SOURCE: Wolf, Elizabeth Ann. “The Politics of Rhetorical Strategy: Kate Chopin's ‘La Belle Zoraïde’.” Southern Studies 8, nos. 1 & 2 (winter-spring 1997): 43-51.

[In the following essay, Wolf contends that Chopin's indirect rhetorical strategy functions to attack prevailing myths of racial superiority and Southern womanhood in “La Belle Zoraïde.”]

The large body of Kate Chopin's fiction was written in the 1890s, during a critical transition in the history of the social and legal classification of Creole identity in Louisiana¹. This point does not assume its full significance, however, until it is considered in the context of Louisiana's legislation of race and gender relations during the same period². Surprisingly, that context has received little critical attention.

At the close of the centennial celebration of Chopin's writing, scholarship has certainly been extended into areas of inquiry formerly ignored or under-analyzed in Chopin studies. Both Elizabeth Ammons and Michelle Birnbaum have written exemplary essays on class, race, and women's rights. Brook Thomas and Wai-chee Dimock have made remarkable contributions with essays on social contract, possessive individualism, and the “promise” one generation makes to the next. Critics of the novel have, however, remained singularly silent on Chopin's representation of the “human landscape” of Creole Louisiana during the first full decade of Jim Crow³.

My paper attempts to add to the present body of criticism by arguing that the challenge facing Chopin was one of incorporating into her fiction a history of Creole Louisiana rich enough to represent a region of the country that, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, had grown rigidly intolerant of its own complexities. The myth of Creole whiteness; the segregation of the colored and white races; the distinction between Creoles of color and white Creoles; and the unification of white women, to the exclusion of women of color in the suffrage movement—all of these social issues contributed to the marginalization and displacement of the Creole Louisiana about which Chopin wrote. Assuming the challenges of writing that history into her fiction, she confronted dominant cultural, social, and political myths as well as dominant nineteenth-century narrative plots, stereotypes, and caricatures. In the process, she created a unique narrative rhythm, an analogue to the ebb and flow of the Gulf tides—a rhythm structured by the tension between dominant post-bellum myths and plots and the subordinated histories and stories that counter them. We have had difficulty seeing and hearing the tensive structure of that unique narrative rhythm: a lack of familiarity with Creole Louisiana has obscured our view of the challenges a regionalist writer such as Chopin faced. It has muffled the sound of the voice with which the Gulf Coast speaks.

The politics of Louisiana in the 1890s rendered the emergence of a complex Creole history all but impossible. George Washington Cable had attempted it in The Grandissimes (1880), followed by “The Freedman's Case in Equity” (1884)⁴; but, by the 1890s, the racist myth of a white, aristocratic Creole identity had so thoroughly reshaped the historical record of miscegenation, cutting across all class distinctions, that the author of the canonical History of Louisiana (1879), Charles Gayarré, could claim, with long-standing repute, that his former friend wrote with no intimate knowledge of his subject⁵. Writing for The Chautauquan in 1892, Mary L. Shaffter added her voice to Gayarré's. In an article entitled “Creole Women,” she defined the Creoles as “descendants of French or Spanish, born in Louisiana, [distinguished by] the chivalry of their men and the grace and beauty of their women” (Culley 137)⁶ The work of two late-twentieth-century historians, Marjorie Spruill Wheeler and Joseph Tregle, helps us to understand the ideological shifts that resulted in such mythologizing claims.

In an excellent account of the Cable/Gayarré debates of 1885, Tregle writes:

In pre-Civil War New Orleans […], unchallengeable white supremacy […] had made it possible to accommodate a panracial creolism. […] The Civil War changed all that. […] The creole sense of vulnerability was as a consequence turned upside down. Whereas 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. For the creole knew the world he now lived in to be one obsessed with the no longer settled issue of racial supremacy, in which the very suspicion of “tainted blood” guaranteed a ticket to opprobrium, contempt, and ostracism. He knew it because he had helped make it so. In such manner was the cardinal tenet of the now familiar myth born: for those so threatened, henceforth to be creole was to be white.

