SOURCE: Gunning, Sandra. “Rethinking White Female Silences: Kate Chopin's Local Color Fiction and the Politics of White Supremacy.” In Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912, pp. 108-35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Gunning analyzes Chopin's works for evidence of her views on racial violence and stereotypes.]

Harris & Page of course wrote from a different standpoint;—that of the white gentleman as I write from the standpoint of a white lady.

—Grace King

In any discussion of late-nineteenth-century American and African American literary discourses on white supremacist violence, George Washington Cable, Thomas Dixon, Thomas Nelson Page, Ida B. Wells, Charles Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, David Bryant Fulton, and even Pauline Hopkins must undoubtedly be included as prominent figures. Yet this standard list suggests that lynching and mob rule were of concern only to black and white male writers and to black women activists. Much work remains to be done in uncovering how white women participated in debates about white supremacist violence, whether as literary figures or as social reformers. The tradition of white female activism perfected during the antislavery movement culminated by the end of the century in women's efforts to secure temperance reform, to improve the social conditions of the poor, to “Americanize” immigrants, and especially to extend women's rights to include the vote, access to birth control, and higher education. Such widespread activity would surely have set the stage for white female commentary on white supremacist violence.¹

Not surprisingly, white women ran the gamut of opinions for and against lynching. By the 1890s, one of the most notorious supporters of the idea of the black rapist was Rebecca Latimer Felton, wife of a Georgia minister-politician, an avid suffragist, a supporter of the temperance movement, and later the first woman to serve as a United States senator. Speaking in 1897 at the annual meeting of the State Agricultural Society of Georgia on ways to improve farm life, Felton urged rural whites to look to the protection of their women:

I warned those representative men … of the terrible effects that were already seen in the corruption of the negro vote, their venality, the use of whiskey, the debasement of the ignorant and incitement of evil passion in the vicious. … A crime nearly unknown before and during the war had become an almost daily occurrence and mob law had also become omnipotent.

It was at the same meeting that she made her infamous plea to white men to “lynch a thousand times a week if necessary,” provoking the ire of black and white men opposed to lynching, including the black editor Alexander Manly from Wilmington, North Carolina, and Andrew Sledd, a white Southerner and a professor at Emory.² Felton's views were popular enough, however, for her to launch a lecture tour aimed at protesting what she saw as white male inaction in the face of black rape.

Because of her sympathy for Southern white supremacists, Frances Willard of the Women's Christian Temperance Union found herself embroiled with Ida B. Wells in a battle over her public reputation as a moral reformer. The furor arose over an 1890 newspaper interview given by Willard in which she described “great dark faced mobs whose rallying cry is better whiskey and more of it.” Willard claimed that “[t]he safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.”³ During her first visit to England on an anti-lynching lecture tour, Wells publicly attacked Willard for this stand, a move that prompted the British temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset to publish a new interview with Willard to serve as a vindication. In the interview Willard stood by her belief that Southern families were menaced by blacks, a fact she had heard from “the best people I know in the South”; still, to mollify critics like Wells, she added at the same time that “no crime however heinous can by any possibility excuse the commission of any act of cruelty or the taking of any human life without due course of law.”⁴ Willard's WCTU eventually passed an anti-lynching resolution in 1893; and despite Wells's protests that Willard's earlier public utterances were tantamount to a support of white violence, the temperance reformer was staunchly defended by William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Julia Ward Howe.

Compared to Willard, Chicago social worker and NAACP member Jane Addams was much less equivocal in her attack on lynching, publishing in the January 1901 issue of the Independent an indictment of mob rule called “Respect for Law.” However, as Bettina Aptheker has pointed out, Addams did not reject the image of the black beast; rather, she saw lynching as an act that degraded white participants and enforced a disregard for legitimate institutions of law. Addams admitted that there was indeed “a peculiar class of crime [i.e. rape] committed by one race against another,” but she argued “[t]hat the bestial in man, that which leads him to pillage and rape, can never be controlled by public cruelty and dramatic punishment, which too often cover fury and revenge.” Addams went on to suggest that

[b]rutality begets brutality; and proceeding on the theory that the negro is undeveloped, and therefore must be treated in this primitive fashion, is to forget that the immature pay little attention to statements, but quickly imitate what they see. The under-developed are never helped by such methods as these, for they learn only by imitation. The child who is managed by a system of bullying and terrorizing is almost sure to be the vicious and stupid child.⁵

Like Willard, Addams was horrified by mob rule; but she also gave credence to the white supremacist notion that “under-developed” black men were driven to rape white women, and that as moral beings blacks were severely handicapped. And again it was Ida B. Wells who responded to what she saw as serious moral lapses in white feminist argumentation on lynching, replying several months later to Addams's comments with her article “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” also published in the Independent. While more respectful of Addams than she was of Willard, Wells nevertheless pointed out firmly that the belief in black rape was “the same baseless assumption which influences ninety-nine out of every one hundred persons who discuss this question” and urged that “misrepresentation should have no place in the discussion of this all important question, [and] that the figures of the lynching record should be allowed to plead, trumpet tongued, in defense of the slandered dead.”⁶

Activists like Wells would fight for decades more to encourage many white women reformers to rethink their stance on white supremacy. The situation was made more difficult by the fact that, in their postbellum campaign, white women suffragists embraced a strategy of “expediency” under which they accommodated white supremacy in order to sign on Southern states behind the campaign for the woman's vote. In 1867, early in the post-Civil War campaign for suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that

[w]ith the black man, we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life and thus, by the law of attraction, to lift all races to a more even platform than can ever be reached in the political isolation of the sexes.⁷

In terms of a white female organization dedicated to fighting white supremacist violence, Wells and others had to wait until 1930 for the founding of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching organized by Jesse Daniel Ames, herself a white suffragist. Ames's organization “represented an acceptance of accountability for a racist mythology that white women had not created but that they nevertheless served.” Unlike earlier suffragists who had argued that “the Negro Problem” and the political and social advancement of women were completely separate issues, Ames saw lynching “not only as an obstacle to regional development and an injustice to blacks, but also an insult to white women.”⁸ Ames and her organization sought to work with black women against lynching; such interracial cooperation made her recognize more clearly that the practice of lynching was itself supported by stereotypes of black female promiscuity—a fantasy that shielded white men who raped black women.

The record left by Felton, Willard, Addams, and Ames suggests that white women reformers who were interested in improving race relations came late to a sophisticated analysis of white supremacist violence, which is why, for example, overtly anti-lynching works of fiction by white women writers seem so few and far between before 1920.⁹ Thus, decades after the efforts of Wells and other black women, the May 1923 issue of Century Magazine contains the short story “Nemesis” by Virginia novelist Mary Johnston on the aftereffects of a lynching on a small Southern town. In the story Johnston acknowledges that lynching is less about black guilt (the story's lynchers never actually ascertain whether their victim is guilty) than it is about white male desire for revenge. A number of the lynch mob's leaders are in fact adopted sons of the South, hailing from New England, the Midwest, and the West, revealing Johnston's belief that the responsibility for white supremacist violence was national and not just Southern. The story ends when the ghost of the dead rape victim returns to admonish her husband for his role in the lynching: “John, don't ever say that you-all did that for me! If you're asking me—no! no! no! What good could it do you-all or me or him or anybody? It didn't please and it didn't serve—not anything—not anybody!”¹⁰ Silenced first by the rape attack and then by the imposition of male narratives about black criminality, the woman rejects the crime of murder committed in her name as an act that serves no purpose for the protection of the white home and hearth. Curiously, though, Johnston only implies that the black man lynched is not guilty of rape.

Without disregarding the nature of white female political discourse on lynching and rape, it is equally important to identify how these topics surfaced in late-nineteeth-century white women's fiction, beyond the kind of direct commentary provided by Felton, Addams, Ames, or Johnston. In the field of black women's writing, for instance, only recently have critics paid any attention to how Pauline E. Hopkins explicitly addresses racial violence in Contending Forces (1900), a novel ostensibly designed to address issues of race, femininity, and domesticity. Instead of dismissing Hopkins's work as a novel of black manners marred by a “wild portrayal of injustice, cruelty, and brutality,” scholars now recognize Contending Forces's explicit contrast of the promise of black domestic life in America with the crisis of lynching and rape as Hopkins's challenge to readers to recognize that the social and political survival of blacks into the twentieth century depended on the defeat of white supremacy.¹¹

Given the fact that turn-of-the-century white women writers—already negotiating traditional notions about what passed as suitable subject matter for the female author—were further constricted by the conservative tastes of publishers and public alike, can we also read white women's writing in the 1890s as similarly engaged with lynching and white supremacy through a certain kind of genteel discourse of fiction?¹²

This chapter sets forth a “rereading” of the recently canonized turn-of-the-century white woman writer Kate Chopin, as an attempt to expand the assumed record of American women's responses to lynching beyond the official utterances of the women who actually spoke out on the issue. Reclaimed by twentieth-century feminist scholars because of her iconoclastic representation of female sexual rebellion in The Awakening (1899), Chopin has always been portrayed as sympathetic to the New Woman movement at the turn of the century. On the subject of Chopin and white supremacy, critics uniformly turn to her 1893 short story “Désirée's Baby” to demonstrate her critique of nineteenth-century double standards of race and sexual conduct that governed the lives of white men and women. Still, though some attention has been paid to the ethnic contexts of her Southern fiction, little has been done to examine fully how the themes of female sexual liberation can be read specifically in the context of the racial politics of female containment inherent in the ideology of lynching. Similarly, more consideration is needed of how her local color fiction addressed not just miscegenation and black concubinage, but also the problems of regional recovery after the Civil War and Reconstruction, of white male aggression, and of white fantasies of black sexuality.¹³ Unfortunately, the traditional simplification by white feminist critics and others of the term woman writer renders economic, racial, ethnic, and regional distinctions subordinate to gender, masking the unavoidable convergence of all five categories and severely limiting fuller critical discussion of Chopin and other white female writers within American literature.

