SOURCE: Thomas, Heather Kirk. “‘The House of Sylvie’ in Kate Chopin's ‘Athénaïse’.” In Critical Essays on Kate Chopin, edited by Alice Hall Petry, pp. 207-17. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.

[In the following essay, Thomas explores Sylvie's narrative function in “Athénaïse.”]

The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to future readings as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language.

—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark¹

Per Seyersted, perhaps Kate Chopin's most influential critic, considers her lengthy story “Athénaïse” among her “most important efforts.”² Written 10-28 April 1895 and published in the fall of 1896 in the Atlantic Monthly, the story not only exhibits the Cane River and New Orleans settings that earned Chopin acclaim in Bayou Folk (1894) but, more significantly, anticipates the overtly sexual themes of her mature work.³ For these reasons Helen Taylor, among others, views “Athénaïse” as a precursor to Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening, and both the story and its title character have received sustained critical attention.⁴ By contrast, Chopin's characterization of Sylvie, the hard-working, middle-aged, black woman who runs the New Orleans boarding house where Athénaïse briefly resides, has escaped notice. This lapse appears doubly ironic, considering that Chopin's literary practice of effacing women of color has been so recurrently disparaged. To ignore Sylvie's narrative function is also to misread “Athénaïse”'s operative irony, which raises substantial questions about transitional stages in women's lives, including their deficient preparation for marriage, by contrasting a young white woman's marital loss of identity with a mature African-American woman's capable self-sufficiency.

The narrative features Athénaïse Miché Cazeau, a two-months' bride disillusioned in her marriage to the handsome widower Monsieur Cazeau, a conventionally laconic but nonetheless loving Cane River planter. Similar to Janie Crawford's repulsion to her first husband in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Athénaïse declares that she “‘can't stan' to live with a man; … his ugly bare feet—washing them in my tub, befo' my very eyes, ugh!’”⁵ Her first petulant flight from Cazeau's Bon Dieu plantation merely returns her to her parents' adjacent farm, but eventually she succumbs to her rakish, adored brother Montéclin's proposal that she flee from Cazeau to New Orleans. At this point, he orchestrates her secretive disappearance and secures lodgings at Sylvie's French Quarter boarding house, a locale he also frequents when visiting the city. During her month-long stay at “the house of Sylvie” (440), Athénaïse meets a cosmopolitan Creole journalist, Monsieur Gouvernail, who falls a little in love with her.⁶ However, any adulterous liaison is avoided when she discovers her pregnancy, a revelation that returns her “in a wave of ectasy” (451) to her husband where “her lips for the first time respond to the passion of his own” (454). The story's insinuation that maternity fully awakens the young bride's passionate nature constitutes the singular brazen element of its otherwise conventional conclusion. In any case, Montéclin's disgruntled response to his sister's reconciliation with her husband—“he could not help feeling that the affair had taken a very disappointing, an ordinary, a most commonplace turn, after all” (454)—may mirror the reaction of some readers.

Per Seyersted, however, argues that the story's embedded critique of women's marital disempowerment likens Athénaïse “indirectly … to a slave”; Helen Taylor similarly considers it Chopin's most explicit analogy between “marriage and slavery.”⁷ In this sense, in Athénaïse's chastened return to her husband's Bon Dieu plantation, we might consider her sold “up river.” But Chopin regularly created alternative versions of female emancipation and confinement in her fiction. On the one hand, she experimented with thematic reconfigurations: exploring the ameliorative effects of a surrogate mother's love in “Polydore” (1895), for example, then deconstructing that myth in the later, Faulknerian nuances of “The Godmother” (1899). On the other hand, she commonly utilized parallel female characters or foils within single narratives: for example, in “A Sentimental Soul” and “Regret” (both written in 1894), in “Two Summers and Two Souls” (completed in 1895, immediately after “Athénaïse”), as well as her widely recognized trio—Mademoiselle Reisz, Adèle Ratignolle, and the woman in black—in The Awakening. In “Athénaïse” Chopin follows her customary practice by appointing the proprietor of the “house of Sylvie” as an ironic foil to the title character's personality in that Sylvie, an unmarried, African-American businesswoman, enjoys emotional, economic, and (presumably) sexual emancipation in New Orleans. White, pregnant, and Catholic, Athénaïse is essentially trapped even before she begins her journey.

