SOURCE: Blythe, Anne M. “Kate Chopin's ‘Charlie’.” In Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, edited by Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis, pp. 207-15. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Blythe counters the prevailing Freudian interpretation of “Charlie” and asserts that it “be read as an exceptionally strong and forthright story of the growth into womanhood of a young girl of unusually fine qualities and potential.”]

Kate Chopin's story “Charlie”—written in 1900, the year following the publication of The Awakening, but not published until 1969—has been almost completely neglected by critics, and what attention it has received has done it little justice. The longest and one of the strongest and most moving of her stories, “Charlie” has with few exceptions been misread and misunderstood by literary critics since it was first made generally available in Per Seyersted's 1969 edition of Chopin's writings (CU, 638-70).

Seyersted began the critical misreading of the story when he dealt with it briefly in his 1969 biography of Chopin. Discussing it in light of Chopin's theme of “female self-assertion,” Seyersted says that the author “allows herself to disable a man … thus subtly hitting back at the males who labeled her a disgrace and silenced her literary gun because she had represented a woman taking liberties of a man” (CB, 183). He is referring to the critical reception of The Awakening and the episode in the story where Charlie, the tomboy heroine, practicing her target shooting in the woods with a pistol, accidentally wounds a male stranger in the arm. But the analogy is farfetched. The wound is not only unintentional; it is in his arm, and it is slight—and Charlie is deeply embarrassed. Seyersted unfortunately goes a step further in misreading the story when he suggests a tendency toward incestuous feelings between Charlie and her father. Although he somewhat downplays this accusation by enclosing it within parentheses, he nevertheless puts forth the unhappy idea that a “Freudian would call it [the relationship between Charlie and her father] a fixation and point to the secret outing of the two where they feel ‘like a couple of bees in clover’” (CB, 183).

This is nonsense. Her father loves Charlie and misses her when she is away. She loves him. There is no hint of anything abnormal or unhealthy in the feelings of either, no suggestion that this healthy father-daughter relationship is in any way delaying or hampering her maturing as a young woman or growing in need and ability to respond to other men.

The great injustice done by this reading lies in the fact that because Seyersted as editor and biographer was the most important Chopin scholar who had yet written about her and his critical judgments were usually carefully weighed and sensible, it was perhaps inevitable that later critics would use this original prurient reading of the text as a springboard for further, if brief, misconstructions and distortions of the story.

One critic, though she asserts that “Charlie” is “probably the only good piece [Chopin] wrote after The Awakening debacle,” joins Seyersted in his Freudian reading of the story and goes even further, saying that the story “shows a troubled imagination.” She believes that Charlie must “become ‘masculine’ and lose her sensual life, or become ‘feminine’ and lose her independence; [that] in fact, to have independence a woman must become ‘male.’” She sees the story as one with a “saddening conclusion.” Another critic dismisses it as sentimental and misreads the ending: “Not even Chopin's earliest stories surpass in sentimentality ‘Charlie.’ In it a girl grows up, falls in love, loses a man to her sister, and dedicates the rest of her life to helping her father.” Barbara H. Solomon, in her edition of Chopin, follows and slightly elaborates Seyersted's interpretation.¹

Such distorted and inaccurate interpretations have succeeded in denying a proper place in American fiction to what may be Kate Chopin's finest characterization of a young woman and one of her finest short stories. I propose that “Charlie” be read as an exceptionally strong and forthright story of the growth into womanhood of a young girl of unusually fine qualities and potential. To read the story in any other light is to ignore too many aspects of it that the author stresses—for example, the happy ending. For at the conclusion, Charlie is preparing to marry a good man, a man who loves her, who is her match in both temperament and physicality. She will marry a man she knows and understands and has grown to love, a man her father knows and respects.

“Charlie” is the story of a seventeen-year-old tomboy, Charlotte Laborde, the second of seven daughters, who runs free and wild on the family's Louisiana plantation. Charlie (as nearly everyone calls her) is intelligent and imaginative, physical and courageous, loved but not always approved of by the people who live in that self-contained world. She is especially close to her father, a widower, and is worshiped by her younger sisters (her older sister, Julia, is too ladylike to approve of her entirely). She is constantly getting into and out of scrapes, and her father, her sisters, her aunts, and her teacher are all worried that this daring, imaginative, impetuous young girl is going to have a difficult time in the adult world unless her boundless energy can be channeled into activities more conventional than racing along the levee and around the plantation on horseback and on a bicycle—a nice combination that Chopin uses to show that Charlie can be equally at home in a changing modern world and an older traditional and rural one.