As Anne Goodwyn Jones has suggested, even when we assume that “Chopin's concerns more centrally had to do with what she saw as the almost immutable and far from regionally limited relationship between woman and man, the symbols she chose to invest her subject with imaginative power come from her [S]outhern experience.”¹⁴ Thus, many of Chopin's short stories, as well as her first novel, At Fault (1890), evince a strong preoccupation with white adjustment in the wake of black emancipation, with the problem of internal ethnic and class divisions, and with the shift from rural to urban, from Southern to Northern bases of power.¹⁵

Chopin's fictional representation of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction social scenes are not designed to promote pro-black political activism, as in the case of some of the fiction by William Dean Howells or George Washington Cable. Hers are “thoroughly orthodox” late-nineteenth-century white attitudes toward African Americans; and in much of her work, images of “black suffering, slavery and oppression are all linguistically and thematically appropriated for white women.”¹⁶ However, her fiction's representation of white society as heterogeneous and at times violently divided bears some comparison to the conflicted responses to the stereotype of white unity that appear in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and later in the novels of Thomas Dixon. Also, since so many of Kate Chopin's stories are about white men as well as white women, the issue of white supremacy and its attendant violence surfaces as a subject not through the unambiguous lens of racial war, but subtly, within an often all-white context that has been carefully and imperceptibly “shaped and transformed by the presence of the marginalized.”¹⁷

KATE CHOPIN AS WHITE SOUTHERNER

The “Southern experience” on which Chopin drew heavily to shape her white characters has the potential to complicate considerably how we read her representation of whiteness, and specifically of white masculinity. Unlike Thomas Dixon, Chopin was not reared in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, but both her childhood in St. Louis before the Civil War and her marriage to a racially loyal white Southerner tied her on the one hand to the memory of slavery, and on the other to the violence of white supremacy itself.

Chopin was born Catherine O'Flaherty in 1851 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her Irish father, a prosperous self-made merchant, died in a train accident when she was five. After her father's death, Kate O'Flaherty was raised exclusively by the independent women of her mother's family, presided over by Victoire Verdon Charleville, a descendent of the early creole settlers to the city. At the time of Chopin's childhood, St. Louis was technically Northern, but “having been settled by French [slaveholding] colonists from New Orleans” the city did possess a Southern as well as a frontier quality. Though many of its citizens did not own slaves, St. Louis had become a slave trading center, slave auctions taking place “[o]ccasionally … on the steps of the [city] Courthouse”; on the eve of the Civil War, the O'Flaherty household included six slaves.¹⁸ Staunchly Confederate in sympathy, with slaveholding relatives living in Louisiana and a son fighting for the Southern cause, the O'Flahertys were disliked by the pro-Union faction in St. Louis and at one point in 1863 a Union flag was draped on their front porch. In what might be considered the only overtly political act of her life, thirteen-year-old Kate O'Flaherty angrily ripped the flag off her home; she narrowly escaped arrest by the pro-Union authorities of the city, but her act earned her the nickname of St Louis's. “Littlest Rebel.”¹⁹ The family survived the war, suffering some vandalism of their home, but also enduring the death their son George while he served in the Confederate army. And of course they were destined to lose their slaves, including one Louise, who was presumably Chopin's cherished black “mammy.”²⁰

Kate O'Flaherty's connection to the South was reaffirmed by her marriage to Louisiana-born Oscar Chopin in 1870. After a courtship and a wedding ceremony in St. Louis, and then a European honeymoon that coincided with the Franco-Prussian War, the Chopins returned to the United States late in the year to settle in New Orleans, where Oscar worked as a cotton factor. By 1879 he was experiencing financial difficulties, and he moved his large family (five sons) north to Cloutierville, a small village in Natchitoches Parish where he had purchased some land to argument the remains of his family estate. After bearing her sixth and last child in Cloutierville, Kate Chopin remained there with her husband until his death in 1882.

Oscar Chopin had never been successful as a businessman, and the newly widowed Kate had to resolve her husband's enormous debt in the midst of caring for six children. Undaunted by this challenge, she put the estate in order and in 1884 decided to move back to St. Louis to be with her mother. Thus it was in St. Louis, in the comfort of first and familiar surroundings, that Chopin drew on almost twelve years of life in Louisiana, publishing two novels and approximately a hundred stories about black and white women and men, and the complexities of sexuality, marriage, and maternity. She corresponded frequently with her in-laws in Cloutierville and kept up with the running of the Chopin estate, which was now rented out. She never returned to Louisiana for any extended period, and she died in St. Louis in 1904.

In terms of race relations, Louisiana had a unique history in the South. New Orleans, Chopin's home during the early years of her marriage, offered residents a rich mélange of French, African, Anglo, and Spanish cultures. While other Southern states during slavery enacted segregation and antimiscegenation laws, in Louisiana blacks and whites mixed freely in the Catholic Church, in the street, and at quadroon balls that still occurred after the Civil War; indeed there were even a few interracial marriages, despite the ban against such contact.²¹

Before the war, free blacks “owned real and personal property (including slaves), contracted legal marriages, testified against whites in courts of law, learned trades and professions, and participated in music and the arts.”²² Interestingly, free men of color had never been closely allied with black slaves. After emancipation, however, the fates of both the free gens de couleur and the exslaves were linked in the struggle for civil rights. According to John Blassingame, the ex-slave, as “the property the white man went to war to preserve, was the ubiquitous reminder of his folly, guilt, humiliation, and defeat. … Most whites were bewildered, angered, and humiliated by the change” in the status quo.²³ Thus, despite the seemingly liberal racial atmosphere of antebellum Louisiana, after the war the stage was set for violence as whites moved to regain control.

The worlds of New Orleans, Cloutierville, and the Cane River valley in which Kate Chopin set her local color stories had their own violent racial past, which undoubtedly become part of the fabric of both her Southern identity and her Southern writing. Indeed, as Helen Taylor asserts, “[s]he could hardly have been oblivious to the many class and race tensions in the area, or to the considerable shifts in economic and social power and influence” that marked the tumultuous years after the Civil War.²⁴ Before the war, her father-in-law, the French-born Dr. Jean Baptiste Chopin, had been a wealthy cotton planter with 94 slaves and more than 4,000 acres of land. Prior to the advent of Dr. Chopin, the land had been owned by Robert McAlpin, said to have been the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's cruel slaveholder Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Comparison and confusion in the minds of local residents between the two was inevitable, since Dr. Chopin was notoriously cruel to both his slaves and his white wife.²⁵

As a child Oscar Chopin had been unwilling to brutalize his father's slaves, but as an adult coming of age after the Civil War he was clearly a devoted white supremacist, since in 1874 he enlisted in the Crescent City White League. The White Leaguers, whose members numbered among New Orleans's white elite, sought to oust the state's Republican administration, which was hated for favoring blacks. In the summer of 1874, the armed paramilitary White Leaguers—including Oscar Chopin—stormed City Hall to force the mayor's resignation, and a struggle with the city police ensued. Yet another company of white supremacists moved on the State House, expelling the Republication state government until federal troops reinstated it a week later. Despite nationwide indignation at the League's actions, the federal government did not prosecute the rebels. The “Battle of Liberty Place,” as it was latter dubbed by New Orleans whites, resulted in the deaths of twenty people and the wounding of a hundred others.²⁶

Oscar Chopin's affiliation with the White League would not have seemed out of place in the racially polarized context of Reconstruction. During this period, Louisiana creoles from all classes—especially in New Orleans—swelled the ranks of the state's many local white supremacist organizations such as the Innocents and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1868 almost half the white male population in many parishes of Louisiana belonged to the Knights of the White Camellia (KWC), an organization founded by the French creole Alcibiade DeBlanc that was pledged toward “the MAINTENANCE OF THE SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE in this Republic.”²⁷ The northern part of the state increasingly became a Klan stronghold; and in 1873, whites murdered 103 blacks in the town of Colfax.²⁸ Such violence continued through to the end of the century. In 1891 eleven Italian immigrants were lynched by a New Orleans mob after a court failed to convict them for the murder of a police officer. Lynching continued, and in 1898 blacks were disenfranchised with the inclusion of the “grandfather” clause in the state constitution. One of the most infamous race riots in American history occurred in 1900 in New Orleans—the same city Kate Chopin loved to roam during the 1870s, fascinated by the exotic presence of black culture.²⁹ The riot began with an altercation between black resident Robert Charles and the city police, and it finally exploded into a bloody white rampage against the city's black population that lasted for four days.³⁰

Site of the Chopin family's ancestral home, Natchitoches Parish had a history consistent with the rest of the state, which meant that its black residents (60 percent of the parish's population) were consistently targeted by white supremacists. Cloutierville resident Phanor Breazeale left a “Statement on Reconstruction Natchitoches” that chronicled his and other white supremacists' criminal activities against blacks in the parish from 1872 to 1878, the year before Kate and Oscar Chopin moved north to the town.³¹ Dispassionately and in chilling detail Breazeale describes white Democratic election fraud, the purpose of which was to counteract black Republican votes, and his own eager participation in the ambush and lynching of blacks.³² In one anecdote Breazeale regrets only that, in attempting to lynch a black political activist, his comrades inadvertently murdered a harmless black sexton of the Episcopal church. Despite such “mistakes,” Breazeale views his actions and those of other white terrorists with pride, carefully recounting his substantial role in the intimidation and harassment of an elected black official and his family. Ironically, Breazeale makes it clear in his narrative that the motives of such white “patriots” were purely to exercise political control and intimidation, not to protect white women, noting that though “the negro population on the west bank of Red River of ward 3 was enormously in the majority … they were good quiet citizens and obeyed the ladies looking after the crops for their absent husbands.”³³ Breazeale eventually married Oscar Chopin's sister, and in later years he served as a friend and confidant to Kate Chopin, entertaining her with tales of his Reconstruction-era activities. According to some, Breazeale told Chopin the story that later became The Awakening. And, according to Emily Toth, Breazeale might have served as a model for the many attractive but ungovernable white male characters in Chopin's fiction.³⁴

The turmoil of politically and racially violent Louisiana in Kate Chopin's lifetime surfaces obliquely in her fiction, mediated through localized representations of domestic disputes and rural community clashes among whites with differing class, regional, and ethnic affiliations (upper-class French creoles still living on the land, urban residents of New Orleans, lower-class cajuns, “American” whites).