Stereotyping of racial minorities was a common feature of 19th-century regional writing, and Chopin created her share of “Black Mammies” and fanatically loyal ex-slaves.⁸ The majority of her black female characters have no family names, illustrated by “Mandy,” “Betsy,” and “Suze” in her first novel At Fault (1890), and others receive the honorary title “Aunt,” a form of address alleging an affectionate bond with white families.⁹ Chopin presumably copies Southern custom in both matters. Completed in 1892 but never published in her lifetime, the sketch “A Little Free-Mulatto” focuses specifically on free black families, but Chopin rarely created full-bodied characterizations of such people. Hence Sylvie's delineation as a woman of color who is also a New Orleans entrepreneur is not only atypical of Chopin's oeuvre but of American literature in general.

Couched in conventional local color language, the introductory description appears, at first glance, to diminish this exceptional woman of color:

She was a portly quadroon of fifty or there-about, clad in an ample volante of the old-fashioned purple calico so much affected by her class. She wore large golden hoop-earrings, and her hair was combed plainly, with every appearance of effort to smooth out the kinks.

(440)

But the overall narrative pays Sylvie uncommon homage as a woman of “dignity” whose strong racial features inscribe “the loftiness and command of her bearing” (440). In fact, the text states specifically that Sylvie's manner is supremely respectful, never obsequious, in the presence of her white patrons, notwithstanding she “believed firmly in maintaining the color line, and would not suffer a white person, even a child, to call her ‘Madame Sylvie’” (440-41).

Anna Shannon Elfenbein notes that in Chopin's stories with black characters, “Her detached observations reveal both the extent to which oppressed people are shaped by the stereotypes applied to them and the extent to which they may use these stereotypes to dupe their oppressors.”¹⁰ The survival of “the house of Sylvie, on Dauphine Street” (440) in the heart of the French Quarter commercial world would normally demand that its proprietor adopt “the mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar's term for the obsequious face Southern racist convention required. Sylvie's position as the head of a business, however, excepts her from the traditional address “Aunt Sylvie.” In addition, from “those of her own race”—her employees and others who value her economic achievement—she commands the title “Madame Sylvie,” a form of respect she is said to have “exacted religiously” (441). A successful entrepreneur, Sylvie obviously pays lip service to Southern morés but demands deference when and where she can. Chopin's clarification of Sylvie's prerogatives in this matter cannily confronts Southern codes of etiquette as they intersect with issues of race and class. In “Madam's Past History” (1943), Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes makes the same point about a self-employed black woman who extorts respect for a lifetime of work: “My name is Johnson—/ Madam Alberta K. / The Madam stands for business. / I'm smart that way. … I do cooking, / Day's work, too! / Alberta K. Johnson—/ Madam to you.”¹¹

The story's first mention of Sylvie's Dauphine Street townhouse—“a three-story gray brick, standing directly on the banquette, with three broad stone steps leading to the deep front entrance” (440)—associates its proprietor with an inherent air of respectability. In calling a boarding house “the house of Sylvie” Chopin not only contributes a French flavor to this Creole tale but also conveys a sense of economic sovereignty, like the powerful traditions invoked by “the House of Chanel” or “the House of Lords.” The residence's public face, fronted by a second-story balcony, overlooks Dauphine Street. In the flagstone courtyard, invisible from the street, “fragrant flowering shrubs and plants” thrive in beds and in “tubs and green boxes,” while the guest rooms within are “plain” but “exquisitely clean.” To Athénaïse, who did not take well to housekeeping herself, “the whole place smelled of cleanliness” (440). She resolves “to live on indefinitely in this big, cool, clean back room” (442).

Sylvie's reputable “clientèle” hails mainly from “the southern parishes,” ladies and gentlemen stopping a few days in New Orleans for business or pleasure. In fact, she “pride[s] herself upon the quality and highly respectable character of her patrons” and also rents out the house's “sanctuary of elegance,” its formal front parlor, to “parties of respectable and discreet gentlemen desiring to enjoy a quiet game of cards outside the bosom of their families” (442). Clearly, the respectable gentlemen gather in Sylvie's front parlor because their equally respectable womenfolk discourage or prohibit these masculine pursuits. When they wish to enjoy a convivial evening at cards and smoke in peace, they come to Sylvie's. (The same impulse precipitated Mark Twain's inclusion of an attic billiards room in his Hartford mansion.) Interestingly, in a story about women's loss and gain in marriage, Chopin's irony extends beyond Athénaïse's quandary to critique how women themselves might reinforce the notion of separate spheres.

