SOURCE: Staunton, John A. “Kate Chopin's ‘One Story’: Casting a Shadowy Glance on the Ethics of Regionalism.” Studies in American Fiction 28, no. 2 (autumn 2000): 203-34.

[In the following essay, Staunton considers Chopin's attitude toward regionalism and local color fiction and discusses her short fiction as regionalist writing.]

In Kate Chopin's first two critical essays, both written in 1894, the same year her first collection of short fiction, Bayou Folk, was published, the St. Louis-born writer—who was best known for her Louisiana fictions—demonstrates the ambivalence with which many nineteenth-century American authors approached terms like regionalism and local color. The essays are brief but incisive accounts of the strengths and weaknesses of regional writing and offer a quick glance at the literary conflicts at the end of the century. The first reports on the Western Association of Writers, a mostly Indiana group that Chopin chides for “clinging to past and conventional standards, [for] an almost Creolean sensitiveness to criticism and a singular ignorance of, or disregard for, the value of the highest art forms.”¹ The group's provincialism, Chopin suggests, prevents it from realizing that “there is a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana.” But to ensure that her criticism of local writing here is not itself read provincially, Chopin continues to describe the world good fiction must attempt to configure: “nor does it lie at the antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it” (691). The second is a more measured piece, a mixed review of Crumbling Idols, Hamlin Garland's collection of essays championing the use of regional and local color elements in the service of a literary realism. By Chopin's estimation, when Garland advocates breaking free of “the hold of conventionalism,” he ends up undervaluing “the importance of the past in art and exaggerates the significance of the present,” especially as the present makes itself visible through the meticulous detailing of local life. Though she herself was a writer of regional fiction that was enthusiastically promoted for its artistic and faithful rendering of local life, Chopin here warns that “social problems, social environments, local color and the rest of it are not of themselves motives to insure the survival of a writer who employs them” (693).

Chopin's curious aversion to the efforts of her fellow regional writers in these essays seems to come from a suspicion of any ethical motive or naturalist principle and favor a strict formalism or aestheticism. The critiques also show Chopin to be reluctant to throw in with any aesthetic ideology that blindly attacks the powers that support it or the artistic forms that enable it. Thus she characterizes the Western Association's eschewing of high art as naïve and childish, and she takes Garland to task for his impolitic criticism of the East as a tyrannous literary center. “There can no good come of abusing Boston and New York,” Chopin cautions: “On the contrary, as ‘literary centers’ they have rendered incalculable service … by bringing to light whatever … has been produced of force and originality in the West and South since the war” (694). Such a position is coincidentally (and perhaps ironically) in step with much of the early twentieth-century literary criticism of regional fiction that kept Chopin an admired but minor figure until the rediscovery of her second novel, The Awakening. At first glance, much of Chopin's own fiction seems to discount her critique of Garland's “veritism” and of regional writing in general, but a closer inspection, particularly of the short fiction, tells a different story. Chopin delivers her criticism with authority and conviction, with the authenticity of one who speaks from within a region and tradition, suggesting not that Chopin is simply inconsistent in her criticism and practice, but rather that Chopin's understanding of regional writing includes a sophisticated and indeed implicitly ethical knowledge of the dangers inherent in claiming to offer an authentic or enduring relation of another person or community.

Published six months before her review of Garland's manifesto, Chopin's Bayou Folk contains two stories that explicitly challenge the impulse of local color to provide an authentic vision of a region. In the first, “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” a Northern painter wants to capture the colorful spirit of rural Louisiana by portraying a local man in the imagined garb of the 'Cadian rustic, something the man, Evariste Bonamour, considers demeaning for any gentleman—Acadian or other—of the Bayou Têche. Evariste's continued resistance ultimately convinces the painter to allow Evariste himself to title the painting (and in turn provide the title for Chopin's story). In the second story, “La Belle Zoraïde,” a plantation mistress demands of her slave Manna-Loulou that she nightly tell her a true story to help her sleep. When Madame Delisle hears the tale of la belle Zoraïde, a story configured out of the bits of old song the servant hears the locals singing as she goes to her mistress's chamber, Madame instead remains fitful and awake. The “true” story lives on to trouble the woman who wanted only to be entertained by colorful and harmless tales about her region. The story's effect on Madame presents an implicit critique both of her narrative preferences and her treatment of Manna-Loulou.