CLASS, RACE, ETHNICITY, AND MALE AGGRESSION IN CHOPIN'S FICTION

In her discussion of pre-Civil War Afro-creole culture in New Orleans, historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall asserts that the “Afro-creole culture of New Orleans has had a significant impact not only on blacks of Louisiana and Afro-American culture in the United States but on American culture in general.”³⁵ Both the cultural and political conditions of black life had a continuing impact on white racial consciousness, and Chopin's literary imagination was undoubtedly shaped by her exposure to the political and cultural turmoil of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras. Thus her short stories often deploy a problematic, unresolved investigation of the limits of white action against the backdrop of increasingly prescriptive social roles for both blacks and whites.

As active characters, blacks are not central to Chopin's exploration of white Southern identities; however, the use of blackness, slavery, and Reconstruction as cultural and historical referents to locate and describe white social experience is crucial in her fiction. Chopin constructs blackness generally (although not exclusively) as benign, separate, and exotic rather than as monstrous. Most characterizations draw on the old standards of local color and plantation fiction: blacks like Old Uncle Oswald in “The Bênitous' Slave” and the servants in “Old Aunt Peggy,” “Tante Cat'rinette” and “Nég Créol” are quaint “darky” throwbacks to serene plantation days.

When she is critical of Southern culture, as in “Désirée's Baby” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” Chopin uses the stereotype of black sexual freedom as a metaphor to criticize hypocrisy over miscegenation and white refusal to come to terms with sexual passion. Chopin does not, however, advocate the abolition of Jim Crow. When the issue of integration surfaces, it is usually seen as an obnoxious act performed half-seriously by local whites who want to harass their own kind, as her novel At Fault and the story “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” demonstrate. Blacks in her fiction welcome separation, and mulatto characters in “A Little Free Mulatto” and “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” find peace and happiness in the little black enclave L'Isle des Mulâtres.³⁶

When blacks and whites do meet, as long as social distinctions are upheld, they confront each other easily and without tensions, as in “Ozème's Holiday.” While the cajun farmer Ozème vacations around the Cane River valley, he stops to nurse black Aunt Tildy's sick nephew and harvest her cotton before the rain. Working side by side in the field with Aunt Tildy, Ozème remarks jokingly: “I am watchin' you, ol' woman; you don' fool me. You got to work that han' o' yo's spryer than you doin', or I'll take the rawhide. You done fo'got w'at the rawhide tas'e like, I reckon” (The Complete Works of Kate Chopin [hereafter abbreviated as CW], 386).³⁷ Aunt Tildy is highly amused at this “reminder” of the old days, as the white man “Mista Ozème,” who might have beaten her with impunity during slavery, does not mind helping her out of a bind after the Civil War.

Chopin's portraits of blacks are generally one-dimensional, but her representation of the internal world of white Southerners is always marked by an acute sensitivity to the heterogeneity of origins and experiences in terms of class, ethnicity, and generation. In contrast to the cajun farmer Ozème, members of the French creole planter class who bear allegiance to the Old South are almost overwhelmed by the historical turn of events. Such is the case in Chopin's story “Ma'ame Pélagie” where the main character, a former plantation belle, cannot exist outside of the memories of her family's past. For men of Ma'ame Pélagie's class, the difficulty of negotiating change expresses itself in community violence and self-destructive behavior, both of which from Chopin's point of view are counterproductive to the success of the postwar South.³⁸ The primary example of her complex attitude toward class and white male aggression appears in the saga of the Santien family whose fate Chopin outlines in several stories, including At Fault, “In Sabine” (1893), “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” (1893), and “A No-Account Creole” (1894)—works in which the contradictions around class and white male aggression generate their own particular discourse on whiteness.

Like the Chopins and their Cloutierville neighbors the Sampites, the fictional Santiens were wealthy creole planters before the war: “In the days of Lucien Santien and his hundred slaves, [the plantation] … had been very splendid in the wealth of its thousand acres. But the war did its work, of course. Then [his son] Jules Santien was not the man to mend such damage as the war had left” (CW, 82). The “damage” inflicted by the Civil War comes visibly in the loss of slaves, and the Santiens find themselves unable to manage under the economically altered conditions of the South. After the death of Jules, Madame Santien returns to her family in France, while her sons Hector, Placide, and Grégoire tend to what remains of the family estate, but to no avail.³⁹ According to Grégoire, “Hec, he took charge the firs' year an' run it in debt. Placide an' me did'n' have no betta luck the naxt year. Then the creditors come up from New Orleans an' took holt. That' the time I packed my duds an' lef'” (CW, 751). Eventually Hector chooses to live among the lowlife of New Orleans, and Placide earns the nickname of “a no-account creole” because of his lack of ambition and desultory attitude toward work. Only young Grégoire attempts to integrate himself within a postwar community when he goes to help out on the thriving plantation Place-du-Bois, owned by his young, recently widowed aunt Thérèse Lafirme.

The Santien brothers reference what Joseph G. Tregle calls the “myth” of the creole, a race that

produced “the aristocracy of the region” through most of the nineteenth century, maintaining family circles renowned for haughty exclusivity as well as cultural refinement and worldly sophistication, the whole invigorated and sustained by fierce conceit of ancestry and a ‘chivalry’ which gave its inheritors certainty of their superiority over lesser breeds of men.⁴⁰

Quick-tempered, arrogant, but made immensely attractive and sympathetic in Chopin's stories, the Santiens are romanticized in standard plantation fiction style as reminders of a more adventuresome, more passionate past. Thus, in “A No-Account Creole,” Grégoire's older brother Placide inhabits a bucolic world in a crumbling plantation house on his ruined, mortgaged land, content to spend his days doing odd jobs or wandering around the Red River. Though Chopin had originally conceived her story around the life and loves of a woman, Euphrasie Manton, the plot centers squarely on Placide's struggle with destiny and (dis)empowerment in his role as Euphrasie's discarded creole lover.⁴¹ Indeed, Placide holds the story hostage when, gun in hand, he sets out to murder the yankified Offdean for taking possession of his family's land as well as of his childhood sweetheart. Bloodshed is narrowly averted when, as an ultimate demonstration that no one but a creole knows “how to love” (CW, 101), Placide decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and free Euphrasie from all romantic obligation.

Chopin's story would function simply as a romantic tribute to male heterosexual passion and the capacity for noble self-sacrifice, were it not for the fact that she places Placide's initial impulse toward murder within antebellum traditions of Southern honor and a legacy of white violence produced and nurtured by the South's defining history of slavery. Meanwhile, both Euphrasie and Offdean are products of an increasingly urban world, where to a great extent the social status of whites is fluid. Importantly, Placide's link to the antebellum past is enforced by the only moment of black narrative in the story. One of Santien's ex-slaves, La Chatte, recalls a chilling incident during her enslavement when a youthful Placide, intolerant of having his desires disregarded, forced La Chatte at gunpoint to drop her other chores and fix him a meal of coquignoles and coffee. During her entire time in the kitchen, until the meal's preparation was complete, Placide held the gun to her head. At the end of her story, La Chatte hints at even more such incidents with the patriarch Jules Santien. As a poverty-stricken black laundress on the decayed Santien estate, La Chatte calls to mind a disenfranchised black population whose collective memory speaks to the historical brutality of life under slavery, as well as to the dual hope and disappointment fostered by Reconstruction and the years beyond. Though each character references a separate group fear of disenfranchisement in both the story's present and its implied future, Placide's tragedy as a failed white man is made to displace that of La Chatte.

The anxiety over white failure engages with but is not analogous to the “failure” of blacks to move from slavery to freedom. Rather, the historical and political isolation suffered by white characters such as Placide both recalls and denies the isolation imposed on American blacks at the historical moment of the story's publication in 1894. Placide is celebrated on white ethnic terms as a romantic creole lover, but his final disqualification as an overly passionate suitor and an irresponsible landowner echoes both the sexual criminalization of black men as beasts/rapists under the regime of late-nineteenth-century white supremacy and their disenfranchisement as post-Civil War citizens. Thus, inasmuch as Placide's violence toward Offdean is not “racial” violence, it is racialized within the context of his past life as a slaveholder's son and of his present life as a white man who operates on his own codes of chivalrous conduct in an economically dynamic, biracial, multiethnic South. Placide's story also references that of countless black men in the South in that both he and his creed must be evacuated to make room for a presumably more acceptable type of lover and landowner in the New South. Thus, though Chopin's sympathetic focus in the story seems to leave room only for Placide, so that blackness can not function as more than a shadowy subtext for the narrative, her articulation of a white man's history in terms that might have been used to describe the fortunes of African American men underscores her dependence on racial discourses about blacks and whites as mutually constitutive, with or without the presence of black characters in her fiction.

This pattern of representation that demands a simultaneous referencing of black and white also marks Chopin's narrative strategy in At Fault. The novel's main focus is the romantic relationship between Thérèse Lafirme and David Hosmer, a St. Louis businessman who runs a timber mill on Thérèse's land. In this context Chopin seems to put aside the explosive issues of black suffrage, the Klan, and mob violence, focusing instead on the white domestic haven maintained by Thérèse, the enlightened female despot of Place-du-Bois.

At Fault adheres to the standard plot of the North/South reunion romance between Thérèse and Hosmer to signify the promise of Henry Grady's New South: the unity between Southern agricultural power and Northern commercial and business interests. The subplot of racial discontent and violence, however, belongs to two other significant characters: on the one hand Grégoire, who struggles to adapt to the world created by Thérèse and Hosmer; and on the other the destructive, pretechnocratic, mixed-blood character Joçint. Their struggle is figured in the context of a New South coming to terms with the railroad, industrial development by the Northern business establishment represented by Hosmer, and the sudden shift of a black population from slavery to wage labor.