But Sylvie's racial and material rise has ensued from pleasing both her male and female clients. Installing the discomfited Athénaïse in her new quarters, the owner is irrefutably in charge. She moves “slowly and majestically about the apartment,” checking the towels, smoothing the bed linens, and offering fresh water to ensure all is perfection. If the girl requires anything else, she is to “‘call Pousette: she year you plain,—she right down dere in de kitchen’” (441). If less tyrannical a hotelier than Leona Helmsley, Sylvie nevertheless rules with a practiced authority, which includes keeping a sharp eye on the aging, recalcitrant housemaid who occasionally neglects her duties. On one occasion Pousette forgets to bring ice water to Athénaïse's room. When summoned, she begs that no one tell her mistress about her lapse: “‘Vou pas cri conté ça Madame Sylvie?’” (448) Indeed Sylvie's high standards take an equivalent toil on her own leisure, as “almost every moment of her time was occupied in looking after her house.” Athénaïse would enjoy a conversation from time to time, but Sylvie refuses because “her deferential attitude towards her lodgers forbade … gossipy chats” (449). To engage in gossip would violate her clients' right to privacy and in the long run might affect her income. By contrast, Athénaïse, who sorely requires her own funds, plans daily to locate “some suitable and agreeable employment” (442), but ruling out “two little girls who had promised to take piano lessons at a price … embarrassing to mention” (451), she eventually determines she has no acceptable marketable skills.

A further disparity between Sylvie's and Athénaïse's capabilities concerns their various conceptions of housekeeping, and the narrative's sensual description of a typical meal at Sylvie's reveals another facet of her knowledge and expertise. Normally, Sylvie's guests do not receive board (except for Gouvernail, who takes Sunday breakfast), but she has agreed as a favor to Montéclin to provide for Athénaïse while she is in hiding.¹² Gracious dining here contrasts sharply with Athénaïse's disdain for her former housekeeping duties, which resulted in her peevish rejection of the keys to her husband's pantries, a gesture reflecting a naive hubris more than any enlightened disavowal of woman's work. Sundays Chez Sylvie, the “immaculately set” table near the window is spread with “delicate river-shrimps and crushed ice,” “a few hors d'oeuvres,” “a small golden-brown crusty loaf of French bread,” a half-carafe of wine, and “the morning paper.” Lamb chops followed by “café au lait” complete the feast (443). Chopin's savory description highlights Sylvie's culinary wisdom and creative touch. She might spend long hours overseeing her business, but when le bon temps rouler at Mardi Gras, she would know how to enjoy herself with food and friends. Athénaïse, by comparison, grew up amidst Cajun laughter and dancing, and her Cane River neighbors applaud her mother's “gumbo filé” (428). But until her sojourn with Sylvie, she appears to have disassociated the anticipation, preparation, and delights of the table with herself. She now has the opportunity to study an expert housekeeper, to savor fine food and wine, and to observe sophisticated table settings, a course of silent instruction to which Gouvernail also contributes during their educational excursions and private tête-à-têtes.

