Edna seeks is disruptive, but because it is figured as existing outside of culture, its subversive quality cannot be maintained. The Awakening thus dramatizes, but finally rejects, the dream of a maternal, feminine, poetic discourse that is not already inscribed within hegemonic language.

Edna's search for a semiotic voice and the text's final rejection of this concept have not received extended critical analysis. Of course, in the last fifteen years, the protagonist's struggle for language has been a central topic. In a linguistic analysis of the text, for instance, Paula Treichler states that “The Awakening charts Edna Pontellier's growing mastery of the first person singular, and … when ‘I’ has been created, the book has successfully completed its mission and comes to an end” (239-40). Using a Bakhtinian approach, Dale Bauer argues that Edna struggles “to make her internally persuasive voice—her impulses and desires—heard against the overpowering authoritative voices of her culture, her religion, her husband's Creole ideology” (141). Patricia Yaeger reads Edna's struggle for voice through a variety of poststructuralist lenses, but is less certain her resistance is successful: “Edna Pontellier has no language to help her integrate and interrogate the diversity of her feelings; she experiences neither world nor signifying system capacious enough to accommodate her desires” (219). Yet while Yaeger, as well as Mylène Dresser and Deborah Barker, employ psychoanalytical concepts, none of these critics apply Kristeva's concept of the semiotic to Edna's search for voice. Using Kristeva's concept of the semiotic, as well as Judith Butler's critique of this concept, clarifies not only what Edna seeks in language and where she situates her moments of voice but, most important, why her search is finally unsuccessful.

Although the novel primarily investigates the theoretical basis of Edna's linguistic oppression, Chopin does not divorce this subject from a historical context. As Frances Harper will do, Chopin situates her character on the cusp between two historical stereotypes of femininity. The novel begins in 1892, when the controversy over the New Woman had not yet exploded in the North American Review, or in novels by Sarah Grand, Grant Allen, and George Egerton. Edna is caught precisely at the moment when the True Woman had become outmoded but the new image had not yet reached popular consciousness. As Edna admits to Arobin: “One of these days … I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am” (966). The codes surrounding Edna construct her as “wicked,” but she finds no alternative “code” that can help her understand who she is. Harper's characters uses a liminal space between the True Woman and the New Woman to remake these ideologies, but for Edna this liminal space is less empowering.

Clearly, Edna is not a domestic saint, as the text explains: “In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman” (888). Edna is willing to give up her physical self for her children, but not her identity, as she says: “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself” (929). This statement shows how far Edna has come from the model of selfless domesticity embodied by characters such Fern's Ruth Hall or even Alcott's Jo March. Edna realizes that she has a self separate from others and desires she will not relinquish for others. Yet when Edna kills herself, it becomes apparent that she has not entirely forsaken her orientation to domesticity. As she walks on the beach before her suicidal swim, she repeats to herself, over and over: “To-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be some one else. It makes no difference to me, it doesn't matter about Léonce Pontellier—but Raoul and Etienne!” (999). Edna feels responsible for her children, and this is one of the reasons she kills herself. Of course, in the act of killing herself, Edna does try to preserve the essential part of her personality that will not be subservient to others. Edna is striving, as Chopin explains, to “becom[e] herself and … cast aside the fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world” (939). But her success in “becoming herself” is only partial, for she can formulate no concept of identity that allows her to move beyond the codes of her time period, codes that construct her as “wicked.”

To dramatize Edna's incomplete process of casting aside her fictitious self and finding a new identity, Chopin uses ambivalent symbolism. At novel's end Edna stands naked before the ocean, “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (1000). This imagery suggests a rebirth of self for Edna that is “strange and awful” but also “delicious” (1000). Yet this positive language is contradicted by the novel's last few lines: “She heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. … The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air” (1000). Edna's father, the spurs of the calvary officer, and Edna's harsh sister Margaret are all reminders of patriarchal forces that have entrapped Edna throughout her life. Furthermore, the hum of bees and the smell of flowers suggest the forces that would drag Edna down, into the soul's slavery: her children and her sensuality. The imagery suggests rebirth into a new world but also that even in death, Edna has not formulated an identity that escapes the old world of patriarchal inscription.

Therefore, although Edna reaches beyond the selflessness of the domestic saint, she never quite replaces the “fictitious self” she has been wearing. At stake here for Chopin, also, is Edna's inability to find a voice that articulates her new identity. For Chopin, self-possession and self-expression are crucially interlinked. Edna never formulates a theory of voice viable in the world she inhabits; therefore her sense of self is constantly being eroded by the languages of the world around her. Furthermore, Chopin is critical of Edna's new theory of language because it locates the subversive potential of the “feminine” voice outside Edna's society. Finally, Edna speaks “a language which nobody understood”—a language that has no community of listeners.

The novel is structured around a gestation and birth (it begins in June, when Adèle Ratignolle is just beginning to feel her “condition,” and ends nine months later, when she gives birth). Here form and content mesh, since the novel is centrally concerned with Edna's attempt to birth herself into an alternative, feminine, maternal discourse. As Chopin explains at the novel's start, Edna is attempting to create herself anew: “But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!” (893). Language is central to Edna's struggle for subjectivity, as the next few sentences of this passage demonstrate:

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

(893)

The ocean represents a maternal realm of language as it might exist in the presymbolic, libidinal world of the mother and child. Chopin's novel returns to the earliest stages of women's inscription within language, asking whether there is some other process of being birthed into language than the oedipal one, some way of achieving subjectivity and voice that does not involve total submission to the Law of the Father, total silencing of the unruly feminine self and the unruly feminine tongue. As Yaeger states, the voice of the sea frames and articulates “Edna's incessant need for some other register of language, for a mode of speech that will express her unspoken, but not unspeakable needs” (219). In the ocean, Edna seeks a maternal voice that avoids the repression of patriarchal language, its erasure of feminine identity and desire.