The tension between antebellum white ideals and the postemancipation threat of “color” comes when Grégoire surprises Joçint in the act of burning down Hosmer's mill: instead of relying on more legitimate methods of punishment, the creole fatally shoots the arsonist. While Chopin unmistakably suggests that Grégoire's murderous impulse is horrifying, her narrative allows no sympathy for the victim. Rude, animalistic, and “extremely treacherous” (CW, 757) as a direct consequence of his Indian blood, the dark-skinned Joçint represents a version of the black beast stereotype of pro-lynching fiction.⁴²

Donald Ringe has suggested that Chopin creates parallel figures in Grégoire and Joçint, figures whose “inner natures simply will not permit” assimilation into the postwar South.⁴³ However, as a creole Grégoire is allowed a certain heroic measure. As the unruly worker turned saboteur who refuses to adhere to the new order, Joçint and not Grégoire stands as the obstacle to national progress, and as such becomes the primary embodiment of evil in the novel's Southern white community—a fact that demands his extermination.⁴⁴ Consequently, as an act of salvation for the New South, Grégoire's murder of Joçint “is seen as less threatening and forgiven more easily by the whole community.”⁴⁵ His act of racial aggression creates exactly the same effects that real-life acts of white terrorism such as the lynching, Klan rides, and race riots of the type engaged in by Chopin's husband and Phanor Breazeale were supposed to achieve: the black workers who have been pilfering from the Lafirme plantation regard the show of white power with awe and are suitably respectful of traditional racial hierarchies. Thus Chopin's failure to offer a complete condemnation of Grégoire suggests that, though she may not approve of white violence, she respects its usefulness.

While Chopin's characterization of Joçint is consistent with some aspects of white supremacist ideology, she disrupts at least some of the traditional racial assumptions around the black beast in order to re-vision gender and race politics among the white characters. For one thing, the subplot repudiates the specific notion of the black as rapist, since Joçint is never a sexual threat to Thérèse. While the bloodshed in At Fault mirrors that of the real-life lynching of blacks, Chopin here implies in part that violence occurs, as even Thomas Dixon himself later acknowledged, “when the Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man.”⁴⁶ Thus the conflict between Joçint and his white employers is figured primarily as a clash of racially determined goals over the use of land and labor, rather than as the rape and possession of the white female body. This presentation fractures the rhetoric of white supremacy that fused the objectified and disempowered white female body with the white nation. As a white woman who does not rely on the “necessary” protection of white men, Thérèse's self-sufficiency and independence (as well as her willingness to cultivate her love for the married Hosmer) mark her as the kind of dangerous woman the black beast stereotype was meant to corral.

The reformulation of Thérèse's role in the white South's social and political future articulates a new rhetoric of race, gender, and power that is further exemplified in the contrasts between Grégoire and Thérèse as managers of the land and its black labor force. As an example of the new order of white female management, Thérèse Lafirme handles her intractable black workers with a disciplined yet kindly hand, replacing the male violence of slavery days with her Southern knowledge of the “darky” character.⁴⁷ Though the novel begins after the Civil War and affords us little information about her life as a wife and slave mistress, Thérèse Lafirme's ability to weather successfully the era's changing economic and social conditions speaks to Chopin's revision of the myth of the Southern belle. Specifically Chopin replaces this myth with the idea of the Southern woman as the white man's equal in leadership and business acumen. The roots of such a revision had taken hold during the Civil War, when white plantation mistresses had been required to manage the slaves and land following the departure of their men to join the Confederate army. With her character Thérèse, Chopin argues for a trend identified by her contemporary Wilbur Fisk Tillett in which “a woman is respected and honored in the South for earning her own living, and would lose respect if, as an able-bodied woman, she settled herself as a burden on a brother, or even on a father.”⁴⁸

Significantly, At Fault demonstrates that Chopin is willing to challenge the politics of white supremacy only enough to liberate her white heroines, while embracing at the same time its structuring of race relations to consolidate Thérèse's power. Rather than embodying a besieged nation, Chopin's heroine thus becomes a feminized literalization of Grady's New South community spirit, a community that, when dealing with racial inferiors, relies not on “the cowardly menace of mask or shot-gun, but [on] the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility, massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation of its liberty.”⁴⁹ Chopin's use of Grégoire confirms even Grady's admission that “under this fair seeming there is disorder and violence,” but Chopin also uses Thérèse to signify an alternate reality that respects traditional racial codes and racial balances of power without losing sight of the Southern white need for black labor.⁵⁰ As Grady himself suggests in his manifesto The New South, Thérèse Lafirme's world “is simply the old South under new conditions.”⁵¹

Grégoire clearly functions as a means of demarcating the space for the existence of a kind of Southern “New Woman,” but he also exists to help refigure significantly the meaning of white violence. For one thing, his role as an anachronism of the antebellum South displaces contemporary white anxiety over lynching as a barbarous practice. Grégoire's aggression is depicted as tragic rather than as merely destructive, and he is doubly romanticized as a gentleman and a passionate suitor.

As she does with Placide, Chopin specifically accounts for Grégoire's predilection for violent racial control by linking his behavior to antebellum male models of white behavior: he is fascinated by the memory of McFarlane, the first owner of Place-du-Bois, whose exercise of complete control over the lives of his slaves made him “[t]he meanest w'ite man thet ever lived”; he “can't res' in his grave fur the niggas he's killed” (CW, 751).⁵² Thus Grégoire's violence has no roots in the present political or domestic world of Place-du-Bois, and the racial and economic management of the South engineered by Thérèse and Hosmer is vindicated from its own historical submersion within a world of racial turmoil. Their system is based on a subjugation of black labor, but their dominance is masked behind the figure of Grégoire; white racial violence is accounted for as simply a declining problem of creole arrogance out-of-bounds, not a long-standing white antipathy to black economic and political rivalry that might extend into the twentieth century. So, the story implies, violence will disappear upon Grégoire's removal, rather than requiring a reform of black and white power relations.

While few scholars can conceive of naming Chopin, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon in the same breath, it is worth considering that Chopin shares these male writers' uneasiness with white violence. In his trilogy on the Ku Klux Klan, Dixon abhors the chaos of mob aggression, opting instead for the ritualized murder committed by his Klansmen, which he renders as almost a religious experience in its power to rejuvenate white masculinity. Page's Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (1898) does feature anti-black violence after Reconstruction; but by the novel's end, blacks under white supervision are pressed into service on the frontier as Indian fighters for the U.S. Army, thereby transforming racial aggression into a necessary tool for territorial expansion. Indeed, Page is most like Chopin in his short story collection In Ole Virginia (1887), where white violence is romanticized as a pre-Civil War occurrence not against blacks but within the context of Civil War battles and duels. He confronts interracial violence in the ghost story “No Haid Pawn,” but within an appropriately distancing context: his white hero, lost on a hunting trip, takes shelter in a haunted antebellum plantation and contemplates the deeds of the estate's long-dead West Indian (rather than American) slave owner, who was guilty of the vilest of deeds. Such a rescripting of the face of the South for a national audience would have minimized any white anxiety over the fifty to eighty blacks lynched yearly in the 1880s, and especially over anti-black riots that occurred in Carrollton, Mississippi, and Danville, Virginia, Page's home state.⁵³

In keeping with the need to distance her vision of the postwar South from the reality of lynching and to secure racial boundaries, Chopin uses Grégoire's behavior to repudiate violence as a practice that might put whites in the position of imitating (and thus embodying) the moral deficiency of the racial Other. (And here Chopin seems to echo the rhetoric of Jane Addams discussed earlier.) As an “enlightened” intersectional coalition of white characters, Thérèse, David, and his sister Melicent Hosmer are disturbed by the fact that Grégoire does not “understand [why] … he should receive any thing but praise for having rid the community of so offensive and dangerous a personage as Joçint,” and collectively they register an emotional shock at his complete “blind[ness] to the moral aspect of his deed” (CW, 824). The Northern characters exhibit a more extreme response. Indeed, Hosmer's inward abhorrence of the murder situates Grégoire in the same role of destructive animal inhabited by Joçint:

Heredity and pathology had to be considered in relation with the slayer's character. … [Hosmer] was conscious of an inward repulsion which this action of Grégoire's awakened in him,—much the same as a feeling of disgust for an animal whose instinct drives it to the doing of violent deeds,—yet he made no difference in his manner towards him.

(CW, 824)

In an outward show of racial solidarity with Thérèse's nephew, Hosmer is silent in front of black workers; but his private characterization of Grégoire draws again on the rhetoric of heredity and eugenics, and it registers a growing fear that violence achieves only the destruction of white morality.

As a potential mate for Grégoire, Melicent Hosmer responds to the young man with a kind of social segregation that mirrors general white hysteria over physical contact with black men. Immediately she makes plans to leave Place-du-Bois and berates Thérèse for tolerating Grégoire's presence after the murder:

“I don't understand you at all, Mrs. Lafirme. Think what he's done; murdered a defenseless man! How can you have him near you—seated at your table? I don't know what nerves you have in your bodies, you and David. … Never! If he were dying I wouldn't go near him.”

(CW, 828)

Melicent is criticized throughout the novel for her distaste at being around black servants and her harsh judgment of Southerners, yet her disciplined enforcement of proper separation between races and types stands in contrast to Grégoire's later undisciplined attempts at integration. Angered by Melicent and Thérèse's condemnation of Joçint's murder, Grégoire becomes a parody of the Northern integrationist when at gunpoint he forces his fellow townsmen to drink with blacks.⁵⁴ This chaotic, last-ditch attempt to reaffirm his power as an aristocrat only results in disruption of the community's moral and racial harmony, since whites, angered at this social imposition, begin to threaten the innocent black men Grégoire has ordered into the bar.⁵⁵ As the black workers remark, “Grégoir gwine be Grégoir tell he die” (CW, 833), so the only option is to expel him from Place-du-Bois.

Still, it is significant that, although Grégoire must be exiled, by the end of the novel he is reincarnated as a heroic ideal. When toward the end of the narrative Thérèse receives word that Grégoire has been killed in a Texas bar-room brawl, all is forgiven as she and her workers grieve for him and revere his memory. This group includes even the black ferryman Nathan, “who had been one day felled to earth by a crowbar in Grégoire's hand, [and] had come himself to look at that deed as not altogether blamable in light of the provocation that had called it forth” (CW, 853). This ending makes sense given that Chopin, like her Northern contemporary Frances Willard, does not criticize Grégoire's racial attitude but rather his methods of racial control. Joçint is reprehensible because, as an Indian and a black, he is driven to impulsive destruction. Grégoire is reprehensible because his acts begin to imitate the violence, moral vacuity, and anti-progressivism of nonwhites. In their emotional restraint, their benevolent paternalism to blacks, their civilized acknowledgment of social rules, and their stand for modernization, Hosmer and Thérèse together represent for Chopin an alternative route for white development in the context of North/South social and economic alliances.