Sylvie's secluded garden also figures in Chopin's edification theme, particularly when examined alongside the story's most portentous symbol, the “great solitary oak-tree” (433) standing on Cazeau's plantation. After Athénaïse's first defiant flight to her parents, Cazeau collects and then accompanies her home. But at the finale of their journey when he sights this ancient, massive landmark, he abruptly recalls an incident in his childhood when his father permitted “Black Gabe,” an exhausted runaway slave, to rest from the travails of his capture in its dense shade. Cazeau's chilling recollection, considering present developments, makes the oak tree suddenly appear “hideous,” just as the locals' conviction “at the time that Black Gabe was a fool, a great idiot indeed, for wanting to run away” from such a “considerate master” (433) taunts him from the past. Per Seyersted interprets Black Gabe as a symbol of the Archangel Gabriel, the messenger of Mary's conception, and the oak tree, as “woman's immutable destiny which makes her the tree of life.”¹³ Chopin's satire of the elder Cazeau as a “considerate master” from whom a slave would be a fool to escape clearly parallels the son's dilemma. Sylvie's French Quarter garden, however, offers a benevolent contrast to the malevolent oak tree as well as to Seyersted's essentialist conception of woman's nature. In New Orleans, Athénaïse spends long hours in this sylvan retreat, caring for the flowers, admiring the “cape jessamine”'s bouquet (449), and hearkening to “a mockingbird that hung in a cage” and “a disreputable parrot that belonged to the cook next door, and swore hoarsely all day long in bad French” (451). Earlier the narrative suggests that Athénaïse would eventually come to “know her own mind” as instinctively as “the song to the bird, the perfume and color to the flower” (433). Compared with the evil antebellum tree of knowledge dwarfing Cazeau's plantation, Sylvie's lush courtyard seems prelapsarian; more importantly, it supplies the three preconditions mentioned above that will enable Athénaïse to “know her own mind.” The brilliantly-colored flowers, their sensual perfume, and the plaintive lament of the caged birds work their magic on Athénaïse. This diminutive Eden arouses her senses and quiescent sexuality, easing her metamorphosis into womanhood prior to her realization that she is expecting a child.

But Sylvie offers Athénaïse more than a garden retreat and the leisure in which to assimilate her experience. Like Mademoiselle Reisz, she also serves as a “very wise” counselor to the “very ignorant” Athénaïse (451), who knows surprisingly little, for a planter's daughter, about human reproduction. Hence when she complains of feeling “not herself” (451), it falls to Sylvie to interpret her symptoms, offer the obvious conclusion, and later just as candidly inform Gouvernail, since “[t]here was no subject known to her which Sylvie hesitated to discuss in detail with any man of suitable years and discretion” (453). Sylvie's diagnosis drastically changes Athénaïse's course of action, but before she departs for Bon Dieu, her landlady presents her with a symbolic farewell gift: an heirloom “set of pattern” (apparently for maternity or infant garments) analogous to the designs Adèle Ratignolle imparts to Edna. Sylvie's generosity expresses a sororal bond transcending race, but the very nature of her gift as well as its ominous, allegorical name portend the young woman's future.¹⁴ Athénaïse accepts Sylvie's patterns “with reverence, fully sensible of the great compliment and favor” (453) but leaves only some castoffs for the housemaid Pousette: “a handkerchief, a petticoat, a pair of stockings with two tiny holes at the toes, some broken prayer-beads, and finally a silver dollar” (452).

Considering Athénaïse's fiscal straits, however, Pousette's compensation might not be as stingy as it seems. The daughter of tenant farmers, Athénaïse undoubtedly had no dowry. She also has no funds in New Orleans except what little her brother borrowed to pay her room and board or what she later acquires from “Harding & Offdean, her husband's merchants,” to purchase a layette and presents for her family (452). In 19th-century Louisiana, the Napoleonic Code controlling a husband's estates was still regnant; indeed, after her husband, Oscar, died in 1882, Chopin had to petition the courts for her marital property and guardianship of her six children. Although Athénaïse improved her estate by marrying Cazeau, during her month's stay in the city she very likely realized that the “house of Sylvie” was more monetarily secure than she, a silent partner in the “house of Cazeau.” Thus in contrasting an autonomous woman of color with the fiscally dependent Athénaïse, Chopin delivers a dismal truth. The monetary survival of 19th-century, white Louisiana wives in general depended upon their husbands' liberality.

John Carlos Rowe argues that Chopin's writings in general rarely expressed any form of “sisterhood” with “women from other classes, races, and economic conditions.”¹⁵ For this reason alone Sylvie's sympathetic characterization is of distinct importance in Chopin's corpus, notwithstanding its extraordinary significance as a rare literary illustration of an entrepreneurial woman of color. Perhaps the earliest prototype is the protagonist of Harriet E. Wilson's rediscovered novel Our Nig (1859), the first known to be published by an African-American woman. Disguised as an “Autobiography,” the novel relates the story of Alfrado or “Frado,” a free woman of color and former servant who supports herself in the North by making straw hats, then by concocting and selling dye “for restoring gray hair to its former color” from a recipe acquired from a benefactor.¹⁶ When poor health forces Frado out of work, she writes and then publishes Our Nig. Destitute but disdaining employment as a domestic servant, Frado, a.k.a. Harriet E. Wilson, joined the ranks of 19th-century women who turned to writing to pay their bills. Whereas white women might advance their writing on their own merits, Wilson, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, required a supporting appendix of testimonials affirming the author's character to market her book.