Chopin continues this sort of internal challenge to local color through her subsequent fiction, but in the brief opening paragraphs of “Elizabeth Stock's One Story”—finished in March 1898, a year before the publication of The Awakening, it is the second piece in what was to have been Kate Chopin's third collection of short fiction, A Vocation and a Voice²—we encounter a more pronounced consideration of the deficiencies of local color through a complex figure of the late-nineteenth-century regional writer herself. Departing from the 'Cadian and Creole characters and settings for which she acquired her fame, Chopin here offers the story of an unmarried Missouri woman of thirty-eight who is also the local postmistress and an aspiring writer of local fiction. The tale begins with a voice from outside the region announcing the death and trying to account for the life of Elizabeth Stock—her unmarried status and independent streak apparently explanation enough of her death for the narrator. By the end of this brief but intricately layered narrative, however, Elizabeth's own voice emerges as the source of truth about what has happened to her and her community. She speaks to us from beyond the grave but also from deep within the community she holds together.

We see highlighted in each of the stories the dangers of undertaking the task of representing a region from the outside, and we witness the repeated narrative and thematic gesture away from the outside perspective toward something more participatory. Explicitly foregrounding the conflict between local color and regional representations by laying one vision beside or over the other, “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” and “Elizabeth Stock” skillfully configure the narrative and ethical consequences of what happens when one attempts to tell the “one story” of a region. In their careful attention to the possibilities of narrative form and the intersection of such literary form and ethical content, they offer a useful site from which to examine a critical difference in the ethical comportment generated by either local color or regionalism.

Despite the suggestion of the title, I do not intend here to argue that Chopin has a singular or uniform vision of what regional writing is or should be. But as we will see in these stories, which range over the 'Cadian, Creole, and Midwestern subjects of her fiction, Chopin is always acutely interested in what is at stake—ethically and aesthetically—when one sets out to fashion an account of regional life that will affect the lives of others. Each of the stories here offers a model of reading within the narrative itself, making more clear one of the central elements of regionalism as it has been defined by a number of critics: to encourage a readerly response based on empathetic connection.

This movement is implicitly an ethical gesture, and I have chosen the stories here for the way they foreground particular formal distinctions between local color and regionalism based on that ethical concern. In conjunction with several recent critical formulations of the differences between local color and regionalism, I will use passages from Chopin's stories to help us survey the dimensions of the critical landscape of regional writing. The key features of the debate are grounded in the formal elements of narration, but what remains unexamined in the criticism to date is the role literary form has in the ethical stances proffered by local color and regionalism. To help us elucidate that connection in Chopin's work and in regionalist literature in general, we will begin by focusing on how the deeply rooted comportment of narrative voice in local colorist and regionalist fictions provides a range of alternate views on region. By intersecting both insider and outsider perspectives, Chopin's work manages to cast each into relief, drawing one out of the shadow of the other. This analysis will then allow us to consider some of the critical and philosophical issues of regionalism, particularly as Chopin considers them, in terms of the ethical consequences of formal innovation. A closer analysis of each story will then follow several different formal configurations of region, leading us back to the questions of how formal and ethical concerns intersect and what happens when they do so, from either a local colorist or regionalist perspective.