Chopin mythologizes aggression and white identity formation in the context of black slavery through the examples of Grégoire and Placide. Yet even as they are condemned for their violent outbursts and lack of self-discipline, theirs is “the only social class that Kate Chopin is really familiar with in this stratified society,” and with which, through characters like Thérèse Lafirme, she finally identifies.⁵⁶ In At Fault Chopin deconstructs white supremacy's myth of the black rapist in order to free her white women characters from restrictive political roles, yet the fact that she does not completely condemn Grégoire's instinct for race protection suggests that she embraces the sense of entitlement offered by the validation of whiteness.

Such validation is exemplified in her short story “In Sabine” where Chopin—in tandem with many of her contemporaries—turns from the planter class to lower-class whites for a portrait of real white evil. The main character in “In Sabine” is again Grégoire Santien, whom Chopin uses this time not to demarcate white shortcomings but to make clear the class-bound dimensions of idealized whiteness. “In Sabine” also functions as a commentary on ethnic division among whites themselves, specifically Americans and creoles in the context of increased anxiety over racial purity after emancipation.

In search of shelter near the Texas-Louisiana border in Sabine Parish, Grégoire encounters Bud Aiken, the “disreputable so-called ‘Texan’” (CW, 326) who habitually abuses his cajun wife 'Tite Reine. In the context of his rejection by Thérèse and Melicent, Grégoire is mindful of the need to control his behavior in the presence of women and so chooses not to kill Aiken; instead Grégoire merely distracts him with a long poker game and liberal supplies of alcohol. Exhausted from hours of carousing, Aiken falls into a deep, drunken sleep, allowing Grégoire to put 'Tite Reine on a horse headed back to her family in adjacent Natchitoches Parish.

While Grégoire represents for Chopin the aristocratic white man made rigid by his adherence to past values, Bud Aiken signifies by both his alien class and his ethnic origins an even clearer notion of evil, a construction that affords Grégoire a certain absolution in the aftermath of Joçint's murder. As the enemy of the kind of refinement symbolized by Thérèse's new feminine South, Aiken treats Reine like a black slave, sending her “out into the field to pick cotton with old Uncle Mortimer” (CW, 331), the neighboring black sharecropper. Such an attempt to appropriate the lifestyle of a wealthy antebellum planter marks Aiken as a social upstart, while his enslavement of 'Tite Reine constitutes a corruption of the kinds of social relations epitomized at Place-du-Bois.

Reine's denigration in Aiken's household is rendered complete when, as she stares at Grégoire from the shock of seeing a familiar face from home, Aiken insults her racially: “‘Well, is that all you got to say to my frien' Mr. Sanchun? That's the way with them Cajuns, … ain't got sense enough to know a white man when they see one’” (CW, 327). Chopin's depiction of Aiken's denigration of 'Tite Reine's ethnic identity and his literal enslavement of a white woman evoke the familiar nineteenth-century feminist representation of marriage as enslavement, and the paralleling of helpless femininity with disenfranchised blackness.⁵⁷ Indeed, Reine suspects that Aiken really wants her not as a wife but as a slave concubine:

“sometime' he plague me mos' crazy; he tell me 't ent no preacher, it 's a Texas drummer w'at marry him an' me; an' w'en I don' know w'at way to turn no mo', he say no, it's a Meth'dis' archbishop, an' keep on laughin' 'bout me, an' I don' know w'at the truth!”

(CW, 330)

Anna Shannon Elfenbein suggests that Reine's tale of white abuse is tantamount to a “denial [on Chopin's part] of the chivalrous claims of white men and their rationalization of lynch law as a means of dealing with the brute ‘nigger’,” demonstrating that “Chopin clearly anticipates the dawning racial awareness of white women” who would later agitate against lynching.⁵⁸ This idea seems confirmed by the actions of the story's only black character. As Reine tells the story, Bud “‘would 'a' choke' me to death one day w'en he was drunk, if [black] Unc' Mort'mer had n' make 'im lef go—with his axe ov' his head’” (CW, 329-30). This scene of a black raising an axe against a white man might ordinarily result in a lynching. Yet Chopin revises the usual white construction of black violence to make it chivalric—not to point to blacks' capacity for heroism but rather to illustrate their imagined faithfulness to good whites (a fallback here on plantation fiction stereotypes). Mortimer is presented as asexual, a move that further draws on the plantation fiction stereotype of black men in order to underscore Aiken's capacity for lawless, abusive sexual desire. And since 'Tite Reine is abused by one white man only to be delivered by another in the form of Grégoire, her story functions less to revise the myth of the black beast for the benefit of African Americans, than to demarcate social and ethnic categories of whiteness.

Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, creole and American ethnic tensions had run high in Louisiana, a fact replicated in Chopin's designation of Aiken as the alien villain. According to historian Joseph Tregle, however, such tensions were severely altered after the Civil War because black emancipation brought (at least for a time) de jure black equality: “In the midst of this convulsion, the creole was caught up not simply in a general Southern explosion of antiblack fanaticism, but as well in a peculiar complication which once again set him apart.” As Tregle suggests,

[w]hereas once the danger confronting them had been humiliating loss of Gallic identity to a devouring Anglo-Saxon homogenization, now it was the infinitely more horrible possibility of being consigned to debased status in the “inferior” race, identified as half-brother to the black, a sort of mixed breed stripped of blood pride as well as of any claim to social or political preferment. … In such a manner was the cardinal tenet of the now familiar myth born: for those so threatened, henceforth to be creole was to be white.⁵⁹

Traditionally cajuns were “rigorously excluded [from the creole world] having arrived in the colony not straight from the Continent but by way of Canada”; yet in spite of 'Tite Reine's class origins, because Chopin decries the sexual enslavement and “negroization” of her heroine, she proves Reine's value as a white woman and thus argues the case for her salvation.⁶⁰ Thus, the urgency to rescue the cajun 'Tite Reine is also the urgency to rescue the identity of nontraditional American ethnicities chafing under restrictive definitions of whiteness, without altering the racial designation of blackness as undesirable.

Ironically, in achieving its rescue of white womanhood from white men, “In Sabine” disturbs the white supremacist fantasy of a natural white masculine solidarity always activated when white women are in danger. Thomas Dixon articulates this fantasy in The Leopard's Spots (1902) when he describes community reaction to the alleged black rapist: “In a moment the white race … [would be] fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate and revenge. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the banker and the blacksmith, the great and the small, they … [would all be] one now.”⁶¹

As Joyce Coyne Dyer and Robert Emmett Monroe suggest, Aiken may “represent the savage state that civilization must destroy, conquer and replace,” and Grégoire's own submerged desires for 'Tite Reine tie him to Aiken, even as Aiken's class and ethnic differences serve to distance Grégoire from that desire.⁶² With the “white” rapist directly represented as a mirror image of the white hero, Grégoire and Aiken exist as bifurcations of the same white male psyche, suggesting Chopin's implicit recognition that both the (white) male impulse to rescue and the (black) male impulse to rape are dual fictions arising out of conflicted white supremacist attitudes toward white women.

Dyer and Monroe also cite Grégoire's connection to Aiken in his sexual attraction to 'Tite Reine, as he recalls “her trim rounded figure; her piquant face with its saucy black coquettish eyes” (CW, 326).⁶³ But what establish Grégoire as Aiken's social and ethnic superior, what affirm his racial and moral purity, are both his designation of 'Tite Reine as white (and therefore deserving of his respect for her) and his refusal to act on his sexual desire. Consequently Grégoire becomes the perfect model of the romantic white lover:

Grégoire loved women. He liked their nearness, their atmosphere; the tones of their voices and the things they said; their ways of moving and turning about; the brushing of their garments when they passed him by pleased him. He was fleeing now from the pain that a woman had inflicted upon him. … The sight of 'Tite Reine's distress now moved him painfully.

(CW, 329)

The potential critique of “In Sabine” might have been devastating: instead of the homosocial black/white male struggle over the white female body, Chopin shifts to an all-white male context that refocuses male anxiety over sexuality and power within the terms of a purely white community. But since Reine's final savior is in fact the white Grégoire and not the black Mortimer, Chopin both references and then forecloses a more extended (and dangerous) political discussion of race, masculinity, and desire.

WHITE WOMEN AND METAPHORS OF BLACK (FE)MALE SEXUALITY

In At Fault, “A No-Account Creole,” and “In Sabine,” Chopin references post-Reconstruction fantasies of the black beast and the white female/nation as victim without relinquishing her impulse toward white racial solidarity. In “A Lady of Bayou St. John” (1893) and its companion story “La Belle Zoraïde” (1894), Chopin sustains her commentary on the restrictive linkage between white female bodies and the South, moving to a critique of ideologies of white sexual suppression through an evocation of desire for the black body. Not surprisingly, this evocation is heavily regulated through her use of the mulatto, the ubiquitous figure throughout Western discourse representing interracial sex. What results is a teasing play on miscegenation that excites and therefore challenges white sexual self-repression, without seriously threatening her contemporary white audience's abhorrence for integration.⁶⁴

Chopin's preoccupation with the taboo of female sexual desire, and her critique of double standards on the subject of male sexuality, is of course made abundantly clear in her stories on Southern women during slavery, in the era of Reconstruction, and beyond. Her characterizations in The Awakening and “Désirée's Baby” are obvious examples. Though set during slavery, “Désirée's Baby” critiques white hypocrisy over miscegenation for an audience mindful of racial tensions in the 1890s, and not just of the memories of slavery and the Civil War.⁶⁵ However, “A Lady of Bayou St. John” and its companion story “La Belle Zoraïde” advance a criticism of particular white female stereotypes that were directly sustained by and utilized for promoting the myth of the black rapist, and that by implication justified the widespread use of racial violence allegedly to protect whites from blacks.