(172-173)

What Tregle does not account for constitutes Marjorie Wheeler's invaluable contribution to our understanding of the place of chivalric romance in the birth of a white Creole mythology. In New Women of the New South, she traces the logic by which Southern womanhood was brought into the service of a white, aristocratic Creolism and, doing so, she clarifies the challenges before a writer, like Chopin, who would take women of the Creole South as the subject of her fiction:

The so-called cornerstone of this ‘Southern civilization’ was white supremacy, and the determination of white Southerners to restore and then preserve it […] and defend the ‘state sovereignty’ thought necessary to protect white supremacy—[…] presented a tremendous obstacle to the Southern suffrage movement. […] Opponents of woman suffrage in the South considered the national woman suffrage movement, with its commitment to securing a federal woman suffrage amendment, one with the proponents of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in their disdain for the sovereignty of the states and their eagerness to force change upon an unwilling South.

(4-5)

Arguing that “the commitment to preserving the traditional role of Southern womanhood was not just an isolated, idiosyncratic whim of nostalgic Southerners; it was part of an intense, conscious, quasi-religious drive to protect the South against the ‘ravages’ of Northern culture” (5), Wheeler reveals the sexual chauvinism of the South. She demonstrates its fear of women's rights, as well as its increasingly hysterical white supremacist ideology as the protective reaction of a people subjected to the forces of Northern colonization.

As the aftermath of Gayarre's attack on Cable testified, the emergence of a historically complex Creole voice in the 1890s required the subtlety of a considerably indirect rhetorical strategy. Such indirection is nowhere better controlled than in Chopin's short story “La Belle Zoraïde” (1893)⁷. Like “Désireé's Baby” (1892), “La Belle Zoraïde” established its Creole identity by critiquing the reality of the very myths of whiteness and of the Southern lady that Creoles in the 1890s indignantly insisted upon. But unlike the earlier story, “La Belle Zoraïde” does so with notable indirection. In this remarkably economic five-page narrative, a woman “as black as the night” (303) tells her mistress the story of another mistress and her slave, a woman whose “soft, smooth skin was the color of café-au-lait” (304). The time separating the two narratives is left unclear; the similarity of the names of the mistresses, Madame Delisle and Madame Delarivière, assists in the blurring of the distance between the dark and the light skinned women. But, the date of publication is clear: in 1893, there were people of color and whites in Louisiana. Law had erased distinctions in complex genealogies: to be “colored” meant to be “black.” Black was black; white was white. Colors like “café-au-lait” threatened this binary legal distinction. Chopin introduces the story of a light-skinned “mulatress” (Zoraïde) from the remove of a woman (Manna-Loulou) whose dark skin testifies to the mythic absence of miscegenation. And the reader is left to understand that Zoraïde is a character from an antebellum Creole world, while Manna-Loulou is a character drawn from its nineteenth-century post-bellum period—one committed to the obfuscation of its own history.

In the course of Manna-Loulou's story, the beautiful Zoraïde becomes “la folle Zoraïde”: Chopin asks us to trace the events leading to the transition. The beautiful girl has fallen in love with “le beau Mézor,” a man “as straight as a cypress-tree and as proud looking as a king […] [whose] body, bare to the waist, was like a column of ebony” (304). Her mistress forbids the marriage of the beautiful Zoraïde to “a negro” (305) and arranges for him to be “sold away into Georgia, or the Carolinas, or one of those distant countries far away, where he would no longer hear his Creole tongue spoken, nor dance Calinda, nor hold la belle Zoraïde in his arms” (306). Zoraïde gives birth to their daughter. When her mistress sends the child away to another of her plantations and tells the beautiful girl that her child is dead, Zoraïde is driven mad. When the mistress sees the pathos she has staged, she repents and sends for the daughter. Seeing her, however, la folle Zoraïde pushes her aside to clutch the bundle of rags that, in the displacement of her despair, she has transformed into her lost “piti.” Manna-Loulou's mistress concludes: “Ah, the poor little one, Man Loulou, the poor little one! better had she died!” (307). Chopin translates: “La pauv'piti, Man Loulou. La pauv'piti! Mieux li mouri!” (308).