When we meet her first, she is hot, mad, and in trouble. Our first impression is the one shared by her sisters in the schoolroom. Distracted from their studies by a figure “galloping along the green levee summit on a big black horse, as if pursued by demons,” they then identify by “a clatter of hoofs upon the ground below” and a voice “pitched rather high” berating a boy for not currying Tim, her horse, their tardy and wayward sister's approach (The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 639). When she finally enters the classroom, she is the picture of vigor and health, “robust and pretty well grown for her age” (CW [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin], 639), but at this moment red-faced and perspiring. Chopin's precise phrase, “pretty well grown for her age,” is aptly descriptive of her not-quite womanhood. Charlie is dressed in a costume of her own devising, a sort of “divided skirt,” a practical but not unfeminine garment she has shaped to suit the life of an active and energetic tomboy whose physical development is just beginning to belie her boyish ways.

Although Charlie hates the cramped artificiality of the plantation schoolroom and the rigid controls imposed upon her freedom by Miss Melvern, the governess, she is instinctively drawn to certain of the arts as well as the natural world outdoors. Chopin tells us that “Charlie had a way, when strongly moved, of expressing herself in verse” (CW, 641). Banished from the schoolroom, she sits on the porch at the back of the house writing a poem about Miss Melvern but letting herself be distracted by all the activity of the plantation yard. The fat Negro cook affectionately abuses her son who is sharpening the ax, and one of the little “Cadian” girls from down the lane comes up with chickens to sell. Charlie at first watches the life around her, still writing the poem, then, because it is impossible not to, lays it aside and joins them. Her poetic impulse is genuine but untrained, undisciplined. Along with her natural exuberance, there are traces of irresponsibility. Charlie is honest, headstrong, and brave, but still capable of being thoughtless.

Her poems are not the only sign of her creative imagination. She next pays a visit to the Bichou family's cabin where she spins a fantastic impromptu tale about tigers and bears and her magic ring. The Bichou children are spellbound. “They had a way of believing everything she said—which was a powerful temptation that many a sterner spirit would have found difficult to resist” (CW, 645-46). When she starts back home through the woods, Ma'am Bichou, worried about “that Charlie,” sends her young son Xenophore with her to see that she makes it home safely. The two sit down to rest beside a fallen tree, and Charlie confides in her young friend: “‘I tell you what it is, Xenophore, usually, when I come in the woods, after slaying a panther or so, I sit down and write a poem or two. … There are lots of things troubling me, and nothing comforts me like that’” (CW, 646-47). Charlie is acknowledging the changes that are beginning to stir within her, mysteriously to her mind, even before her encounter with Firman Walton.

This meeting takes place after she has revealed her deepest secret to the little boy, her possession of a pistol. “‘I think I'll practice my shooting; I'm getting a little rusty; only hit nine alligators out of ten last week’” (CW, 647). A stray shot hits Walton, who is taking a short cut through the woods on the way to pay a business call upon Charlie's father. Mistaking her for a boy at first, he speaks angrily to her: “‘You young scamp! I'll thrash the life out of you.’” But on discovering that she is a girl, he is apologetic.

Walton is encouraged to remain a few days with the family to recover from his wound, and he does so quite cheerfully. Indeed he feels that he has suddenly found himself in heaven among seven beautiful maidens. One evening when all her sisters have gone off for their dancing lessons, Charlie (who has stayed at home because she doesn't like dancing lessons) is brooding on the porch steps when Walton joins her. Sitting down beside her, he earnestly begins to say again how sorry he is about the accident. Knowing perfectly well that the shooting was her fault, not his, genuinely puzzled and piqued by his insistence, she speaks somewhat condescendingly to him and brushes him off. At that moment, young Xenophore slips quietly up the steps and within Walton's hearing delivers a message to Charlie from Gus Bradley, her longtime companion around the plantation.

Although she does not articulate her feelings, a pleasurable confusion about them is obviously stirring within her. The two men paying their respects could not be more different: Firman Walton is a slick city sophisticate Charlie knows she does not understand; Gus Bradley is a man she understands perfectly. Walton is described as “good looking, intelligent looking” (CW, 650). In contrast, Bradley is described as a shy man with a smooth face that “looked as if it belonged to a far earlier period of society and had no connection with the fevered and modern present day” (CW, 654). He is described in terms of Charlie's familiar world, for he is a big man and “in the saddle or out in the road or the fields he had a fine, free carriage” (CW, 654). With new awarenesses beginning to form in her mind, Charlie lingers on the porch with Walton until dusk when “the moon was already shining in the river and breaking with a pale glow through the magnolia leaves” (CW, 654). When her sisters return from their dancing lessons, Charlie slips upstairs with them, “bent upon making a bit of toilet for the evening” (CW, 652).