Such a voice is needed because of the way language functions in a patriarchal world, and in the realm of the symbolic. According to Lacanian theory, an individual enters the symbolic by repressing primary libidinal impulses (including the dependency of the child on the maternal body) and adopting a language structured by the Law of the Father. For women, there are several problems with adopting this language. First, symbolic language suppresses multiple meanings—which recall the libidinal multiplicity of the pre-symbolic realm—installing unambiguous and discrete meanings in their place (Butler, Gender Trouble 79). So entering the symbolic entails giving up the body of the mother as well as the multiplicity of discourse and identity that might be associated with this pre-symbolic realm. As Kristeva states: “Language as Symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother” (Desire in Language 136). Second, this process actually reserves the “I” position for men: “Women, by gender lacking the phallus, the positive symbol of gender, self-possession, and worldly authority around which language is organized, occupy a negative position in language” (Jones 83). Inscription into symbolic language is thus extremely problematic for women; as Ann Rosalind Jones explains, “in a psycholinguistic world structured by father-son resemblance and rivalry and by the primacy of masculine logic, woman is a gap or a silence, the invisible and unheard sex” (83). The acquisition of symbolic language, then, suppresses women's relationship to the maternal, solidifies identity and discourse, and forces women to occupy a negative position in language.

Chopin depicts this becoming “the invisible and unheard sex”—a sex without desire and language—through her characterization of Edna. Rather than being seen as a subject in her own right, Edna is seen as a possession to be traded back and forth between men. Edna's husband views her as an “object” (885) or a “valuable piece of personal property” (884), and she is also called the invention (971) of her father. Edna is also the object of male discourse; she is most often spoken to and of, rather than speaking herself. When Mr. Pontellier reproaches Edna for her “neglect” of the children, for example, he talks in “a monotonous, insistent way” (885), while Edna is silent: “She said nothing, and refused to answer her husband when he questioned her” (885-86). Edna's silence, here, is that of one who does not possess words: “She could not have told why she was crying. … An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish” (886). At this stage in the novel, Edna obeys her husband mechanically and silently, and this demonstrates her inscription within symbolic language, within a discourse that renders her voiceless and powerless. This inscription within the symbolic also involves a suppression of Edna's instincts and drives, a suppression that leaves her without any passion: “Edna found herself face to face with the realities. She grew fond of her husband, realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection” (898). Dr. Mandelet knows Edna as a repressed, “listless woman,” and he is surprised later in the novel to see her transformed into a being “palpitant with the forces of life” (952). In the early stages of the book, then, Edna is inscribed within a symbolic language that renders her silent, passive, and passionless.

Yet the voice of the sea continually hovering in the background of these early scenes suggests there must be something more: “the everlasting voice of the sea … broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night” (886). The ocean (mer)/mother (mère) sings a crooning cradle song to Edna that suggests another relationship to language. As argued in the discussion of Alcott's “A Whisper in the Dark,” Kristeva posits that the poetic or semiotic dimension of language is never completely destroyed by inscription into the symbolic. The semiotic therefore has the potential to disrupt patriarchal discourse. In Chopin's text, the ocean represents this semiotic, disruptive potential of language, a recovery of the maternal body that Edna believes will allow her to dislodge her inscription within patriarchal discourse.

Edna also seeks other physical and intellectual realms that might allow the recovery of a maternal, poetic voice. Chopin uses the image of the meadow in Kentucky, for example, to suggest that Edna was not always inscribed within the symbolic, within the Law of the Father. Edna recalls that as a young girl, she had a sense of limitless possibilities while traversing this meadow: “I was just walking diagonally across a big field … I could see only the stretch of green before me, and I felt as if I must walk on forever without coming to the end of it. I don't remember whether I was frightened or pleased. I must have been entertained” (896). This meadow represents a pre-symbolic realm in which Edna experiences a sense of freedom, instinctual drives, openness, and passion. When asked why she was traversing the meadow, Edna comments that “Likely as not it was Sunday … and I was running away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, read in a spirit of gloom by my father that chills me yet to think of” (896). Edna is running away from the Law of the Father, from the father's harsh and repressive voice, a voice that still has the power to chill her. At this early phase in her life, Edna can still escape to the realm of the meadow, to the realm of impulses and drives: “I was a little unthinking child in those days, just following a misleading impulse without question” (896). This phase of Edna's life is also characterized by passion, by desire: “At a very early age—perhaps it was when she traversed the ocean of waving grass—she remembered that she had been passionately enamored of a dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky” (897). Edna had impulses, drives, passions that had not yet been repressed by the Law of the Father, and these impulses and passions are captured by the image of the meadow.

At Grand Isle, Edna once again feels as if she is in this pre-symbolic world of the mother: “sometimes I feel this summer as if I was walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided” (897). Edna also feels “flushed and intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom” (899). Grand Isle functions as a retrieval of the maternal realm, and a retrieval of a subversive maternal voice that exists before patriarchal discourse has repressed the semiotic, poetic dimension of language. The resort area is dominated by mother figures like Adèle Ratignolle, Madame LeBrun, and the storyteller Madame Antoine; it is a place where men come to stay for the weekend but are, at best, visitors, interlopers, not part of the central social structure of mothers and their children. The men permitted to function in this realm—such as Victor and Robert LeBrun—do so by becoming attached to some maternal woman (Robert) or by remaining in a perpetual state of childhood (Victor).

Perhaps this is why Edna and Robert can talk freely at Grand Isle: while there Robert seems to have not yet completely internalized the Law of the Father or taken his place within the patriarchal world. Mr. Pontellier commands his wife or is bored by her “nonsense” (882), but Robert participates with Edna in conversation: “They chatted incessantly: about the things around them; their amusing adventure out in the water … about the wind, the trees, the people who had gone to the Chênière” (884). Robert and Edna are on terms of discursive equality, and this certainly has something to do with Robert's placement within a maternal sphere. In fact, Robert rejects the patriarchal realm of the Father in favor of this maternal space and discourse. When Mr. Pontellier tries to convince Robert to go to Klein's—a club for men—Robert admits “quite frankly that he preferred to stay where he was and talk to Mrs. Pontellier” (882). For Edna (and possibly for Robert, too) Grand Isle figures as a maternal space that recalls a time when the social and sexual divisions of patriarchal discourse, of the Law of the Father, had not yet been introduced.