The resilient Celie, who rises above her violent and abusive childhood in Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple (1982), remains perhaps our most famous literary entrepreneurial woman of color. Ironically, Celie's successful business grew out of her own physical imperfections. Because her awkward figure palls in comparison with the statuesque Shug Avery, she decides to sew herself loose-fitting pants for camouflage and comfort. Eventually she finds a successful vocation as the designer of “Folkspants, Unlimited,” a unisex garment. Celie's flourishing enterprise provides her with creative and meaningful employment, her first earnings, and an ever-increasing circle of customers. As Celie puts it, “‘I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time.’”¹⁷ She demonstrates that the way to escape Mr. __________, her cruel and neglectful husband, is with “a needle and not a razor” in her hand.¹⁸ One disparity between Walker's and Chopin's portrayals of black entrepreneurial women lies in the authors' emblematic wordplay. Celie's “patterns” for “Folkspants”—both as mode of dress and as business—bring her freedom and security, but “Madame Sylvie” already possesses what Celie newly acquires. It is precisely Sylvie's disruption of 19th-century racial and gender “patterns” that makes her gift to Athénaïse so paradoxical in light of the conventional mold to which the younger woman is expected to conform.

Andrew Delbanco proposes that The Awakening is ultimately a “cautionary tale—in much the same way that Frederick Douglass, for example, set out to shock his white audiences by hinting at the barbarism that slavery would eventually unleash in the enslaved.”¹⁹ Helen Taylor reads similarly “Athénaïse” as an exemplum narrative exhibiting “the problems of self-definition for women, defined and spoken for as they are by men.”²⁰ But “Athénaïse” cautions both sexes about the inevitable conflict between self and other. Although the heroine calls “marriage a trap set for the feet of unwary and unsuspecting girls” (434), portrayal of the husband, who despite his spurs and callouses is not fundamentally at fault for his young wife's unhappiness, is one of its essential ironies. Rather Chopin, like Alice Walker, seems to criticize the institution itself as an uneasy merger in which the spouses infrequently share a substantial conversation, a companionable dinner, an evening at cards, or even a smoke. Chopin's enjoyment of the above activities has been well documented; hence it seems plausible that in presenting both sides of the marital coin she identified as much with the card players who eluded the ladies in Sylvie's front parlor as with the ingenuous bride who braved convention by defecting to Sylvie's second-story rooms.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's autobiographical story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) works well pedagogically alongside “Athénaïse.” However, it is Gilman's evaluation of the cultural symbolism associated with hotel and apartment living that sheds light on the function of “the house of Sylvie” in Chopin's story. In Women and Economics (1898), Gilman's analysis of gender and monetary inequalities, she quips that “[t]o man, so far the only fully human being of his age, the bachelor apartment of some sort has been a temporary home for that part of his life wherein he had escaped from one family and not yet entered another.”²¹ For exactly this reason, Gouvernail has spent three transitional years at Sylvie's “living amid luxurious surroundings and a multitude of books” (443). But Athénaïse, after her education with the Catholic sisters, went from her parents' home directly into her husband's (a route Chopin also took herself). Hence “the house of Sylvie” provides the site of Athénaïse's first taste of freedom, a locus amoenus between carefree girlhood and the assumption of marital responsibilities. Like the lighthearted bachelor who declares he will “take mine ease in mine inn,”²² Athénaïse enjoys a time of reflection at Sylvie's apart from her husband and family, a time to reevaluate herself, her faltering marriage, and her future. Refurbishing her wardrobe with “pure white” and flower-sprigged dresses (442), she even assumes a new identity in this safe house. To assuage her loneliness she putters long hours in the garden, jots down her thoughts in letters, and converses regularly with a sophisticated man of the world. She finds it “diverting” to watch the passersby from the townhouse's private balcony and, above all, savors “the comforting, comfortable sense of not being married!” (444). Clearly, Athénaïse finds more than a room of her own in New Orleans. She experiences, if only symbolically, the first “house of Athénaïse.”