It has been difficult to know how to address the description of the storyteller, Manna-Loulou. She remembers stories for a mistress who “lay in her sumptuous mahogany bed, waiting to be fanned and put to sleep”; she combs her “beautiful hair.” She is called an “old negress” who bathes and kisses “her mistress's pretty white feet […] lovingly, one, then the other” (303). The description seems to reproduce the myth of race relations on a happy, antebellum slave plantation. The remembered relations are reminiscent of Léonce Pontellier's, “when he hunted ‘possum in company with some friendly darky; thrashed the pecan trees, shot the grosbec, and roamed the woods and fields in mischievous idleness” (Seyersted, The Awakening, 953). To what in this description could Gayarré or Shaffter object? Both white identity and Southern womanhood are inviolate—befriended and protected by “friendly darkies” and “loving negresses.”

However subtle the approach might be, Chopin's rhetorical strategy is structured as a disruption of the post-bellum Creole mythologizing of history. In “La Belle Zoraïde,” it takes the form of insisting that the antebellum Creole world be understood as an inseparable, however well disguised, part of the Jim Crow realities all are living. Thus, Manna-Loulou tells the story of a girl described as “the envy of half the ladies who visited her mistress,” who “was as charming and as dainty as the finest lady of la rue Royale” (304)—but, most importantly, who is defiant, and most defiant in her demand to be recognized as non-white: “‘Am I white?’ […] ‘I am not white […]’” (305). Zoraïde is Creole; she is a mother, herself of mixed white and African blood, who demands her rights as a human being in a legal system gone mad in the play of black and white binarisms. Manna-Loulou's mistress, Madame Delisle, may conclude that it would have been better had Zoraïde, and the child she bore, died rather than force an analysis of the logic that drives people to legislated madness. But the storytellers, Manna-Loulou as well as Chopin, speak and write in order for the mother and child to live on, to claim the complexities of their cultural and biological genealogies.

In what language can this story be told? Into whose cultural, legal, and social codes can it be entrusted? Zoraïde's story emerges from “an old, half-forgotten Creole romance” (303). It is introduced into the story in the form of an untranslated Creole patois “whose music and charm no English words can convey”: “Lisett' to kité la plaine,/ Mo perdi bonhair à moué;/ Ziés à moué semblé fontaine,/ Dépi mo pa miré toué.” (303). Manna-Loulou recalls the story and its language from an antebellum Creole world that cannot be translated into the post-bellum, Jim Crow world of the United States. In that world, the issue of Zoraïde's defiance can only be sent away; it may enter Creole Louisiana again only in the shape of a rag doll.

In the 1890s, people of color existed in Louisiana—by law—only as Jim Crow puppets. It has emerged in this story in the shape, form, and translated voice of Manna-Loulou. Read in the historical, political, and cultural context of the year in which the short story was first published, Manna-Loulou's “bedtime story” is the outcry of a race of American, Southern women of color, who, through the “alchemy of U.S. race and rights,” have been transformed into rag dolls performing Jim Crow on a minstrel stage⁸. Reading “La Belle Zoraïde” in this context helps us to read Chopin's Creole Louisiana in terms closer to the ebb and flow of tides, mythologies, and histories that make characters such as Zoraïde and Manna-Loulou interchangeable with rag dolls.

The political, moral, and human strength of the story rests in Chopin's extraordinary skill in playing the mythologies of post-bellum Creole life in Louisiana against its human landscape. Were the narrative a record of the unendurable pain of a woman who loses her husband, her sanity, and her child as the result of the inhumanities of slavery, the reader might be comforted that the “old romance” of the South had been ended by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But the narrative tells us that the past is never left behind. History, it tells us, is heard in the ebb and flow of time and voice. The truth of history is heard in that respiration.