Chopin's novel investigates whether there is a way of entering language that allows this maternal world not to be entirely erased. Specifically, Chopin's text explores whether a maternal, semiotic dimension of language can be preserved through women's art—whether art can become a poetic language that disrupts symbolic language. Edna's awakening begins the night she first responds to Mademoiselle Reisz's playing: “The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier's spinal column. … [T]he very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her” (906). This passage suggests a kinship between Mademoiselle Reisz's music and the ocean: both are characterized by libidinal passions, instincts, and drives characteristic of the pre-symbolic realm. Chopin's description of Edna's response to this music is certainly sexual, and we might be tempted to read this passage as an awakening to what Lacan might call jouissance (if he accepted that women have a knowable jouissance). And later that evening, when Edna first swims in the ocean (under the maternal moon), she seems to be “reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (908)—to be experiencing a loss of self that we might associate with a sexual awakening, with a “little death.” But what Edna awakens to through Mademoiselle Reisz's playing is not a specific sexual desire, directed to or at someone or something, but rather an understanding of how much of her desire has been repressed by her inscription into symbolic language. The music allows Edna to immerse herself in the realm of the maternal and to begin the recovery of the multiplicity of desire and discourse her inscription within symbolic language repressed. And this immersion enables her to find a subversive voice that disrupts patriarchal discourse through a reinstating of feminine desire, feminine wants. Later that evening when Léonce commands Edna to come inside, she responds: “Léonce, go to bed. … I mean to stay out here. I don't wish to go in, and I don't intend to. Don't speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you” (912). In the past, when her husband commanded she submitted, but now her “will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant” (912). Edna combats her husband's verbal harassment with a voice that calls upon her own desires: “I don't wish to go in, and I don't intend to.” Mademoiselle Reisz's music awakens “strange, new voices” in Edna (946), voices that Edna uses to combat the silencing and erasures of symbolic language.

Of course, Léonce is adept at coopting such resistance, and when Edna refuses to go in, he simply sits outside with her until she gives up. Edna feels “like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing upon her soul” (912). She awakens from her dream of a maternal language of desire that subverts patriarchal discourse and finds herself caught in the everyday world. Edna returns to the domestic discourse that she had used earlier in the novel, a discourse that focuses solely on others, asking her husband, “Are you coming in, Léonce?” (913). Certainly, the novel charts the growth of Edna's voice and her self-defined subjectivity and sexuality. By the end of the novel, Edna claims that she has gotten into the extremely “unwomanly” (990) habit of expressing herself and that she has resolved never again to belong to anyone (963). But as the above scene with Léonce demonstrates, Edna's voice continually falters. In the novel's penultimate chapter, when Dr. Mandelet asks whether Edna plans to go abroad with her husband, she cannot respond clearly: “Perhaps—no, I am not going. I'm not going to be forced into doing things. I don't want to go abroad. I want to be let alone. Nobody has any right—except children, perhaps—and even then, it seems to me—or it did seem—” (995). She finds herself “voicing the incoherence of her thoughts” (995), and she says: “Oh! I don't know what I'm saying” (996). By the end of the novel, Edna's voice of resistance has been eroded, and even her sense of subjectivity seems to be under attack.

Edna also seeks voice in her painting, only to have this voice undermined. Noting that “there are no words to describe [Adèle] save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams” (888), Edna tries to capture her friend. Yet while old, patriarchal words do not capture Adèle, Edna is no more successful at portraying her on canvass: “The picture completed bore no resemblance to Madame Ratignolle. [Edna] was greatly disappointed” (891). Later in the novel, Edna comments to her friend: “Perhaps I shall be able to paint your picture some day” (937), but that day never arrives. Edna's art frequently focuses on women and is frequently sensual. It is possible that in her art Edna seeks a language unlike the “old” words of symbolic language, one that articulates, rather than erases, feminine desire. However, although Edna's teacher says her work grows “in force and individuality” (963), Edna herself remains dissatisfied with her painting and claims that she is not an artist (939). When Mademoiselle Reisz tells her that “the bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings” (967), Edna remarks blandly, “I'm not thinking of any extraordinary flights” (966). And when Edna kills herself, it becomes clear that her art has not provided her with a voice of the sea that could break apart symbolic language or speak feminine desires. As Edna walks into the ocean, Chopin tells us that “All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (999). This image emphasizes Edna's isolation (“there was no living thing in sight”) as well as her inability to find a new theory of voice that transcends patriarchal language. Rather than being the poetic artist who soars above patriarchal discourse, she is the woman who is silenced, alienated, and disabled by symbolic language—a reeling, fluttering, broken creature, rather than a triumphant creator.

Why does Edna's attempt to formulate a viable new theory of language fail? Edna seeks a voice that can disrupt patriarchy but also one that is apart from, or underneath, or before the symbolic—the voice of the ocean, of the pre-symbolic realm of the meadow, of Mademoiselle Reisz's semiotic music, of her own painting. But because this voice is constituted as being outside of patriarchy, its subversions cannot be maintained. Butler's critique of Kristeva can be applied to Edna's struggle for voice. Because Kristeva situates the semiotic outside of cultural practices, she limits its potential for cultural subversion: “Poetic language and the pleasures of maternity constitute local displacements of the paternal law, temporary subversion which finally submit to that against which they initially rebel. By relegating the source of subversion to a site outside of culture itself, Kristeva appears to foreclose the possibility of subversion as an effective or realizable cultural practice” (Gender Trouble 88). Edna sometimes finds a voice of resistance, but because it is located outside all her cultural and linguistic matrices, its subversions are only temporary. She is finally silenced by her own inability to find a theory of language that does not put her outside all existing speech communities.

Like the parrot who introduces the novel, then, Edna finally speaks “a language which nobody understood” (881). Or as Treichler puts it, “at the point of her final movement, [Edna] speaks and embodies a language which cannot be spoken. Only in solitude can the true self speak and be heard” (254). When Edna tries to explain her newfound sense of selfhood to Madame Ratignolle, the two women “did not appear to understand each other or to be talking the same language” (929). And when Robert returns from Mexico, he seems to have lost his earlier ability to “chat” with Edna. Robert has become caught within a patriarchal logic and discourse that sees women as possessions to be traded between men, possessions that lack subjectivity and voice. No wonder, then, that he does not understand Edna:

“You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,’ I should laugh at you both.”

His face grew a little white. “What do you mean?” he asked.

(992)

Robert blanches before Edna's assertion of personal and linguistic freedom. Edna has found an unruly voice that puts her outside of his comprehension, and, indeed, outside the comprehension of her culture as a whole. Edna truly becomes, then, what Chopin's original title for the novel (“A Solitary Soul”) implied; she becomes a solitary soul, with a solitary voice that only she (and perhaps not even she) can understand. Finally, neither the voice of the sea nor Mademoiselle Reisz's music nor her own art or language provides Edna with a maternal discourse that can disrupt patriarchal language. These maternal discourses cannot be translated by Edna into a language that can be spoken to a listener.