At the close of her New Orlenian sabbatical, she feels “pride and satisfaction”—“as if she had fallen heir to some magnificent inheritance”—in her decision to return to Cazeau and the household keys: “No one could have said now that she did not know her own mind” (452). Certainly her idealistic conviction remains to be tested, but the evaluation that the story equates marriage with women's enslavement seems unduly harsh. Schooled by the nuns and spoiled by her family, Athénaïse had little conception of a wife's duties or delights when she wed; consequently, she was doomed to disappoint everyone involved. Cazeau, too, held the unrealistic expectation that their union would resemble “the sun shining out of the clouds … like w'at the story-books promise after the wedding” (435). After a month at Sylvie's, however, Athénaïse is better prepared to assume her companionable, conjugal, practical, and maternal responsibilities. No longer an unenlightened girl, she departs a woman, like “Eve after losing her ignorance” (453). What she makes of her marriage and motherhood is now up to her.

In the final analysis, the story is not so much about women's enslavement in marriage but about women's preparation for marriage. And in Athénaïse's example, Chopin teaches that young women, like young men, would profit from a transitional period for emotional growth and at least some rudimentary sex education before they are wooed and moved, like chattel, from one house to another. As “The Yellow Wallpaper”'s conclusion shockingly reveals, late 19th-century women already possessed the “key” to patriarchal confinement, but they first had to unlock the door themselves. In Chopin's story, Athénaïse's three foils likewise instruct us in disclosing that Sylvie, a working woman of color, proves a more reliable guide and surrogate mother than either Madame Miché, who expects marriage to be “a wonderful and powerful agent in the development and formation of a woman's character” (434), or Sister Marie Angélique, who accuses Athénaïse of “turning deaf ears” to her divine calling to become a nun (431).²³ The story also denounces the Victorian double standard, which expected women to have no sexual desires but to submit passively to their husbands, whereas men like Gouvernail and Montéclin were free to pursue discreet affairs.²⁴ In “Athénaïse” Chopin affirms that women can enjoy sex and find fulfillment in marriage and motherhood but that their chance for happiness increases in direct proportion to their knowledge of these intimate, familial, and practical roles.

Whatever the author's intentions in “Athénaïse,” it contributed significantly toward her literary maturation. She labored uncommonly long over its composition and was undoubtedly delighted when it was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly, only her second story to appear there.²⁵ Some say that her maternal grandmother, Mary Athénaïse Charleville Faris, provided the inspiration for the title character.²⁶ Another anecdote reports that Oscar's mother, Julia Benoist Chopin, left her “mean and dictatorial” husband for several years in the 1850s but, like Athénaïse, later returned.²⁷ Whatever the influence of biographical materials upon “Athénaïse,” it is unquestionably one of Chopin's best stories. As a prelude to The Awakening, Sylvie's characterization anticipates Grand Isle hotelier Madame Lebrun, just as the short story narrative uses the novel's bird imagery, house and clothing iconography, opposing rural and urban settings, character foils, and finally those prophetic paper “patterns.”

Earlier in this century, Zora Neale Hurston campaigned that it was of “vast importance” for Americans to read stories about average, everyday people of color who worked “above the servant class” if we were ever “to do away with that feeling of difference which inspires fear and which ever expresses itself in dislike.”²⁸ Needless to say, Madame Sylvie's egalitarian portrayal was creatively and politically ahead of its time. Except in widowhood, Madame Cazeau will presumably never achieve her landlady's options or freedoms. Ultimately, “Athénaïse”'s candor concerning female sexuality as well as its frankness about the impact of all gender relationships upon the achievement of selfhood mark a significant stage in Chopin's growth as a storyteller, an evaluation only enhanced when the story is reconsidered with Sylvie's integral, indeed, crucial characterization in mind.

Notes

1. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1993), xii.

2. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 114.

3. The story appeared in the August and September issues of the Atlantic Monthly as “Athénaïse: A Story of Temperament” and was reprinted in A Night in Acadie (1897). See The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted, hardcover ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 426-54, 1025.

4. Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 179. For discussions of “Athénaïse,” see Taylor, 179-82; Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin, 112-14, 130-32; Barbara Ewell, Kate Chopin (New York: Ungar, 1986), 108-12; Pearl L. Brown, “Kate Chopin's Fiction: Order and Disorder in a Stratified Society,” The University of Mississippi Studies in English 9 (1991), 128-30; and Emily Toth, “Kate Chopin Thinks Back Through Her Mothers: Three Stories by Kate Chopin,” in Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, ed. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSaussure Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 18-21, 24-25; and Toth's biography, Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 274-75.