To whom does an African American woman—whether she is the “color of cafe-au-lait” (Zoraïde) or “as black as the night” (Manna-Loulou)—tell the stories of Creole Louisianan women? The answer would seem to depend in large part upon the time of the telling. Forgetfulness becomes madness by the end of Chopin's tale: the beautiful “belle” becomes the “piti,” the “folle” as a result of that forgetfulness. In 1893, Chopin records the unspeakable human failure of a “white” population to face the challenges of emancipation; she records the unthinkable response of a “white” population as it makes “rag dolls” of human beings during Jim Crow. It is not Zoraïde who has gone mad. It is a state; it is a nation; it is a narrative that understands “a bundle of rags” to be its issue.

Notes

1. Of the 96 short stories and sketches, only 5 were published before 1890 and 7 after 1899. See the appendix to The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted. Throughout this paper, citations from Chopin's fiction refer to the Seyersted edition.

2. In the 1890s, the Louisiana General Assembly passed a series of Acts resulting in the segregation of the “colored” and “white” races: transportation, Acts of 1890: 111; miscegenation, Acts of 1894: 54; and education, Constitution of 1898: 248. For a history of the reciprocity of race and gender in late-nineteenth-century Jim Crow Louisiana, see Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South, 3-37. For a history of the transformation of Creole identity during the transition from an antebellum tripartite (white, free people of color, slave) legal system of racial identification to a post Civil War binary (white, colored) legal system of racial identification, see Virginia R. Domínguez, White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana, 133-148 especially; and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” Hirsch and Logsdon, 58-87.

3. I am invoking Toni Morrison, Playing In The Dark: “Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape” (9).

4. Originally delivered as an address before the American Social Science Association at Saratoga, New York, September 11, 1884; adapted from a commencement address at the University of Alabama on June 18, 1884. Originally published, Century Magazine 29 (1885): 409-418.

5. “Mr. Cable's aim is to degrade, lower in the public opinion the reputation of the population of Louisiana, Creole or not, to put it socially, civilly, and politically below the black race, which he considers superior to ours and destined to africanize the entire South. […] When the ‘Grandissimes’ appeared, we were requested by the editor of The Times-Democrat to review the work. We refused from motives of delicacy. Mr. Cable having heard of it and having requested us to change our decision, we replied that we would, if he could name two Creole families with whom he was intimately acquainted. He could not” (Gayarré, article published in The Times-Democrat, 11 January 1885, quoted in Turner, 203).

6. Although Shaffter did little more than echo Gayarré, she is more widely known today. See the 1976 as well as 1994 Norton Critical Editions of Chopin's The Awakening: the essay is included in both and is the source of the editor's definition of Creole (1994: 10, n. 4; 1976: 11, n. 2).

7. The story was first published in Vogue, January 1894 (Seyersted, 1016).

8. See Patricia Williams The Alchemy of Race and Rights.

Works Cited

Ammons, Elizabeth. “The Limits of Freedom: the Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Kate Chopin, and Pauline Hopkins.” Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Birnbaum, Michele A. “Alien Hands: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race.” Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill. Eds. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes. New York: Penguin, 1988.

———. “The Freedman's Case in Equity.” The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South. New York: Doubleday, 1956.

Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

Culley, Margaret, ed. The Awakening. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1976.

———. ed. The Awakening, 2nd Ed. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1994.

Dimock, Wai-chee. “Rightful Subjectivity.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1990): 25-51.

Domínguez, Virginia R. White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986.

Gayarré, Charles. The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance. New Orleans: Hopkins, 1885.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. “The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture.” Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Eds. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.

Louisiana General Assembly. Acts 1812: 72; Acts 1890: 111; Acts 1894: 54. Constitution 1868; Constitution 1898.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992

Shaffter, Mary L. “Creole Women.” The Chautauouan 15 (1892): 346-7. Rpt. in Culley, 1976: 119-121; 1994: 137-139.

Thomas, Brook. “The Question of Agency and Delivering the Promise.” American Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

Tregle, Joseph G. Jr. “Creoles and Americans.” Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.

Turner, Arlin. George W. Cable: A Biography. Durham: Duke UP, 1956.

Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. The New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.