In discussing the notion of a female body that exists beyond the Law of the Father, Butler comments: “If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to is original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities” (Gender Trouble 93). Applying this idea to Edna's search for language, we might say that Edna dreams of a return to a maternal language that is outside symbolic language, that gives voice to her newfound subjectivity and sexuality. However, she learns that because this language is outside of patriarchy, it cannot subvert patriarchy. Edna discovers that “if subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law,” a subversion from within the terms of patriarchal discourse itself. Dale Bauer argues that Chopin;'s novel is dangerous because it suggests the possibility, however imprecise, “of a world beyond: the world of the body, perhaps the world under threat of erasure by a moving, returning ocean that sweeps [Edna] back to the beginnings and beyond” (154). Yet finally, the novel rejects this dream of a world beyond, of a retreat to a language that exists in the beginning, before the Law of the Father has been imposed. When Edna drowns herself, “the voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” (999). Chopin repeats the lines she had used earlier to suggest that the voice of the sea functions as a maternal realm outside culture, a solitary world beyond patriarchal discourse that cannot exist within the culture Edna knows. The voice of the sea does not provide Edna with a viable theory of feminine voice, and Chopin finally rejects the idea that music, or art, or anything but language itself can subvert language. In the end, Chopin suggests that if we wish to be comprehended, we cannot speak “a language which nobody understood” but rather must talk “as women talk,” waging our linguistic struggles in the here and now, in the interstices and gaps of patriarchal discourse.

Despite the liberation engendered by the decline of domesticity, not all fictional characters can find a viable theory of feminine voice, as Edna Pontellier's struggle demonstrates. Indeed, as Yaeger argues, the novel describes “a frightening antagonism between a feminine subject and the objectifying world of discourse she inhabits” (211). This frightening world is also present in Chopin's short fiction, and yet a comparison of her early and later short works shows her moving toward a clearer understanding of how women can most effectively resist the Law of the Father. In her earlier works, Chopin frequently depicts silent, passive women—women who seem incapable of expressing themselves or their desires. Chopin also depicts Anglo American and African American women who attempt to enunciate their desires and experiences through a voice of overt resistance that is quickly labeled meaningless or “insane.” Early works such as “At the 'Cadian Ball,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” “Désirée's Baby,” “Wiser than a God,” and particularly “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” depict a voice of pure resistance that attempts to locate itself outside of patriarchal discourse and culture. Like Edna's maternal voice, these resistant voices are quickly erased, negated, or labeled “insane” by patriarchal structures. In some of Chopin's later short works, however—particularly those written during or after 1894—she moves toward depicting women who are more active and more vocal. Moreover, these stories' strategies of resistance often entail a covert, metalinguistic voice. Works such as “Her Letters” and “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” depict a discourse of insubordination that attempts to bridge the gap between women who speak, like Edna, “a language which nobody understood,” and women who are silenced by patriarchal discourse. These later works therefore reject a feminine voice existing outside of patriarchal discourse, and instead find a metalinguistic voice that forces patriarchal discourse into a subversive dialogue, a dialogue that shows its categories to be nonabsolute.

Chopin's short fiction does not reflect a linear movement from silence to voice; rather, as her career progressed Chopin continued to test the ways women could—and could not—achieve articulation. Given her own experiences as a writer, Chopin's development of a covert, metalinguistic voice seems logical. Early in her career, when she wrote charming Creole stories with happy endings, she had little difficulty finding publishers. And when she depicted women who were silent and submissive, the reading public readily accepted her works. But, as Emily Toth shows, after 1894 Chopin attempted to be more daring in her short fiction; concurrently she had more difficulty finding publishers (224; 232-33). Moreover, her most subversive works—stories that often involved female heroines with strong desires and voices—were repeatedly refused by publishers, and, of course, the public and literary critics alike condemned the unconventional Edna Pontellier. Toward the end of the short decade during which Chopin wrote, she did not even attempt to publish works that posited a direct challenge to the literary and moral standards of her time. Yet she did not give up on challenging these standards. Rather, her challenge went “underground”: it became less open and direct, more covert and inscribed. These covert strategies of resistance were Chopin's most effective weapon, because they allowed her to slip subversive messages past the censoring dictates of her own society.

Early in her career, Chopin tends to depict women who are silent, women who seek but do not find a voice, or women who find a voice only to have it labeled insane or meaningless. In an early story such as “A No-Account Creole” (1888, 1891), for instance, Euphrasie becomes engaged to Placide Santien even though she does not love him. When Euphrasie realizes she loves another man, Wallace Offdean, she takes no steps to end her engagement. Even when Offdean declares his love for Euphrasie, she still cannot enunciate her desire: “She could not speak. She only looked at him with frightened eyes” (98). Throughout the story Euphrasie remains incapable of expressing her marital preferences and embarrassed about her sexual attraction to Offdean. Similarly, in another early story, “Love on the Bon Dieu” (1891), Lalie's silence causes her great harm: “Because she had been silent—had not lifted her voice in complaint—[the village people] believed she suffered no more than she could bear” (162). For Lalie, speech is a great effort: “Lalie had spoken low and in jerks, as if every word gave her pain” (160). And like Euphrasie, Lalie seems incapable of articulating her desire; she almost dies with her secret—her love for Azenor—completely unspoken.

These female characters are relatively passive, so perhaps it is no surprise their voices seem ineffective. Yet even more aggressive women, such as Calixta and Clarisse of “At the 'Cadian Ball” (1892), have difficulty. In this story, Calixta exhibits verbal dexterity, swearing “roundly in fine ‘Cadian French and with true Spanish spirit” (219) and wittily chiding Bobinôt for standing “planté là like ole Ma'ame Tina's cow in the bog” (224). Yet Calixta's society dislikes her linguistic proficiency, as the crowd's reaction to this sally demonstrates: “Madame Suzonne, sitting in a corner, whispered to her neighbor that if Ozéina were to conduct herself in a like manner, she should immediately be taken out to the mule-cart and driven home. The women did not always approve of Calixta” (224). Apart from her linguistic forwardness, Calixta also behaves aggressively, slapping her friend Fronie's face when insulted, and eventually forcing Bobinôt to marry her.