Accounts of American literary history often use the terms regionalism and local color interchangeably, and both modes are concerned with rendering true and faithful accounts of local life.³ Each seeks to make visible a sense of life in those places that lie outside the experience of readers from other regions, both offering at the very least the vague ethical lesson that other regions have some value that should interest us. Through their creative configurations of place, both local color and regionalism acknowledge what Eudora Welty says allows for art to fulfill its chief function “to make reality real.” Indeed, it is “location,” Welty says, that “is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from a story in its course.”⁴ As such, either local color or regionalism can succeed only insofar as it renders visible and makes present the ethical currents that find their grounding in a particular place. But as Welty herself notes, “region” can be a careless critical term when talking about locality and fiction. It rarely designates simply a static place or set geographical boundary, and it cannot in itself ensure the worth or survival of any representation of local life. “Regionalism” and “local color” have a similarly vexed quality, for in practice they offer markedly different representations of local life, which have wide-ranging consequences for how we see individual characters and how they see themselves in relation to each other. And yet it is not simply a case of one mode being more accurate or authentic than the other, nor can we simply configure the two modes in terms of good (regionalist) and bad (local colorist) visions of regional writing. Indeed, as Chopin notes in her review of Garland, these differences of themselves matter little for the survival of a region, its literature, or its authors. Rather it is a much more complicated ethical and aesthetic matter of what happens to local life when one chooses to render it artistically at all.

Chopin's work in general and these stories in particular help demonstrate that any regional survival hinges on the success of a readerly refiguration of a particular representation of local life. If “one story” exists in respect to the representation of local life, it is that each literary mode effects a different ethical position, which qualifies any univocal claims to authority or authenticity. As critics such as Judith Fetterley, Jim Wayne Miller, Marjorie Pryse, and David Holman have all come to argue, “regionalism” is best understood as a type of local writing, beginning in the early nineteenth century and extending through the twentieth century, that seeks to privilege the voices of the previously overlooked.⁵ Local color is generally understood to be the emergent form of American literary realism that flourished particularly in post-Civil War America. Local color found its proponents in Eastern editors such as Howells, and by Chopin's and Garland's time it had essentially become an Eastern aesthetic mode concerned with seeking out distant areas and cultural practices separate from the customs of the coast. In a practice that shares striking similarities with the colonialist projects of other eras and regions, local color fiction marks and contains the excesses of regional difference. Transliterated and phonetically rendered dialect, rich sensual geographical detail, and the evocation of alien customs and systems of power, all are refashioned by a framing narrative in standard written English that suggests the comfort and security of a carefully modulated Eastern cultural vision. The result is a remaking of local life in the regions over into the image of a national or ideal type of American living.

Regionalism resists such idealizing or stereotyping and importantly establishes its differences from local color in its narrative perspective and in the comportment of characters and readers brought forth by the events of the narrative. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse note in their studies of American women regionalists, for instance, that the literary practice of writers like Chopin operates to establish an aesthetic vision of empathetic connectedness that is markedly different from what local-color writers produced. By “present[ing] regional experience from within, so as to engage the reader's sympathy and identification,” regionalism becomes a literature both of difference and for difference. It attempts to teach readers to read differently, to “see with” instead of “look at” the characters represented.⁶ David Holman arrives at a similar distinction in his study of Southern and Midwestern literature by both men and women writers. The regionalist artist, he says, reports on the region from within, and “as arbiter of the worlds outside of and within the region, fully participates in both.” In contrast, the local colorist's work, “as the examination and presentation of exotics, is anathema to the aims of most serious writers to present not only a region but the world as they see it.”⁷

Chopin's “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” takes as its theme precisely this gap between seeing and not-seeing which separates the practice of regionalist from local colorist.⁸ The opening lines of the story, for instance, allow the local colorist's vision to become normative for the reader before it will be challenged.

It was no wonder Mr. Sublet … wanted to make a picture of Evariste. The 'Cadian was rather a picturesque subject in his way, and a tempting one to an artist looking for bits of “local color” along the Têche.

(319)

By the end of the story, however, Mr. Sublet's perspective on Evariste Bonamour changes. For Evariste saves Sublet's son from drowning in the bayou, something which elevates him for the painter above the “typical” rustic to the status of hero. Evariste has a more modest assessment of himself, and Chopin allows him, not Sublet, to shape the vision (and the title) of the picture that Sublet will make of him, though presumably Evariste will still not possess Sublet's rendering of his own image.