Set during the Civil War, “A Lady of Bayou St. John” focuses on the appropriately named Madame Delisle, a Southern belle effectively isolated and immobilized on her husband's plantation. Cared for by her black mammy Manna-Loulou, Madame Delisle embodies the stereotype of a male-authored Southern femininity that denies female adulthood and independence to white women. Madame Delisle's inaction is contextualized by the traditional sources of power in the South (the upper-class white patriarchy signified by the plantation), an idealized blackness in submission (the vague reference to her only companions, the slaves), and also the far-off violence of the Civil War, which eventually precipitates a shift in Southern social roles.

But since the story focuses on a world on the verge of transition, an assault on traditional plantation life, traditional forms of white power, and (therefore) traditional forms of white female containment, is indeed the promised end. This end comes not in the form of social “rape” by an emancipated black population, but rather in Madame Delisle's near-seduction via love letters by her white neighbor Sépincourt. Yet, though life with Sépincourt promises more richness and sexual possibility than were hers in her previous existence, Madame Delisle finally fails at the critical moment. Learning of Gustave Delisle's death she rejects Sépincourt and constructs an altar out of her dead husband's portrait: “Can you not see that now my heart, my soul, my thought—my very life, must belong to another?” (CW, 301).

Her self-sacrifice reinitiates her into servitude to Southern patriarchy, signifying that, while the Civil War will free Manna-Loulou and the rest of the Delisle slaves, white women's adherence to old constructions will perpetuate their restriction into the post-Civil War era. In Madame Delisle's embrace of this traditional role, she literally becomes the Old South of plantation fiction lore, a living memorial to a past ideal of white manhood:

“My husband has never been so living to me as he is now. … I hear his familiar voice, his footsteps upon the galleries. We walk once more together beneath the magnolias; and at night in dreams I feel that he is there, there, near me. How could it be different! Ah! I have memories, memories to crowd and fill my life, if I live a hundred years!”

(CW, 301)

Consequently this embodiment of the South through the figure of the belle signifies the death of white femininity, not its protection. White supremacist identification of the white woman with the essence of Southern values and sectional identity is in effect a form of annihilation.

“La Belle Zoraïde” has traditionally been read as Chopin's commentary on what Madame Delisle has lost, since she implicitly contrasts her white heroine with the passionate main character of one of Manna-Loulou's bedtime stories. Like Madame Delisle, the octoroon slave Zoraïde is the tempter of male desire: “‘La belle Zoraïde had eyes that were so dusky, so beautiful, that any man who gazed too long into their depths was sure to lose his head, and even his heart sometimes’” (CW, 304). But whereas white men have the option of losing head and heart, of lusting and even loving, Zoraïde (who is clearly a reference for Madame Delisle) does not.

Zoraïde's dilemma lies in the fact that she must choose between M'sieur Ambroise, a light-skinned body servant favored by her despotic mistress Madame Delarivière, and the black fieldhand Mézor. When Zoraïde takes Mézor as her lover and becomes pregnant, an angry Madame Delarivière arranges for Mézor to be sold and then snatches away the newborn baby. Believing her child to be dead, Zoraïde goes mad, clutching at a bundle of rags in place of her infant. Insanity saves her from marrying M'sieur Ambroise, but it also cuts her off from motherhood, since she refuses the child returned to her by a remorseful Madame Delarivière. At the story's end, Madame Delisle's only reaction is to moan “‘La pauv' piti! Mieux li mouri!’” (“The poor little one! Better had she died!”) (CW, 307), in ambiguous response either to the fate of the child or to that of Zoraïde, with whom she perhaps identifies.

As Anna Shannon Elfenbein writes, Chopin's story suggests that “neither lady nor tragic octoroon can be free, since one is forced to live vicariously through tales of romance, and the other forced to escape the realities of her lot by going mad.”⁶⁶ Certainly Madame Delisle suggests the tragedy of self-repression for white women, while Zoraïde suggests the tragedy of slavery: both conditions produce a loss of female potential in terms of sexuality and motherhood. But while Zoraïde's fate mirrors that of Madame Delisle's, their stories are not analogous. Zoraïde instead becomes the final index of female hysteria, the real symbol of excess in female behavior, an excess that is at least hinted at by the fact that Zoraïde is akin to the white supremacist stereotype of the oversexed black who reproduces.

Zoraïde also becomes a referent for the story's subtextual flirtation with miscegenation as a corrupting social practice. At the start of the story Madame Delisle is figured as a lonely picture of dormant white sexual energy lying sensually “in her sumptuous mahogany bed,” an energy answered by the ministrations of Manna-Loulou: “The old negress … bathed her mistress's pretty white feet and kissed them lovingly, one, then the other. She … brushed her mistress's beautiful hair” (CW, 303). Borrowing from Sander L. Gilman's analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual representation of race and womanhood, where in paintings such as Manet's Olympia “the figures of the black servants mark the presence of illicit sexual activity,” I would argue that the juxtaposition of Madame Delisle and Manna-Loulou references nineteenth-century white fears of the detrimental connection between masters and slaves, especially since Manna-Loulou's protection of the seemingly helpless Madame Delisle figures as a corruption, her “soothing” bedtime story perhaps inciting the chaste female mind to lust and infidelity.⁶⁷ Manna-Loulou even lends a dangerously “Sapphic” air to the scene with her caresses, actions made more riveting by the contrast of the servant's skin, “black as the night” (CW, 303) with Delisle's blond paleness.⁶⁸ Ultimately the physical separation of black and white is reengaged in the story of Zoraïde herself. With her “‘café-au-lait’” skin and a figure envied by “‘half the ladies who visited her mistres’” (CW, 304), Zoraïde is a fantasy of desirable blackness and desirable black female passion. Thus Chopin seems to defy and confirm the need for Jim Crow laws, which were well established by the time of the story's publication.

The connection between Zoraïde and Madame Delisle is clear: both are petted; both are fair; both are oppressed by similar rules of social behavior. But in contrast to Madame Delisle, who senses Sépincourt's desire in a “glance that penetrated her own” yet refuses to act upon her “awakening,” Zoraïde at first reverses the process of female objectification by tapping into her own sensual feelings: “‘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’” (CW, 299, 304). The octoroon whose body excites white male lust is herself capable of lust; but because of the story's framing, she must become the conduit for frustrated white desire, rather than a subject in her own right. Madame Delisle—and Chopin's white readers—can still fantasize about sex in comfort and safety: the spectacle of Zoraïde's sexual transgression furnishes the reader/listener with a moment of distanced sexual pleasure, and the punishment for that pleasure (insanity and social exclusion) is distanced within the black body. In a sense Chopin rewrites black sexual criminality (Mézor is not the black rapist, but rather the desired lover; Zoraïde is not the prostitute, but rather the desiring lover) to speak for white sexual lack, without necessarily disrupting the white supremacist linkage of blackness to bodily excess.

Chopin's complicated play on stereotypes of black and white femininity—to gratify Delisle's longing and then absolve her character of that longing—further grapples with patriarchal notions of white desire by underscoring the excitement inspired by the stereotype of black male sexuality. As a possible sign of her rejection of “her white godmother's racist values,” Zoraïde spurns the mulatto M'sieur Ambroise, “with his shining whiskers like a white man's, and his small eyes, that were cruel and false as a snake's” (CW, 304).⁶⁹ In “A Lady of Bayou St. John” Sépincourt's appearance is more appealing: darkened by the sun, he has “quicker and hotter blood in his veins” than his white neighbors. Though he has a “slim figure, a little bent” (CW, 298-99), he is still more desirable than Gustave Delisle's portrait, near which the dead man's impotent sword hangs.

But all three men are overshadowed by the sexually charged Mézor; if Sépincourt seduces with words, Mézor seduces with the promise of the black phallus: “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” (CW, 304). As with the stereotype of the black rapist, in Chopin's and the reader's—and presumably Madame Delisle's—eyes, Mézor is finally the object of white desire instead of white terror. And more than Sépincourt, who wants Madame Delisle but cannot “comprehend that psychological enigma, a woman's heart,” Mézor proves to be a compassionate lover, with “kindness” in his eyes and “only gentleness in his voice” (CW, 302, 305).

Despite such gentleness, Mézor also excites because of the danger implied by his presence. Zoraïde (and through her, the reader) first catches sight of him in New Orleans' Congo Square performing the Bamboula, one of a number of antebellum slave dances characterized by “a frenzied African beat” that whites found both disturbing and fascinating.⁷⁰ According to early white observers, dances like the Bamboula

mounted from a slow, repetitious, and grimly deliberate opening phase … in an increasingly lascivious crescendo to a final frenzy of “fantastic leaps” in which “ecstasy rises to madness,” and finally, suddenly, the dancers fell, exhausted and unconscious, “foam on their lips,” and were “dragged out of the circle by their arms and legs” as new dancers took their place, the music never ceasing.⁷¹

As the symbol of racial regression in the story, Mézor functions doubly as the romantic connection to an exotic African past and as a forbidding reference to a “savage” black passion that, according to Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, accounted for why “the Ashantee warrior knocks down his prospective bride with a club and drags her off into the woods.” According to Lydston the primitive sexual feeling that marked the regressive African provided “an excellent prototype illustration of the criminal sexual acts of the negro in the United States.”⁷² But though he personifies the black phallus, as the potentially violent lover who restricts his animal passion to his dances, Mézor is made safe in Chopin's narrative, always tethered to the earth, under white control, “hoeing sugar-cane, barefooted and half naked” (CW, 305), the subdued African body.

Chopin's Mézor resembles the larger-than-life slave, African prince, and sometime dancer of the Bamboula, Bras-Coupé, who appears in George Washington Cable's historical novel set in 1803 New Orleans, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880).⁷³ Revered by the quadroon Palmyre but feared by whites, Bras-Coupé functions in The Grandissimes less as a character than as Cable's stereotype of enslaved black masculinity in all its passion and primitive power. A violent figure who showers curses on his master's family but bows down as a tributary before white women, Bras-Coupé is finally mutilated by exasperated slaveholders; and like the lynch victim of post-Civil War American culture, he casts his shadow over Yankees and Southerners struggling to achieve national reunion.