Clarisse, too, is aggressive. She rides out alone in the middle of the night to “rescue” Alcée from Calixta, and forces him away from her rival. Yet Clarisse plays the role of the soft-spoken, pure woman; she is shocked, for example, by the “hot, blistering love-words” (220) Alcée pants in her face one day. Eventually, Clarisse admits she loves Alcée, but Chopin switches to indirect discourse and narrates this moment through the eyes of Alcée: “He began to wonder if this meant love. But she had to tell him so, before he believed it. And when she told him, he thought the face of the Universe was changed. … The one, only, great reality in the world was Clarisse standing before him, telling him that she loved him” (227). For the delicate Clarisse to enunciate her desire for Alcée would break the narrative parameters established for her character—as well as for the series of women Chopin portrays in these early works. And as we know from “The Storm” (1898) (the sequel to “At the 'Cadian Ball”), more aggressively verbal women such as Calixta end up with boring men like Bobinôt, and have to wait five years for the consummation of their desires.

Like Alcott's writing, then, Chopin's earliest fictions sometimes reward women who accept their inscription into symbolic language and punish women who assert an unrully voice. Even as late as 1896, Chopin sometimes censors the unruly tongues of her female characters. “A Night in Acadie” depicts Zaïda Trodon, a woman who has “an absence of reserve in her manner” and “the air of a young person accustomed to decide for herself and for those about her” (487). Yet after Zaïda realizes her would-be fiancé is a drunkard, after she must be rescued by another man, she loses her self-control and even her voice: “Her will, which had been overmastering and aggressive, seemed to have grown numb under the disturbing spell of the past few hours. … The girl was quiet and silent” (498-99). The last phrase—that the girl is both “quiet and silent”—seems repetitive for the usually concise Chopin, yet it marks her double attempt to appease her editors, who complained about the story's first ending in which Zaïda forces another suitor to marry her. According to Toth, this ending offended Chopin's publishers, and she bent to the literary tastes of her time, silencing Zaïda.

Zaïda is described as having the free carriage of “a negress” (487), but racialized women in Chopin's early fiction also have their voices censored. In “La Belle Zoraïde” (1893), Zoraïde (a light-skinned slave) wishes to marry the man who attracts her rather than the one her mistress (Madame Delarivière) has picked. Zoraïde tries to express her desire and to reason logically with Madame Delarivière: “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). But like Robert in The Awakening, Madame Delarivière simply ignores expressions of subjectivity and language contradicting her understanding of the world. When Zoraïde becomes pregnant by her forbidden lover, Madame Delarivière has him sold and later tells Zoraïde her baby has died. Zoraïde goes insane, believing a dead bundle of rags is her living child, even refusing to accept her real infant. She also loses the ability to speak rationally, becoming inscribed under a label of insanity as “Zoraïde la folle” (307). This story seems to indicate that for African American women there is no middle ground between sexist and racist repression of speech and a discourse that goes unheard because it is labeled “insane.” And this pattern is replicated in the story's frame. Manna-Loulou, an African American servant, tells this tale to her mistress, Madame Delisle. But Madame Delisle misses the point of the story, sympathizing with the abandoned child rather than the silenced mother (307).

Resistant feminine voices of racialized characters, then, simply go unheard. Eventually such voices are erased by madness or suicide, as “Désirée's Baby” (1892) depicts. An orphan, Désirée marries a man who claims not to care about her obscure origins: “He was reminded that she was nameless. What did it matter about a name when he could give her one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana?” (241). Désirée's husband, Armand, will inscribe his wife under his own social and linguistic identity, under his linguistic law. But when Désirée bears a child that shows signs of being African American, Armand takes this social and linguistic protection away, telling her to go. Armand also refuses to hear Désirée's language once he knows of her racial status. “I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand … And my skin is fair … whiter than yours, Armand” (243), Désirée says to her husband, but Armand ignores her arguments. Soon Désirée becomes silent: “She tried to speak to the little quadroon boy; but no sound would come”; “She was like a stone image: silent, white, motionless” (243). As Ellen Peel has pointed out, Désirée appears to be a blank screen onto which others project their desires, a screen with no identity of its own. And no language, I would add, once patriarchal protection, the Name of the Father, has been removed. The story clearly depicts a repressive structure in which phallicism sustains itself through an erasure of the voices of feminine and racialized “others,” but it presents no way of challenging this structure.

In Chopin's early fiction, Anglo American women are more likely to retain their identity than their African American counterparts, but not necessarily their voices. Discourses spoken by Anglo American women can easily be labeled as “insane” as Zoraïde's, particularly when they do not enunciate socially acceptable codes, as Paula Von Stoltz of “Wiser than a God” (1889) learns. Paula's suitor, George Brainard, talks fluently, utilizing the language of romantic passion, while Paula (a musician) is silent: “Say if you love me, Paula. I believe you do. … Why are you speechless? Why don't you say something to me!” (46). Paula does finally attempt to explain her emotions to George: “‘What do you know of my life,’ [Paula] exclaimed passionately. ‘What can you guess of it? Is music anything more to you than the pleasing distraction of an idle moment? Can't you feel that with me, it courses with the blood through my veins? That it's something dearer than life, than riches, even than love?’” (46). Paula's speech calls upon codes other than those of romantic love and articulates the view that to an artist—even a female artist—art is life. None of this is understood by George, who only exclaims: “Paula listen to me; don't speak like a mad woman” (46). Paula flees from George and pursues her art, eventually becoming a successful pianist. But Paula continually finds that her language is not understood; even her mother tells her not to “chatter” (40).

“Mrs. Mobry's Reason” (1891) also depicts Anglo American women trapped between patriarchal silence and a discourse labeled meaningless or insane. The story concerns a generational struggle for voice in which the mother, Editha Mobry, acquiesces and is silenced, while the daughter, Naomi, resists and becomes insane. Editha is reluctant to marry John Mobry, but he is “of that class of men who, when they want something, usually keep on wanting it and striving for it so long as there is possibility of attainment in view” (71). Editha cannot resist such a superior force of “wanting,” despite her own obvious lack of enthusiasm for the marriage: “Her tired face wore the look of the conquered who has made a brave fight and would rest. ‘Well, John, if you want it,’ she said, placing her hand in his” (71). Editha therefore enters the symbolic order of language only by internalizing male desire; she phrases her wishes in terms of the male's—“Well, John, if you want it”—even enclosing her body, her hand, within the masculine sphere of desire. Because Editha enters the symbolic through the masculine gaze she silences herself, making herself part of the “invisible and unheard sex.”