This ending provides a brief but important ironic coda to the otherwise linear sequence that dominates the narration. Through the alternate perspective at the end, Chopin forces her readers to re-think the normative claims of Sublet's local color art and elicits a more sympathetic vision of life along the Têche. That vision is part of a regionalism that is, as Jim Wayne Miller observes, “appreciative of … ways in which small and great traditions are connected.” The texts that emerge from this regionalist vision charge out from the “center of a moral universe [in which] local life [is] aware of itself” as both local—grounded in a region—and as living.⁹ Regionalism, so defined, is not a literature “about” place, though it is drenched with place and soaked through with concerns for place. Rather it is a literature about how people attempt to live together in community; it is ethical in the broadest sense, examining the simple question, “how ought we to live together here?” The narrative perspective it adopts privileges the voices that come from within the region, so that the ethical stance it seeks to engender in the reader encourages an interaction that will challenge the boundaries drawn by the dominant society and that will attend to the voices of those who otherwise exist on the margins of the societal discourse.¹⁰

As we see with Sublet and Evariste, the confrontation of these stances appears almost immediately in Chopin's stories. In the obituary-like opening of “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” we encounter first a monochromatic version of the death of a would-be writer: “Elizabeth Stock, an unmarried woman of thirty-eight, died of consumption during the past winter at the St. Louis City Hospital. There were no unusually pathetic features attending her death” (CW [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin] 586). Despite the apparent normalcy of the death of this supposedly unremarkable woman, the frame narrator nonetheless seeks out Elizabeth's quarters and discovers in her desk a manuscript that is presented to us as an interesting piece of local color. This new narrative begins with an innocuous declaration by the titular character: “Since I was a girl I always felt as if I would like to write stories” (CW 586). Neither introduction to Elizabeth's life seems particularly compelling on its own, but at the intersection of the two narratives—one from the outside, looking in, the other from within, looking closely at itself—we discover that much is at stake in the production of stories about local life and that efforts to establish a single, definitive, or authentic account of one's life need first to reckon with the competing perspectives of others.

The story of Elizabeth's ambition—“I always felt as if I would like to write”—comes to us, for instance, already filtered through the lens of our prior knowledge of her demise, even before the distancing and protective use of the subjunctive that seems to hide her desire for authorship. The frame narrator informs us that after being transferred to the hospital's incurable ward (inexplicably, since “she showed hope of rallying till placed” there), Elizabeth “relapsed into a silence that remained unbroken till the end” (586). But the voice of Elizabeth herself clearly breaks that silence, speaking to us and speaking back to the frame narrator from beyond the grave. Here, in the multi-perspectival narrative that results from the confrontation of outsider/local colorist and insider/regionalist accounts of Elizabeth's life, we arrive, as Mikhail Bakhtin says happens “beginning with any text,” ultimately at the sound of “the human voice, which is to say we come up against the human being.”¹¹ Elizabeth's voice forces us to question any assessment of her life we may have made from the information supplied by the frame narrator. At stake here is not only the legitimacy of Elizabeth's ambition to write but also the authenticity of competing narrative perspectives on local life. For as we confront the question of how the narrative configuration of local life necessarily passes through the troubled intersection of literary form and ethical content, we must still decide on a particular perspective, and in so doing we privilege which vision of community is to survive.