The accidental shooting of Walton has convinced everyone, including Charlie, that it is time to send her to boarding school in New Orleans. This idea, which has always been abhorrent to her, she is “exceedingly astonished” to discover is now “not at all distasteful”; she finds herself marveling at the mystery (CW, 654). This significant change in her character, we come to see, is probably due to her feeling attracted to Walton, apparently the first time she had felt such an emotion. She is also “secretly in hopes” (CW, 652) that her sister Amanda will lend her a dress to wear that first evening when her father orders her out of her “trouserlets.” When Gus is surprised and flustered at seeing her in a dress with “frills and furbelows,” Charlie replies impatiently: “‘Oh, well, I have to begin some time’” (CW, 655). Secretly she would like this big change, from divided skirt to feminine dress, to pass by unnoticed. However, once committed to a course of action, her instinct is to plunge forward headlong and unhesitating. And she handles this stepping into the feminine world of lace, ruffles, sailor hats, and baubles characteristically—with unbridled enthusiasm.

Now, thrust brand-new and untried into rich city life, Charlie stuns everyone in charge of her with a “violent” acceptance of her change in lifestyle. She also surprises with her extravagance. The only examples of womanhood she has had in her family are sorely lacking in both passion and creativity; in other words, she has no idea what it means to be a grown-up woman except what she has seen in her older sister, whatever she recalls of her mother (who died when she was eleven) and her aunts. She is doggedly determined to become “a fascinating young lady” (CW, 657), but she knows instinctively that she is out of place in this artificial world. She senses more and more intensely her awkwardnesses and tries with the aid of creams and curling irons and hat pins to conform to that world's standard of beauty. It is worth noting at this point too that during those two weeks of preschool “preparation” and initiation, Charlie finds herself frequently in the company of Firman Walton, who, although he distinctly prefers the company of the more beautiful and polished Julia, does not mind toying with the wild heart of her younger sister.

An episode that takes place soon after she enters the school and that warrants close and careful examination is the greatly misunderstood scene of Mr. Laborde's visit. The decision to send her to the boarding school was not an easy one for her father. All his daughters are described as individuals—each has been encouraged to grow according to her natural bent—but Charlie has a more restless spirit than the others. We must remember too that of all the daughters, Charlie is the one who knows best the working world of her father's plantation. That Mr. Laborde loves this wayward daughter is obvious. That he enjoys her company especially because she can ride, shoot, and fish better than the other girls is also apparent. And that he misses her sorely when she must be sent off to school cannot be doubted. But he believes that Charlie must be tamed, that she must learn for the sake of her own happiness to conform to the polite ways of the civilized world.

When he comes to visit her, he rejoices in seeing her, and she in him; he delights in discovering how well she has made the adjustment. He encourages what he assumes is her natural (but hitherto dormant) feminine frivolity, and they have a fine afternoon together. To play the role of a stern disciplinarian is not something that comes easily to Mr. Laborde, and now that he can enjoy his daughter's company without constant worry, he does so “like a school boy on a holiday” (CW, 661).

But to read this scene as incestuous is absurd. It is quite likely that if Mr. Laborde was separated for several months from his six-year-old twins, with whom he is equally affectionate—they count the gray hairs on his temples “perched on either arm of his chair” (CW, 644)—he would be “hungry” for them too. But the key to their relationship in this scene is the conversation between Charlie and her father at the lake café where they enjoy their second breakfast of the day, blissfully unaware of the rest of the world. Charlie proudly holds out her hand (newly creamed) for him to inspect. “‘What do you think of that, dad?’” she asks him. He looks carefully, examining the ring she always wears, then says, “‘No stones missing, are there?’” How well he knows his daughter! When she tells him with some exasperation to inspect the whiteness of her hand, and to compare it with her sister Julia's, he immediately understands the importance of her question. She is asking him for a confirmation of her femininity. Having long been aware (and disdainful of the fact) that Julia's hands were soft and white whereas hers were tanned and strong, she now feels pride that she has accomplished so successfully one of the more considered requisites of feminine appearance. Mr. Laborde takes her question seriously and gives a good father's careful answer. “‘I don't want to be hasty,’” he tells her. “‘I'm not too sure that I remember, and I shouldn't like to do Julia's hand an injustice, but my opinion is that yours is whiter’” (CW, 662).

This episode carries all the tenderness, gentle humor, and trust that can be asked of a father and a seventeen-year-old daughter, and Chopin accomplishes this with a fleeting moment's conversation. To read this scene as corrupt is an ultimate in critical misreading and falsification, and to use such a misreading to show Chopin as warped and embittered (by her critics!) at this period in her career is to be as false to the writer as to her work.