5. Kate Chopin, “Athénaïse,” in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 431; hereafter cited in the text.

6. Gouvernail also appears in “A Respectable Woman” (1894) as well as The Awakening.

7. Per Seyersted, The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 27, and Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region, 180.

8. For analyses of Chopin's African-American characterizations, see Barbara C. Ewell, Kate Chopin, 68-73; Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region, 138-202; Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable; Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 117-57; and Eunice Manders, “Kate Chopin's ‘Wretched Freeman,’” in Perspectives on Kate Chopin: Proceedings of the Kate Chopin International Conference [6-8 April, 1989], ed. Grady Ballenger, Karen Cole, Katherine Kearns, and Tom Sarnet (Natchitoches, La.: Northwestern State University Press, 1992), 37-45.

9. Some of Chopin's lengthier characterizations of older women of color are “Old Aunt Peggy” (Bayou Folk), “Aunt Dicey” in “A Gentleman of Bayou Teche” (Bayou Folk) “Aunt Pinky” in “Odalie Misses Mass” (1895), “Aunt Tildy” in “Ozeme's Holiday” (1896), “Aunt Halifax” in “Dead Men's Shoes” (1897), “Aunt Lympy's Interference” (1897) and “Aunt Crissy” in “The Gentleman from New Orleans” (completed in 1900 but published first in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin). Aunt Belindy in At Fault is perhaps the most three-dimensional of the characters.

10. Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, 118.

11. Langston Hughes, “Madam's Past History,” in American Literature, ed. Emory Elliott, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 2:1173-1174.

12. Interestingly, Chopin's “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” (1893), which mentions Athénaïse Miché's approaching marriage, contains a precursor to Sylvie's characterization, a middle-aged white woman who likewise runs a French Quarter boarding house. Unlike Sylvie's hardworking example, however, “Maman Chavan” lounges about in a “white volante” (266), drinks sauterne at breakfast, smokes cigarettes, and enjoys a friendship with Hector Santien, a notorious gambler who, like Gouvernail, similarly takes Sunday breakfast at her townhouse.

13. Per Seyersted, The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 27.

14. Sylvie obtained this “set of pattern” from “a foreign lady of distinction whom she had nursed years before at the St. Charles hotel” (453), a vetting that not only testifies to Sylvie's rise in the economic world from her earlier position as a nurse-domestic, but also furnishes added subtlety in its implication that the patterned life of a wife and mother is as yet “foreign” to the expectant bride.

15. John Carlos Rowe, “The Economics of the Body in The Awakening,” in Boren and Davis, Kate Chopin Reconsidered, 134.

16. Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1983), 137.

17. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 183.

18. Walker, 125.

19. Andrew Delbanco, “The Half-Life of Edna Pontellier,” in New Essays on “The Awakening,” ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 106.

20. Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region, 182.

21. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Cambridge: The University Press, 1911), 265.

22. Gilman, 265.

23. In an “entrepreneurial workshop” hosted by the Department of Marketing at Loyola College, Baltimore, the participants were asked to consider these questions: “What skills, life experiences does this entrepreneur bring?” and “What skills, experiences must this entrepreneur acquire before opening this enterprise?” The first question reveals why the fifty-year-old Sylvie owns a living business. The second highlights the qualities Athénaïse lacks to begin the business of living.

24. Gouvernail, who associates with a liberal crowd, hopes someday to hold Athénaïse with “a lover's arms”; her marriage “made no particle of difference” to him (450). Montéclin takes frequent, solitary trips to New Orleans, and Cazeau, a widower, was married for ten years before his wife's death.

25. “Tante Cat'rinette,” published in September 1894, was Chopin's first story in Atlantic Monthly (Seyersted, The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 1017).

26. For a biographical account of Mary Athénaïse Charleville Faris (1799-1887), see Emily Toth, “Kate Chopin Thinks Back,” in Boren and Davis, Kate Chopin Reconsidered, 18-21, 24-25. In Kate Chopin, 30, Toth states that “Athénaïse” was “named for Kate's grandmother.”

27. Seyersted, Kate Chopin, 36.

28. Zora Neale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won't Print,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979), 169, 173.