By the time we encounter her, though, Elizabeth Stock has apparently not survived as a writer. Nevertheless, when Chopin's frame narrator offers us an example of the “scraps and bits of writing in bad prose and impossible verse” (586) that fill Elizabeth's desk, we do receive the promise of encountering something outside our own experience and of discovering some truth about this particular woman. We also receive an evaluation, from an unsympathetic source, of Elizabeth's (in)ability to render local life. Elizabeth identifies her own failure to emplot the lives of her regional characters and render their experiences into compelling narrative as an inability to make reality real to prospective readers. “Whenever I wanted to write a story,” she explains, “I could never think of a plot,” for “whenever I tried to think of one [a plot], it turned out to be something that some one else had thought about before me”(586). She tries to write a story about a well-known local figure, “old Si' Shepard that got lost in the woods and never came back,” for example, but her Uncle William chides her: “this here ain't no story; everybody knows about old Si' Shepard” (586). Her uncle's provision implies that a real story is not simply something that happens to someone; rather it is something atypical and unknown that joins the expectation for the exotica of local color with a desire to depict local life faithfully. Indeed, his guidelines are not unlike the requirements for a story contest Elizabeth herself enters, in which the winning entry, Elizabeth says, would have “to be original, entertaining, full of action and Goodness knows what all” (CW 587). Such guidelines, Elizabeth suggests, demand originality but in a format that traffics only in set types, and despite her name, Elizabeth can not seem to emplot the experiences of “stock” local color characters and still render an authentic vision of her regional community. In her ambition to survive as a regional writer, she becomes stuck at the intersection of “local color” and local life. Only when she turns away from reproducing types of local life and concentrates on defining and defending herself through her narrative do we at last acquire “true” pictures of Elizabeth and her community.

The shift in Elizabeth's focus points to a crucial difference in the narrative comportment established by regionalism and local color. Adopting and privileging the outsider's perspective, such as the frame narrator does, local color can not and does not fully “see” what life is like in the regions beyond its own boundaries. Favoring indigenously inflected perspectives, regionalism attempts to bring parts of the world together not under one time-line of Eastern progress, but under competing (and simultaneous) time-lines and narratives of local significance. Gary Saul Morson has called the multi-perspectival aspect of this type of narrative mode a “sideshadowing,” which “projects—from the ‘side’—the shadow of an alternative present. It allows us to see what might have been and therefore changes our view of what is.”¹² The regionalist perspective makes visible what local color fails to see, and it sideshadows the chronology of Eastern aesthetic progress implicit in local color writing. As a result, the “outside” view can no longer (as Bakhtin notes of discourse in the novel) perceive the overlooked inhabitants of a region solely “as objects, as typifactions, as local color.”¹³ In thus seeking to “make reality real” by making visible the previously overlooked, regionalism fashions a corrective re-vision of both local and national life.

Moving the narrative perspective from the margin into the center, and giving ethical weight to an otherwise unheard voice or unseen life, Chopin certainly participates in what has come to be recognized as the regionalist aesthetic of nineteenth-century writing. In “Elizabeth Stock's One Story,” the lack of pretension in the narration, the focus on character over plot, and the participation of the narrator in her own narration are all elements of the regionalist effort to make local life visualizable to readers. To these elements, however, Chopin adds her own criteria for the regionalist short story. In “La Belle Zoraïde,” for instance, the concerns of form and theme spiral and return, sideshadowing each other in a descending helical pattern that becomes subtly self-reflective, in which the possibility of other origins and meanings for a story about authentic origins and meanings always, and troublingly, exists. Chopin frames this story as a narrative in which multiple voices piece together the story of Zoraïde, the “true” tale that will help Madame Delisle sleep. On the surface the “as if” situation here is one which acknowledges and seeks to anesthetize the reader's participatory power. The story's success for Madame Delisle depends on its soporific qualities. But Chopin's story relies on our ability as attentive readers to piece together the bits of information about the racially divided world of Madame Delisle that demands such stories in the first place. Elizabeth Stock's position as both storyteller and manipulator of the written word likewise invites a sideshadowing critique of the frame narrator's opening verdict on her life and challenges the efficacy of narrative to configure the “true” story of regional life.