Editha also tries to make her daughter part of this invisible and unheard sex. Mrs. Mobry is a firm believer in the late-nineteenth-century view that women should not develop their intellect and mind; she believes that “ologies and isms and all that for women” (72) are useless and possibly injurious to women's mental stability. She will not allow her daughter to engage in intellectual pursuits that might lead to a mastery of language or knowledge. However, Mrs. Mobry has a secret reason for her behavior. Her lineage contains a hereditary strain of insanity, and her reluctance to marry stems from fear of passing on this taint. She also tries to prevent the spread of insanity by keeping her daughter unmarried. Mrs. Mobry therefore attempts to shield her daughter from both sexual and intellectual knowledge, from learning and love.

Yet she is unsuccessful. Naomi falls in love with her cousin Sigmund, and caught between her desire for Sigmund and her desire for her mother's approbation, she loses her mind. Moreover, when Naomi loses mental self-possession, she begins to speak a language not grounded in any normative conception of meaning. She believes she has mastered all discourse and can even understand what nature is saying: “I know everything now. I know what the birds are saying up in the trees … I can tell you everything that the fishes say in the water. They were talking under the boat when you called me—” (78). Naomi's unrepressed language is also tied to a sexual liberation: “‘Sigmund,’ she whispered, and drawing nearer to him twined her arms around his neck. ‘I want you to kiss me, Sigmund’” (78). But Naomi speaks “a language which nobody understood”—a language that is so contradictory and illogical it can only be considered insane. Sigmund, for example, reads Naomi as a blank; looking into her eyes, he finds that “there was no more light in them” (78). Furthermore, by the end of the story, Naomi has become silent: “Naomi sat upon a lounge. She was playing like a little child, with scraps of paper that she was tearing and placing in rows upon the cushion beside her” (79). Naomi can finally only escape from patriarchal dictates by regressing to childhood and silence.

The discourse Naomi achieves in “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” is thus a form of escape from patriarchal repression that renders the escapeé insane and seems to erase her personality. Between the silent mother and the daughter's insane babble, there must be an alternative discourse. This is the discourse not of overt resistance but of covert subversion. As in The Awakening, in her short fiction Chopin finally rejects a discourse located outside patriarchal culture, realizing that linguistic struggles must be waged in the here and now, in the daily “chatter” of women. For as Bauer explains, “The feminist struggle is not one between a conscious ‘awakened’ or natural voice and the voice of patriarchy ‘out there.’ Rather, precisely because we all internalize the authoritative voice of patriarchy, we must struggle to refashion inherited social discourses into words which rearticulate intentions (here feminist ones) other than normative or disciplinary ones” (2). Chopin's later texts continue the struggle through a covert, dialogic theory of voice that refashions inherited discourses, rather than through a feminine language outside society or outside the Law of the Father.

These covert, dialogic voices are depicted most clearly in Chopin's portrayals of women who write. “Her Letters” (1894) tells of a dying woman unable to destroy her adulterous love letters. Upon her death, she compels her husband to destroy the letters unread. The husband does so but then finds himself consumed by curiosity about their contents. Unable to pierce the mystery, he eventually follows the letters to their watery grave, drowning himself. The unnamed woman's letters are therefore subversive of male control in the most literal sense: they drive a husband to question his perception of his wife and to kill himself.

However, these letters are also subversive in a discursive sense, both for the woman and for her husband. This forbidden discourse—not her husband's presence or counsel—has nourished the woman for the last four years of her illness: “they had sustained her, she believed, and kept her spirit from perishing utterly” (398). Moreover, the letters—not her husband, or even her lover—provide the story's one moment of erotic pleasure: “But what if that other most precious and most imprudent one were missing! in which every word of untempered passion had long ago eaten its way into her brain; and which stirred her still to-day, as it had done a hundred times before when she thought of it. She crushed it between her palms when she found it. She kissed it again and again. With her sharp white teeth she tore the far corner from the letter, where the name was written; she bit the torn scrap and tasted it between her lips and upon her tongue like some godgiven morsel” (399). In this subversive revision of the Eucharist, the word becomes wholly sensual, yet wholly disembodied. It is not her lover's presence the woman relishes but the tokens of their mutual esteem, the words making up their dialogic intercourse. Discourse becomes a subversive replacement for the bodies of men.

For the husband, the letters function differently, forcing him into a subversive dialogue that completely undermines his sense of knowledge and subjectivity. His wife's secret letters irrevocably change his world, for he realizes their probable contents. Although he can find no other written evidence documenting that “his wife had not been the true and loyal woman he had always believed her to be” (403), the letters seem to prove his wife had a hidden personality he could not discover while she was alive, and cannot fathom after her death. These covert texts, these unfathomable letters, force the husband to question his monolithic perception of his wife. He continues this dialogue with other men who have known her but finds only that his friends also misperceive her: “Foremost he learned she had been unsympathetic because of her coldness of manner. One had admired her intellect; another her accomplishments; a third had thought her beautiful before disease claimed her, regretting, however, that her beauty had lacked warmth of color and expression. … Oh, it was useless to try to discover anything from men!” (404). Other men believe his wife to be cold and asexual, but the letters seem to tell another story. The husband thus finds that the letters enact a subversive dialogue undermining his perceptions of the woman he thought he knew so well.

The letters, besides creating a dialogic problem, also create a linguistic problem, causing the husband to question his own understanding of how words function. Previously, when his friends claimed to have seduced women, he has “heard the empty boast … and had always met it with good-humored contempt” (403). Now, however, he distrusts his perception that these words are empty: “to-night every flagrant, inane utterance was charged with a new meaning, revealing possibilities that he had hitherto never taken into account” (403). The letters alert the husband to levels of covert meaning in language he has previously believed he could fathom but now finds he cannot: “He was remembering how she had conducted herself toward this one and that one; striving to recall conversations, subtleties of facial expression that might have meant what he did not suspect at the moment, shades of meaning in words that had seemed the ordinary interchange of social amenities” (403; my emphasis). The husband seems to have an awakening into the unreliable and potential disruptive possibilities of language—an awakening that profoundly destabilizes his whole universe.