In Mézor, Chopin evacuates altogether the violence that distinguishes Cable's Bras-Coupé, but neither figure has a presence temporally coexistent with the principal white characters; instead they are written out of the national narrative as actors, to remain finally as symbols of white guilt and desire. Consequently Mézor's safeness is precisely what accounts for his usefulness as a device to stage the articulation of Madame Delisle's suppressed lust. Under the burden of the story's framing, Zoraïde is a frustrated octoroon out of control who must stand in for a white woman unable to imagine herself out of control. Mézor, on the other hand, as a black man is always in the narrator's grasp, trapped within the white idealization of the perfect lover, referencing finally white, not black social insurrection.

The criminalization of blackness that enforces distance is also underscored by the mingled discourses of failed maternity, eugenics, and racial regression invested in “La Belle Zoraïde.” Within the story's late-nineteenth-century context, “[m]iscegenation … was a fear not merely of interracial sexuality but of its results, the decline of the population.”⁷⁴ Zoraïde's black maternity highlights both Madame Delisle's and Madame Delarivière's barrenness: Delisle moves from immaturity to childless widowhood, while Delarivière can only manage a surrogate black daughter instead of a white one.

The play on black fecundity here as a sign of white disempowerment is further emphasized because the birth of Zoraïde's child in the story signifies the octoroon's disobedience to white law. By denying Zoraïde her child, Delarivière deprives her slave of any claim to a domestic identity, and here Chopin seems to be rejecting antebellum social relations much as she does in At Fault, because they allowed such abuses.⁷⁵ But though Chopin seems to be engaging in racial disloyalty by validating black female maternal rights, she sets into motion turn-of-the-century discourses about racial inferiority that deny black capacity to exercise those rights.⁷⁶ Zoraïde might reproduce, but she is ultimately unfit for parenting even when a regretful Madame Delarivière returns the child.

Nineteenth-century medical discourse would have attributed Zoraïde's madness not only to her grief over the loss of the child, but to her “impure” racial identity: an octoroon rendered inherently unstable by her heritage of racial interbreeding. The eugenicist language of the story casts M'sieur Ambroise as diminutive, imitative of whiteness, but finally deceitful and cruel, the product of racial refinement that does not improve physical or temperamental characteristics. In The Grandissimes Cable's quadroons are similarly afflicted: they suffer either from uncontrollable anger or from a failure of will. Thus at the moment of her rejection of white domination, Zoraïde proves herself to be a version of the “tragic mulatto” who goes mad at the restrictions set upon her identity.⁷⁷

But whereas Zoraïde is trapped within madness and slavery because of the unchangeable features of race and blood, Madame Delisle is trapped by Southern tradition and history, conditions about to undergo radical change in the story because of its setting during the Civil War. Thus, Zoraïde finally exemplifies black sexuality but also black powerlessness, if we read Madame Delisle's “La pauv' piti! Mieux li mouri!” as a comment on the slave's hopeless condition. On the other hand, Delisle exemplifies white female empowerment precisely because of her race, and the frustration generated in the narrative by Zoraïde's tragedy as a black slave becomes finally a frustration at Madame Delisle, who does not exercise the choices Chopin implies are hers by virtue of her whiteness.⁷⁸

It is worthwhile to return to Chopin's heroine in At Fault, Thérèse Lafirme, as a rewriting of women like Madame Delisle. Rousing herself from the stupor of the antebellum age, refusing to become a memorial for her husband, Thérèse actively inserts herself into Southern economic life and indeed harnesses and flirts with black sexuality. Like Madame Delisle, Thérèse possesses a black “mammy,” Tante Marie Louise, who plies her with food and gentle massages, providing a haven of female sensuality for her weary white mistress. Thérèse is on similarly close terms with Joçint's mixed-blood father Morico, taking delight in combing “that exquisite white hair of his” (CW, 805). She does not proffer similar intimacies to Joçint, however; and her rejection of Joçint affirms her instinct for racial self-policing, even as she reorders the sinfulness of the black body with Marie Louise and Morico. Thus Thérèse's rebellious attraction to blackness, tempered by her maintenance of firm control over the latter, becomes a measure of her newly found power as Chopin's ideal of New South womanhood.

I have been arguing in this [essay] for a reconsideration of Kate Chopin as neither disengaged from the racial politics of the late nineteenth century nor actively in resistance to white supremacist thought. Rather, Chopin's female characterizations are as much a response to stereotypes of race as they are a reaction to patriarchal domination. While traditional readings cast her as resistant to the gender conventions of her age, I would argue that Chopin's feminism worked in tandem with her investment in turn-of-the-century racist discourses. As such, her fiction offers an added site from which to consider the racialization of gender within turn-of-the-century white women's fiction. Her fiction also helps to decenter monolithic notions of white supremacist discursive patterns. Inasmuch as Chopin contributes to white supremacist thought with works such as At Fault, “In Sabine,” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” she revises the white supremacist association of the white female body to suggest a more affirming sexualization and a site for white female subjectivity. She does not address the problem of rape as a category of white racial violence against blacks, but she does register a sense of white anxiety with regard to lynching and mob rule, as exemplified in the behavior of characters such as the Santiens.

However troubling may be Chopin's failure to address fully in any politically meaningful way the horror of lynching, she critiques the balance of power within the gender relations prescribed by turn-of-the-century white supremacy in its restriction of female access to economic and sexual freedom. Chopin's work also registers tensions within “white” culture about the nature of whiteness itself and about the boundaries among ethnicity, race, and region in determining American enfranchisement. As a result, Chopin's work reveals the complex entanglement among white supremacist public discourses, “mainstream” white writing on regional and community development, and especially female “nonpolitical” fiction as she subtly evokes a vision of white supremacy that both liberates and confines.

Notes

1. For general studies on white female activism in the nineteenth-century public arena, see Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (1965; New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1989); and Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 66-91.

2. Quoted in Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 128. See also John E. Talmadge, Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1960), especially chapter 13.

3. Quoted in Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), 151-152. For more information on Willard, Wells, and lynching, see Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986); and Vron Ware, “‘To Make the Facts Known’: Racial Terror and the Construction of White Femininity,” in Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 167-244, especially 198-205.

4. Ware, Beyond the Pale, p. 203.

5. Jane Addams, “Respect for Law” [1901], reprinted in Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views, ed. Bettina Aptheker (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977), pp. 24, 25, 26. See also Aptheker's “Introduction,” p. 12.

6. Ida B. Wells, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” reprinted in Lynching and Rape, pp. 29, 34.

7. Quoted in Angela Y. Davis, “Racism in the Woman Suffrage Movement,” in Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 72. See especially her chapter “Woman Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Rising Influence of Racism”, pp. 110-126; and Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1984), chapter 7.

8. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 338. See also Hall's book-length study, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1974).

   Ames's movement did not by any means suggest a national shift in white women's racial alliances. For information on the campaign to increase white female enrollment in the revived Ku Klux Klan during this same period, see Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991).

9. In her memoir The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), the white NAACP activist Mary White Ovington includes her riveting short story “The White Brute” (pp. 88-99), in which a black newlywed couple traveling southward encounter trouble in a small town. While they wait for the arrival of their homebound train, two white men (one of whom turns out to be the son of the local sheriff) kidnap the bride for the purpose of rape, keeping the horrified groom at bay with the threat of lynching. The story was originally published by Max Eastman in The Masses in 1916. I am indebted to Steve Gray for bringing the Ovington piece to my attention.

10. Mary Johnston, “Nemesis,” in The Collected Short Stories of Mary Johnston, ed. Annie Woodbridge and Hensley C. Woodbridge (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1982), p. 61.

11. Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 [1931] (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1964), p. 326.

12. For an important discussion of Northern publishers and their reluctance to engage in radical discussions of race and reform in the aftermath of slavery, see Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), chapter 2.

13. With regard to Chopin and turn-of-the-century racialized discourses on gender, modern white feminist scholarship on Chopin is undergoing a long overdue change. Two recent studies that link the concerns of white feminist critics (that is, a study of Chopin's feminism) with the impact of region and race are Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1989), and Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989). Neither of these studies has “failed to recognize how Chopin's feminism is mediated through her implicit positions on race and regionalism” (Taylor, p. 139), and I am indebted to them for shaping my own thinking about Chopin's creole stories. See also Wai-chee Dimock, “Rightful Subjectivity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1990): 25-51; and Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). For a consideration of race and sex in The Awakening, see Michele A. Birnbaum, “‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race,” American Literature 66 (June 1994): 301-23.

    Notable early exceptions to the dehistoricizing and deracialization of Chopin's work include Robert D. Arner, “Landscape Symbolism in Kate Chopin's ‘At Fault’,” Louisiana Studies 9 (1970): 142-53; Richard H. Potter, “Negroes in the Fiction of Kate Chopin,” Louisiana History 12 (Winter 1971): 41-58; Joyce Coyne Dyer, “Bright Hued Feathers and Japanese Jars: Objectification of Character in Kate Chopin's At Fault,” Revue de Louisiane/Louisiana Review 9 (1980): 27-35; Joyce Coyne Dyer and Robert Emmett Monroe, “Texas and Texans in the Fiction of Kate Chopin,” Western American Literature 20 (1985): 3-15; and Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981).

    Ironically, Cyrille Arnavon's 1953 introduction to the French translation of The Awakening (entitled Edna) spends more time contextualizing the novel in its historical and regional setting than many American feminist readings of the past two decades. For a translation of the Arnavon introduction, see A Kate Chopin Miscellany, ed. Per Seyersted and Emily Toth (Oslo and Natchitoches, La.: Universitetsforlaget and Northwestern State Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 168-88.

14. Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, p. 149.

15. I am especially guided here by two early articles on the context of Chopin's local color fiction: Donald A. Ringe, “Cane River World: At Fault and Related Stories,” in Modern Critical Views: Kate Chopin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 25-33; and Patricia Hopkins Lattin, “Kate Chopin's Repeating Characters,” Mississippi Quarterly 33 (1979-80): 19-37.

16. Taylor, Gender, Race and Region, pp. 155, 157.

17. Hazel V. Carby, “The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction,” Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (1989): 39.

18. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Oslo and Natchitoches, La.: Universitetsforlaget and Northwestern State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 14. For information on the O'Flaherty slaves, see Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow, 1990), p. 57.

19. Toth, Kate Chopin, p. 64.

20. Seyersted and Toth, A Kate Chopin Miscellany, pp. 115-16. See also a letter written by Kate Chopin's mother Eliza to her Louisiana relatives towards the close of the war, Miscellany, 103-4.

21. John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), 15-22. See also chapter 7 of Blassingame's book for a discussion of race relations after the war.

22. Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984), p. 67.

23. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, p. 174.

24. Taylor, Gender, Race and Region, p. 145.

25. Toth, Kate Chopin, pp. 122-23.

26. Toth, Kate Chopin, pp. 134-36. At the time of the Battle of Liberty Place, Kate Chopin was away visiting her family in St. Louis.

27. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction [1971] (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), p. 93. According to Trelease, voter intimidation, election fraud, murder, and violence against politically active blacks and white Republicans became the norm in the early years after the war. During the 1868 election year, “[i]t was reported that in the course of a month at least twenty-five or thirty [n]egro bodies floated down the Red River past Shreveport” (130).

28. Trelease, White Terror, p. 131.

29. Emily Toth, “Kate Chopin's New Orleans Years,” New Orleans Review 15 (1988): 58.

30. Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 61-63. Ida B. Wells discusses the incident in her third pamphlet Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (1900), reprinted in Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, comp. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).

31. For a startling account of the intense violence during Reconstruction in the Red River area of Louisiana, see especially Ted Tunnell's incredible chapter 9, “Showdown on the Red River,” in Crucible of Reconstruction. White supremacists viciously attacked blacks as well as white Northerners who came to “reconstruct” these areas.

32. For the full text of Breazeale's memoir, see Seyersted and Toth, A Kate Chopin Miscellany, pp. 157-66. Helen Taylor is one of the first critics to consider the importance of this document for providing clues to the social and racial world Chopin inhabited in Natchitoches Parish. See her discussion on racial tensions in Gender, Race and Region, pp. 144-45.

33. Seyersted and Toth, A Kate Chopin Miscellany, p. 159.

34. See Toth, Kate Chopin, pp. 323-4, 177, for information on Chopin's friendship with Breazeale, and for a description of characters like the Santien brothers.

    Chopin seems destined to have her name associated with the most violent men in Cloutierville. Toth has suggested that after Oscar's death, Chopin had an affair with her neighbor Albert Sampite. Handsome, charming, and wealthy, Sampite was nevertheless a reincarnation of the Chopin-McAlpin myth, since he was cruel to his black workers and would beat his wife with a leather strap. See Toth, Kate Chopin, pp. 165-66, 171. For an earlier reference, see Seyersted's introduction to The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 26.

35. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1992), p. 60.

36. L'Isle des Mulâtres was of course the real-life Isle Brevelle in Natchitoches Parish. For the history of the black creole settlement on the island, see Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977).

37. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969). All references to Chopin's fiction come from this two-volume set, and are indicated in the text by the abbreviation CW.

38. Here I am relying especially on Donald A. Ringe's “Cane River World” for an important early discussion of Chopin's possible attitude toward creole violence and the post-Civil War South.

39. I am indebted here to Lattin's “Kate Chopin's Repeating Characters,” pp. 21-25, for her discussion of the Santien brothers.

40. Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans, p. 135.

41. “A No-Account Creole” was based on one of Chopin's first short stories. Variously titled in her notes “Euphrasie,” “A Maid and Her Lovers,” and “Euphrasie's Lovers,” the story was eventually pared down and published in its present form in the Century in 1894. See Toth, Kate Chopin, pp. 177-78.

42. Robert D. Arner identifies some of the same qualities in Joçint but does not contextualize him within the postwar context of racism that provided the background to Chopin's literary production. See Arner, “Landscape Symbolism,” p. 152.

43. Ringe, “Cane River World,” p. 29.

44. Taylor, Gender, Race and Region, p. 170. My reading of At Fault is informed by Taylor's perceptive commentary. See her discussion of the novel in Gender, Race and Region, pp. 166-70.

45. Taylor, Gender, Race and Region, p. 170.

46. Thomas Dixon, Jr., “Booker T. Washington and the Negro,” Saturday Evening Post (19 August 1905): 2.

47. See also Taylor, Gender, Race and Region, pp. 167-69.

48. Wilbur Fisk Tillett, “Southern Womanhood as Affected by the War,” Century Magazine 43 (November 1891): 12. For an illuminating discussion of white female management during the Civil War, see Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘Trying to Do a Man's Business’: Slavery, Violence and Gender in the American Civil War,” Gender and History 4 (Summer 1992): 197-214.

49. Henry W. Grady, The Race Problem [1889] (Philadelphia: John D. Morris, 1900), p. 546.

50. Grady, The Race Problem, p. 542.

51. Henry W. Grady, The New South (New York: Robert Bonner, 1890), p. 146.

52. Place-du-Bois is based on the old Chopin estate, and McFarlane is the renamed Robert McAlpin, the land's previous owner who was allegedly the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Simon Legree.

53. See Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia: Or, Marse Chan and Other Stories [1887] (Nashville: J. S. Sanders, 1991), and Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (New York: Charles Scribner, 1898).

54. This point is made by Donald Ringe, though from a different perspective. See his “Cane River World,” pp. 29-30.

55. A similar incident occurs in “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” (1893), when the planter Alphonse Laballière loses his temper and tries to force a young creole school teacher to integrate her classroom.

56. Arnavon, “Introduction” to Edna in Seyersted and Toth, A Kate Chopin Miscellany, p. 174.

57. Aiken's ethnic identity is especially important, since Chopin is much more generous in her portraits of lower-class whites of French background (the cajun characters). The bumbling but kindhearted Bobinôt in “At the 'Cadian Ball” and “The Storm” and the gallant Telèsphore in “A Night in Acadie” offer examples of romantic portrayals of lower-class cajun chivalry. On the other hand, when Chopin wants to hint at unbridled sexual energy, class and ethnicity come into play with half-Spanish, half-French characters such as Calixta in “At the 'Cadian Ball” and “The Storm” and Mariequita in The Awakening.

58. Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, p. 119.

59. Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” p. 173.

60. Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” p. 132. See also Dyer and Monroe, “Texas and Texans in the Fiction of Kate Chopin” for a discussion of cajun or 'Cadian balls (where Grégoire would have met 'Tite Reine), as places frequented by “sensual, ‘disreputable’ women who threaten domesticity and monogamy” (6). Dyer and Monroe offer an entirely different reading of ethnicity from my own.

61. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865-1900 [1902] (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg, 1967), p. 372. Ironically, in white supremacist fiction of the period, usually the middle-class white hero embodied an ennobling racial hatred that expressed itself in justifiable and retributive white violence. Any obvious excesses of white brutality were usually construed as the acts of lower-class whites who were invariably thought to make up the undisciplined mobs that wreaked havoc during the numerous race riots of the 1890s and early 1900s. See, for instance, the stereotypes of white violence represented in Dixon's Ku Klux Klan trilogy of The Leopard's Spots, The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907).

62. Dyer and Monroe, “Texas and Texans,” pp. 1, 5-7.

63. Dyer and Monroe, “Texas and Texans,” p. 6.

64. See Joyce Coyne Dyer's useful but strangely uncritical description of Chopin's invocation of race to distance and connect her white readers with the sexual desire demonstrated by the black characters in “Techniques of Distancing in the Fiction of Kate Chopin,” Southern Studies 24 (1985): 69-81. See also Michele A. Birnbaum's reading of the quadroon nursemaid in Chopin's The Awakening, in her article “‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race.”

65. Cynthia Griffin Wolff makes an excellent point about the historical resonance that “Désirée's Baby” might have had for Southern readers in its subtle references to causes of the Civil War, but she fails to recognize that Southern (and Northern) readers in the 1890s were just as concerned about miscegenation as the story's main character, Armand. See Wolff, “The Fiction of Limits: ‘Désirée's Baby’,” in Modern Critical Views: Kate Chopin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 38.

66. Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, p. 131.

67. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): p. 209. The specific idea of black corruption of whiteness is not new, of course. Northern white abolitionists had long feared that part of slavery's danger was the potential moral contamination achieved through associations with uncivilized black slaves. See, for example, Ronald G. Walter's extremely useful article “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 177-201.

68. See Gilman's reading of blackness, female sexuality, and disease in “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” especially at p. 237. For a useful discussion of the metaphoric uses of Sappho as an emblem of corrupting lesbian relations in medical discourse, see Nicole Albert, “Sappho Mythified, Sappho Mystified or the Metamorphoses of Sappho in Fin de Siècle France,” Journal of Homosexuality 25 (1993): 87-104.

69. Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, p. 133.

70. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, p. 3. See also Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans's Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation,” Louisiana History 32 (Spring 1991): 117-57.

71. Johnson, “New Orleans's Congo Square,” pp. 143-44.

72. Hunter McGuire and G. Frank Lydston, Sexual Crimes Among the Southern Negroes (Louisville: Renz & Henry, 1893), p. 7.

73. George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life [1880] (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988).

74. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” p. 237. White fears of black and European immigrant overpopulation were of course widespread in the post-Civil War era, and white supremacists anxiously countered reports of the decline in the birthrate among whites with the notion that, without slavery, blacks were heading for extinction by the end of the nineteenth century. For a discussion of the issue of black/white population growth, see George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1971), chapter 8. For advice given to women to avoid what Theodore Roosevelt termed “race suicide,” see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1978), pp. 134-37.

75. The context here, of course, would be Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

76. It is important to note that black female claims to equality with white women had been argued in the nineteenth century through the figure of the maternal. See, for instance, Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and, at the very moment of Chopin's stories, the numerous domestic novels by black women that stressed black female capacity for responsible motherhood and racial uplift.

77. For a discussion of blackness and madness in nineteenth-century thought see Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), chapter 5. There was of course a separate discourse on womanhood and madness; and my argument here is that, as a racial hybrid and a woman, Zoraïde bears the burden of a body doubly inscribed as the site of madness.

78. See also Birnbaum's discussion of race and female empowerment in The Awakening in “‘Alien Hands’,” p. 304.