This rigorous internal examination is one of Chopin's principle formal components of regionalist narration. By examining the formal options for telling a story within the story itself, Chopin questions the epistemological grounding assumed in any given narration and challenges the ethical positions constructed from those “grounds.” The multi-perspectival narratives and the layers of narrative mediation in “Elizabeth Stock,” “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” and “La Belle Zoraïde” test the reader's ability to rely on his or her perception and knowledge of the world. Through the formal structures themselves, Chopin configures specific “as if” situations to force an epistemological crisis for readers to help achieve an ethical connection with readers about the lives of characters. We will see this appeal to empathetic connection made in a more mediated and deliberately stylized fashion when we look more closely at “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” and especially “La Belle Zoraïde.” But a brief return to the opening of “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” will lay out the way Chopin effects the shift in perspective from the outside to the inside, from reserved distance to committed engagement.

As we have seen, the story of Elizabeth's ambition to become a successful writer is already enclosed by the frame narrator's presentation of her apparent failure to distinguish herself. That Elizabeth dies of consumption seems to the frame narrator a natural and logical result of her having been “an unmarried woman of thirty-eight.” This perspective quickly comes under critique, however, as Chopin leads her readers through several re-evaluations of the implied notion that the death of an unmarried woman is inevitable and not worthy of pathos, or that such a death is the univocal story of her life. What we piece together from the “bits and scraps” from Elizabeth's desk challenges the single story and judgment that the narrator and society make on Elizabeth's life. We learn from Elizabeth herself that despite her artistic ambitions she already has secured a position of distinction in her community. She is the successful and widely respected postmistress of Stonelift, Missouri, a rural settlement not far from St. Louis. For six years in this position she has exercised no small measure of power and control over the mail and the people she sees every day. She is independent, but she also holds the community of Stonelift together by providing a locus for conversation and by delivering the written correspondence of its citizens, seeing postcards and letters safely into the hands of the addressees. Far from being the “type” of the unmarried woman the frame narrator suggests, Elizabeth demonstrates the remarkable range of a particular and distinctive voice, one that from the beginning is tied inextricably to stories and to the problem of their configuration and transmission. Her situation is characteristic of many of Chopin's protagonists: the lives of Chopin's characters never have just “one story” but emerge from personalized or alternative accounts of the construction of individual selfhood and identity that live in the shadows and margins of other or more “official” records.

Given Elizabeth's occupation and position within the town, her apparent problems with the written word that the frame narrator suggests would seem to have little to do with any unfamiliarity with oral or verbal communication. Rather her problem has its source in more formal concerns that seem to arise from too much familiarity with what has already been written. This difficulty similarly besets Zoraïde and Evariste, as they too must face the struggle of living through competing and mediating narratives about who they are. They join Elizabeth in attempting to fashion a story of themselves that will not be, as Elizabeth says, “something that some one else had thought about before” (586). To this end, Chopin's characters search amid a matrix of competing narrative and cultural strains for some permutation that will allow for what Chopin, her readers, and her characters would consider an “authentic” expression of self. That self-defined and self-defining permutation is for these protagonists an elusive goal that seems to reside sometimes beyond and sometimes at the crossroads of the stories told by the self, the world, and others. In the dialogue of these competing narratives we find the location of what we might call Chopin's “ethics of authenticity,” an ethical posture in which one negotiates the expectations and needs of others with the inner desires of the self in order to discover who one most “truly” is or “ought” to be.¹⁴ As philosopher Charles Taylor explains, this type of ethical identity has its roots in an aesthetic (and chiefly Romantic) vision of life in which “artistic creation becomes the paradigm[atic] mode in which people can come to self-definition.” Such a self-definition, Taylor notes, arises from—in fact requires—creative construction through dialogue and confrontation with other “horizons of significance.”¹⁵ Those “horizons” mark the affective range of a particular vision or system of belief that informs someone's life, but like topographical horizons, they are limited only by the extent of one's own placement and vision. The type of creative encounter Taylor envisions is one in which such limits are crossed or intersect and which allows for a change in one's ethical stance through an empathetic engagement with the horizons of others. And as Werner Marx notes, by “comporting oneself in an attuned and intuitively understanding manner towards the other and others, … [by] partaking in their fate” one can effect or bring forth a community.¹⁶ What regionalist criticism terms empathetic connection, then, is precisely this sort of ethical confrontation arising from the narrative configuration of locality.