Ultimately, the husband's identity and sense of language are so destabilized he kills himself. If subjectivity is irremediably founded on the oppression of the Other, then endowing this Other with some unfathomable but private sense of self—as Chopin's covert letters do—seems to undermine the construction of male subjectivity. As Luce Irigaray explains: “If there is no more ‘earth’ to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire (for one's own), no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the ex-sistence of the ‘subject’?” (133). Covert texts such as these letters take away the pedestal for the existence of the subject by suggesting men do not really know the women they marry, live with, and believe they construct. The wife dies, but her letters affirm the presence of an unruly discourse and an unruly feminine subject. And unlike earlier writers, Chopin refuses to contain this discourse, to repress it under the Law of the Father; ultimately, it is a force that cannot be denied.

Texts, it seems, have a life of their own, a life that begins to undo some of the silences of the patriarchal masterplot. This theme is articulated most clearly in “Elizabeth Stock's One Story,” a complicated text that needs to be examined in detail to hear Chopin's subversive, covert message. Like the wife in “Her Letters,” the title character of “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” dies, but she leaves behind a text that undermines patriarchal control of discourse by giving voice to her subjectivity. Elizabeth is an independent woman who supports herself through her job as postmistress in the small village of Stonelift. Within the society Chopin depicts, however, an independent woman cannot be tolerated for long. When Elizabeth reads and delivers an urgent postcard that arrives late, officials dismiss her for “reading postal cards and permitting people to help themselves to their own mail” (590). Read on the level of discourse, she must be dismissed by an “official” text for her transgressive, unofficial textual practices, as she explains: “One morning, just like lightning out of a clear sky, here comes an official document from Washington, discharging me from my position as postmistress of Stonelift” (590). After her dismissal from her job she becomes ill and dies. Official texts turn upon her, depriving Elizabeth of her livelihood and her life. Males retake the mail.

According to the narrator who introduces Elizabeth's story, the physicians at the hospital where Elizabeth is sent to recuperate “say she showed hope of rallying till placed in the incurable ward, when all courage seemed to leave her, and she relapsed into a silence that remained unbroken till the end” (586). Yet Elizabeth's silence is not “unbroken to the end”; her silence is only the final battle in a long war for self-expression she has waged. She is not content with the limits a patriarchal society has placed on her access to texts. There is a certain “Bartlebyesque” kind of irony in her job as a postmistress: she is responsible for the care and sorting of letters, yet she is not supposed to read these letters. But, as she explains, it is human nature—especially feminine nature—to want to possess knowledge: “I leave it to any one—to any woman especially, if it ain't human nature in a little place where everybody knows ever one else, for the postmistress to glance at a postal card once in a while. She could hardly help it” (587). Elizabeth desires to do more than just read texts, however. She also desires to author them, as the narrator informs the readers: “In Stonelift, the village where Elizabeth Stock was born and raised … they say she was much given over to scribbling” (586). But again, patriarchal forces must attempt to control and limit women's voice; Elizabeth's writing, like her body, must be deemed hopeless and incurable. The narrator finds the story—Elizabeth's one and only story—in her desk, “which was quite filled with scraps and bits of writing in bad prose and impossible verse.” Out of “the whole conglomerate mass” the narrator can discover only one item which “bore any semblance to a connected or consecutive narration” (586). Elizabeth's one story, then, is a found narrative, and after this belittling introduction, the narrator disappears, letting the story speak for itself.

Perhaps influenced by certain masculine notions of literature current in the 1880s and 1890s, the narrator faults Elizabeth's writing for lacking a coherent, linear style. Elizabeth's Uncle William, on the other hand, derides her stories because they lack a unique and adventurous plot, as she explains: “Once I wrote about old Si' Shepard that got lost in the woods and never came back, and when I showed it to Uncle William he said: ‘Why, Elizabeth, I reckon you better stick to your dress making: this here ain't no story; everybody knows about old Si' Shepard’” (586). Like the narrator, Uncle William believes Elizabeth's writing is “incurable,” and he sends her back to more feminine pursuits like “dress making.” Elizabeth's society extols masculine, heroic narratives that she finds herself incapable of producing: “I tried to think of a railroad story with a wreck, but couldn't. No more could I make a tale out of murder, or money getting stolen, or even mistaken identity; for the story had to be original, entertaining, full of action and Goodness knows what all. It was no use. I gave it up” (586-87). Elizabeth cannot come up with any original, action-packed, muscular design for a plot. Yet she still wants to write: “But now that I got my pen in my hand … I feel as I'd like to tell how I lost my position, mostly through my own negligence, I'll admit that” (587). Admitting the negligence of the story, itself, as a story, Elizabeth's tale nonetheless asserts its right to textual existence. If Elizabeth cannot tell the tale of an American Adam, she may be able to tell the tale of an American Eve—the tale of a woman who tastes of forbidden knowledge, forbidden discourse, and thereby loses a privileged status.

Elizabeth's content, then, violates patriarchal norms, as do her style and structure. Her story is fragmentary and nonlinear, moving far back into Elizabeth's childhood, plunging forward into the present, receding to the past events of Elizabeth losing her job. It vacillates, waffles, wavers, digresses, gives details unrelated to the “plot” of Elizabeth losing her job, and frequently draws attention to its own flaws. Furthermore, the style is personal, subjective, colloquial: “Often seems like the village was most too small”; “Anyway, the train was late that day. It was the breaking up of winter, or the beginning of spring; kind of betwixt and between; along in March” (587). Most important, at the heart of the story there is a mystery: was Elizabeth the victim of a plot to oust her from her position as postmistress? And is she aware of the details supporting such a reading of events? On this crucial point the text is silent; it remains a riddle, a structure that resists closure by asserting its own mysteriousness.

According to Ewell, Elizabeth's voice is “colloquial and elliptical”; furthermore, “the one story Elizabeth Stock finally tells … has no conventional plot” (166). Elizabeth's story emphasizes its difference from patriarchal forms of writing through its cumulative rather than linear structure, its multiple narrative viewpoints, and its open ending: “But indeed, indeed, I don't know what to do … After all, what I got to do is leave everything in the hands of Providence, and trust to luck” (591). Elizabeth also allies her writing not with masculine novelty and heroism but with the repetitive, nonlinear structures of piecing and quilting: “I laid awake most a whole week; and walked about days in a kind of dream, turning and twisting things in my mind just like I often saw old ladies twisting quilt patches around to compose a design” (586-87). So while Elizabeth's other scraps and bits of writing have been read as babble and discarded, the tale itself endures, pieced, patched, and puzzling, but uniquely expressive of her own voice. Thus Elizabeth's silence is not “unbroken to the end,” as the narrator and critics such as Heather Kirk Thomas (26) have claimed. Sometime after losing her job, but before she dies, she describes her experiences in her own, unique way.