As Charlie continues to strive to adjust to the new environment of school, friends, dress, habits, and conventions, there is one carryover from the old familiar world. That is her poetry, which continues to be her confidante. It becomes more and more the vehicle for trying to understand her new and confusing emotions.

All of her schoolmates like Charlie enormously, although they don't understand her and are privately shocked at her lack of refinement in certain ways. But they recognize and respond to her generous heart and offer to help her learn the conventional graces. When it comes to light that Charlie is a poet, and a good poet at that, she is universally acclaimed and made to share with her friends the lines she has been writing. She shares her artistry shyly, trying hard “to look indifferent” (CW, 659). She shares all of her poems but one. This she had written immediately following the two-week preparation for school, and it is different from the rest of her poetry. It is written “in the smallest possible cramped hand … folded over and over and over” (CW, 658) until it is tiny enough to fit underneath a picture in her cherished locket. She keeps her love poem to herself.

Charlie is smitten by Firman Walton. And she suffers her first heartache because of his casual, meaningless flirtations. But this experience becomes a vital part of Charlie's realization that she does not belong in Walton's (and her sister Julia's) world of fashioned manners and sophisticated affectations. Indeed her heart recovers much as Walton's arm recovers from the flesh wound. Both wounds are inflicted primarily by accident (although Walton should have been more aware of his effect upon her), and both wounds seem at first to be far more serious than they are.

Then comes the terrible news of her father's near-fatal accident at the plantation. Charlie returns home and remains to help nurse him. While there, she receives the news of Julia's engagement to Walton.

In a period of a few months, Charlie has suffered the disgrace of being banished from the plantation to boarding school, the shock of her father's near-fatal accident, and the humiliation of rejection by a man she believed genuine in his attentions. When she learns of her sister's engagement, she responds with violent passion. In “a voice hideous with anger” she denounces her sister in front of the younger sisters, resumes her trouserlets, mounts her horse, and takes off blindly and furiously on a “mad ride” (CW, 666-67). We know, as Charlie knows, that she is purging her mind, her body, and her heart of what is not good and natural for her. And in that ride she throws off “the savage impulse” that caused her outburst against Julia. “Shame and regret had followed and now she was steeped in humiliation such as she had never felt before.” She apologizes to her sisters for her words and behavior. The result of this sequence of emotions—rejection, bitterness, and rage, ending in humiliation and purgation—is that the “girlish infatuation which had blinded her was swept away in the torrents of a deeper emotion,” leaving her now “a woman” (CW, 667).

Charlie, then, does not return to and remain on her father's plantation as a defeated girl (or woman). She does not have to shed her femininity and “become ‘masculine’ and lose her sensual life” to maintain her independence. On the contrary, she achieves a clearly defined sense of purpose and makes a deep and lasting commitment to a life of usefulness and hard work, a life rich in potential for creativity and emotional growth. As her father slowly recovers, she and Gus naturally begin working together, restoring the plantation gradually to its condition before the accident. They are both physical people, unafraid and unashamed of the dirt, sweat, elements, and creatures of their world, and their work together brings them steadily closer. Gradually they also learn to communicate their feelings and emotions. The conversation between them at the end of the story is full of shyly revealed emotions as they both come to realize how their relationship has changed and grown deeper. She tells him, “‘It seems to me I've always liked you better than any one, and that I'll keep on liking you more and more.’” She then tells him good night and runs “lightly” into the house, leaving him “in an ecstasy in the moonlight” (CW, 669).

Why did Chopin not publish so fine a story? The most reasonable answer is that it is a very long story and she may have sent it out to one or more magazines only to have it rejected because of its length. Another possibility is that Chopin had indeed “withdrawn,” not from her continuing creative strength as an artist but from the public eye after the critical rejection of The Awakening. Perhaps she wrote “Charlie” much as she did “The Storm,” which because of its direct sexuality could not have been published in her lifetime, wrote it to complete something for herself alone, for her own satisfaction as a writer.

I believe that Kate Chopin put a great deal of herself into her tomboy creation. But what she did not put into the story is fear of failure. No fear or resentment of outside opinion informs this work.

“Charlie” is a rich and rewarding story with an unforgettable heroine. It deserves a high place in American short fiction before World War I.

Note

1. Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day (Baton Rouge, 1981), 139, 144; Peggy Skaggs, Kate Chopin (Boston, 1985), 63-64; Barbara H. Solomon, The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin (New York, 1976).