Chopin's narrative experiments in each of the stories examined here make present and configure local life through the construction of a particular “as if” situation, such as Madame Delisle thinks she needs to sleep and that Elizabeth Stock first imagines she cannot devise. But whereas Elizabeth cannot emplot an “as if” situation for her community, others—beginning with the frame narrator and ending with Nathan Brightman, the local squire who orchestrates her dismissal to advance the fortunes of his friend's son—have already emplotted a number of counterfactual stories—i.e. lies—about Elizabeth. An “as if” situation need not always involve lying of this type, of course. Elizabeth's attempts to make up stories, for instance, involve untruths, but not necessarily lies. In fact, as Michael Riffaterre's analysis of narrative diegesis demonstrates, fictions deliberately present untruths but do so without the intention to deceive that by definition stands behind lies. “Whatever symbolic truth fiction may have,” Riffaterre says, “that truth results from a rhetorical transformation of the narrative into figurative discourse or from situational analogies between the writer's inventions and representations of recognized reality.”¹⁷ The rhetorical transformation is also a formal-ethical transformation of fiction into conversation, for as Paul Ricoeur observes, it is at the juncture of narrative configuration and its refiguration by readers that the world of the text confronts and engages the life-world of the reader and “acquires a meaning in the full sense of the term.”¹⁸ Put another way, the “as if” situations of Chopin's stories establish a sideshadowing context by which to measure the efficacy of a particular configuration of the world that both responds to the demands of others and remains true to one's own vision. Ultimately, the “as if” situation seeks an empathetic response, a refiguration of the world of the text by the reader.

By eliciting empathetic response from readers, Chopin's fiction immediately establishes an alternative reality for its characters that opens up a number of narrative and ethical possibilities for readers themselves. As one regionalist critic, Elaine Sargent Apthorp, notes, the “empathetic imagination” involved in such a refiguration is an act of creation that works against the antagonistic power of the dominant cultural language which besets the characters of regionalist fictions (especially when those characters are artists).¹⁹ The principle characters in Chopin's stories examined here are artists of the self, each seeking to fashion an individual authenticity in their local lives. The stories repeatedly show, however, the tragic results of the dominant cultural language impeding the freedom of individual self-definition. In the strategy of regionalist fiction, according to Apthorp, the empathetic imagination, or imaginative engagement,

is not just practiced by the artist in rendering her material; the narrator urgently challenges the reader to practice it …, and indeed, the “cultural work” that the fiction is intended to perform will not be complete until the reader has … [conducted such an] act of empathetic imagination.²⁰

This sort of imaginative engagement can not come solely through a simple, linearly presented tale in which characters march about in front of exotic backgrounds outside the Eastern seaboard. Rather the contexts of self-definition come into question and leave the reader to imagine alternative outcomes for individual lives in light of competing narratives of locality.

Behind these questions and underpinning the emphasis on empathetic connection in regionalist criticism is the conviction that “as if” situations, fictions, stories can and do provide models of ethical action that can be instructive to readers when they engage those models in conversation and confrontation. They express (as philosopher Martha Nussbaum says of novels) “a normative sense of life,” that “tells … readers to notice this and not this, to be active in these and not those ways. It leads them into certain postures of the mind and heart and not others.”²¹ What concerns Chopin are the ethical consequences of using particular short story forms to arrive at specific postures of mind and heart. She explores through the fiction itself how the variety of formal options for telling a story makes “normative” the life in that story.