In so doing, she finds a voice that is her own but that also hollows out patriarchal discourse from within its own parameters. In earlier depictions of women writers such as “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” (1889), Chopin shows women content to write about domestic topics such as “‘Security against the Moth.’” But Elizabeth refuses to force her writing into the mode of domestic discourse. Her writing is also not totally outside the realm of patriarchal understanding, like the “scraps and bits of writing” the narrator finds in Elizabeth's desk and discards, like Naomi Mobry's mad voice, or like Edna Pontellier's “feminine” language. The unknown narrator does not see this one particular tale as insane scribbling; believing it to tell a connected, consecutive narrative, the narrator admits it to the sanctified halls of discourse. But Elizabeth's tale exists in a middle ground: it is neither a linear, masculine, patriarchal plot, nor an insane, illogical, fragmented feminine discourse.

In short, Elizabeth finds a covert voice that allows her self-expression but that is not entirely repressed by patriarchy. Elizabeth disarms her readers with her forthright, simple tone; in other words, she plays the fool. But she is no fool. She remembers the name on the postcard—Collins—well enough to repeat it to her readers three times (588) but apparently does not make the connection that the postman hired to replace her after her “negligence” is also named Collins. She blithely informs the reader that one reason for her dismissal was that she allowed people to help themselves to their own mail, while apparently forgetting that the only one who ever actually helped himself to his mail was Nathan Brightman. Nathan Brightman is also the only person who had other concrete evidence for her dismissal, and the only person in town who knew the Collins family. Does Elizabeth know that Nathan Brightman had her fired so his friend Collins could get the job of postmaster? She does not say. Instead, Elizabeth presents the reader with 2 + 2 but does not add them up to 4. She plays the fool, creating a subversive dialogue between the reader and the text, a dialogue in which we are left to ponder just how much Elizabeth actually knew. If, as Bauer argues, a fool represents “a resisting reader within the text” who provides “the means of unmasking dominant codes” (11), then Elizabeth fits this paradigm perfectly.

Moreover, Elizabeth's text, while seeming to conform to patriarchal dictates (at least in terms of being nonoffensive or noninflammatory) still asserts its difference. Though pressure is exerted on the tale externally, by a hostile narrator, and internally, by an unsympathetic interpretive community, the text does not succumb. Elizabeth refashions patriarchal discourse, making it take account of her own specific experiences, her own subjectivity. Elizabeth's greatest creation, finally, is her own voice, her own self, which, as Ewell argues, rises “well above any conventional characters she might invent” (167). “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” depicts its own exclusion from “proper” discourse, but in so doing nevertheless subverts male control of texts, and perversely insists upon women's right to write/right their own stories. And once again, Chopin refuses to contain her character's unruly voice: Elizabeth's story lives on after her death, enunciating the subversive messages patriarchal society and discourse seek to repress.

Elizabeth's subversive message is that women are excluded from language—from reading and writing—and denied self-determination. Her story enunciates the theoretical mechanisms whereby patriarchal forces create speaking masculine subjects through a silencing of a feminine “other.” But her story also presents another theory of language in which women become speaking subjects through the use of covert, dialogic methods. Elizabeth did not end her quest for a form of resistance to patriarchal norms; she only made it less overt. And neither did Chopin. Despite the “failure” of The Awakening, she is still looking for ways to subvert patriarchal control of women's subjectivity and voice.

Although Chopin sought a publisher for “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” she was not successful, and after the furor over The Awakening its publication in A Vocation and a Voice was delayed for almost one hundred years. Toward the end of her career, Chopin did not even attempt to publish some of her most daring works, such as “The Storm.” Chopin's fiction as a whole thus depicts a distinct pattern of repression of women's voices—a pattern reflected within the lives of the characters she creates as well as within her own career as a writer. A patriarchal society denies women's right to control their destinies, their desires, and their discourses, and censors or erases unruly female voices that do not conform to its dictates. And yet authors like Chopin realize that to conform to patriarchal dictates is to be silent as women; as Xavière Gauthier has explained: “As long as women remain silent, they will be outside the historical process. But, if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history that, logically speaking, their speech should disrupt” (162-63). How to speak in a voice that disrupts patriarchal discourse, without being censored by patriarchal structures? Throughout her career, Chopin confronts this problem, trying various strategies for creating a voice of insubordination: characters who are mostly silent, characters who use overtly resistant feminine voices that go unheard, characters who find a covert discourse. Like earlier writers, Chopin sometimes destroys the unruly voice of her female characters. However, the overall focus of her fiction is an investigation of the way patriarchal theories of subjectivity and voice silence women, and a resistance to this silencing that involves a release and a validation, rather than a repression, of a subversive feminine voice.

Clearly, for Chopin, certain voices (like Naomi Mobry's) sacrifice the self for a momentary eruption of language no one can understand. There is no subversion that can occur from “outside” the confines of dominant discourses; as Edna Pontellier learns, there is no feminine voice “out there” that can be used to disrupt the voice of patriarchy that is “in here.” But some forms of discourse walk the delicate tightrope between “a language which nobody understood” and the silence that is patriarchal repression of women's speech. Some forms of voice successfully challenge patriarchal language through a covert, metalinguistic interrogation of its very premises. So stories like “Her Letters” and “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” may be paradigmatic texts for women's experiences with patriarchal language and their development of an unruly voice. In Julius Caesar Mark Antony states that “the evil that men do lives after them.” But texts, too, have a life of their own, a life that may exceed the author's and one day undo the evil men do. Like Elizabeth Stock's one story and the messages of the wife in “Her Letters,” Chopin's texts live on after her, graphically depicting the way women were silenced and effaced but also speaking the subversive message that women desire—and sometimes find—a subjectivity and voice that exceeds that granted to them by the Law of the Father. I think Kate Chopin would be pleased to know that today, her most daring works—works like The Awakening, “Elizabeth Stock's One Story,” and “The Storm”—are widely anthologized, admired, and read. In the end, Chopin had the last laugh. She may have lost the battle for feminine self-expression, but she won the war.