In looking at the process by which regionalist literature attempts to make an empathetic connection, we see the importance of specific formal elements such as narrative point of view in allowing that connection to occur in the first place. I want now to shift attention more centrally to other aspects of literary form that Chopin uses to enable this encounter. Again, the critical distinctions between regionalism and local color are useful in understanding exactly how Chopin's experiments with form affect her interrogation of the ethics of regional writing made normative by different formal elements. But we will examine Chopin's use of form more extensively here, since the stories each investigate the aesthetic and ethical limits of specific elements of local color. For instance, the narrative trajectory of most local-color fiction follows a linear progression that the reader observes passively and indifferently from a position removed from the action. As the events of the story unfold, in a sense inevitably and teleologically, the type of emotional involvement made normative for reader or narrator in local color is almost always implicitly one of superiority to the lives of the characters. In Chopin's deployment of this form, however, she shows that posture to be a dangerous one to adopt for writer/artist or reader. Chopin manipulates just such readerly expectations in “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” to offer a critique of both linear narration and local color, challenging the smug comportment of the passive observer from outside the region. Through her relation of the experiences Evariste Bonamour has with Mr. Sublet, the Northern painter searching for pictures of local color, Chopin employs the form of local color against itself, showing in Evariste's claim to his own image the moral limits of a form such as Sublet's when it tries uncritically—and unempathetically—to account for “real” life.

Chopin does not pin her challenge of local color practice solely to this ending, however. Early in the story Evariste and his daughter Martinette speculate about Sublet's motives for making the picture, questioning the impulse of the outsider looking for representations of “authentic” and exotic Acadian life. “He tell' me he want' put my picture in one fine’Mag’ zine,” Evariste tells his daughter. “W'at fo' you reckon he want' do dat?” (319). Sublet's motives—or his “eccentric wishes” as Chopin's narrator designates them—to portray Evariste in his ragged clothes do not make sense to the Bonamours. They raise for them a kind of epistemological and ethical crisis, for the northern “local colorist” does not act the way people along the Têche do. For the Bonamours, Sublet's reasons belong to the province of some mag'zine “yonda” (320), and they remain alien to their way of thinking about the world. But Aunt Dicey, a neighbor, raises the possibility that Sublet and his son are driven by more than a predilection for documentation and ethnography, providing some insight into the impulses of local colorists. Sublet may pay Evariste handsomely for the privilege of making his picture, Aunt Dicey tells Martinette, but “Dey [presumably the editors of some “mag'zine yonda”] gwin sot down on' neaf: ‘Dis heah is one dem low-down 'Cajuns o' Bayeh Têch!’” (320). Aunt Dicey speaks from recent experience: Sublet's son wants to photograph her toiling over her ironing board in her work clothes; the woman, though, would prefer to be represented in her best meeting-clothes and as far removed from her ironing board as possible. Her preference does not so much seek to gloss over the harsh reality of her life as it seeks to present another side of the story of who she is. Through this dialogue of motives Chopin allows her characters to demonstrate that life along the Têche has more facets than the Northern taxonomists of local color initially or usually see.

If Chopin allows her regional characters to lampoon the motives of local colorists such as the Sublets, however, she herself is not above using the exchanges between her rural characters to present a vision of local life that is quaintly humorous and naïve. For example, Martinette uncritically takes Aunt Dicey's opinions of Sublet and his son to be the truth of the matter and quickly informs her father about Sublet's supposed subtitle for the picture. She delivers her claim with authority but with a specious logic. “I yeard so,” she says. “I know it's true” (321). Evariste similarly accepts the authority of another's word. Although he does not know (or ask for) the source of his daughter's certainty, Evariste still asks her to return the money to Sublet. Though we learn later that Aunt Dicey's supposition may have some merit, at this point we know nothing certain about Sublet's motives from his own perspective. With the exception of the opening paragraph that gives us the local colorist's position on Evariste, Aunt Dicey's suspicions and Martinette's conviction seem to have no sound base. They remain comically and safely contained within the local colorist vision the opening invites us to assume.

Although Martinette is appalled at the stereotypical way in which Sublet apparently views her father, she does not hesitate from making her own conclusions based solely on her local way of seeing. She knows Sublet, the “stranger gentleman,” immediately, the narrator explains, “because his hair was parted in the middle and he wore a pointed beard” (322). Up to this point in the story, Chopin has kept Sublet from our sight. In allowing Martinette to locate Sublet for us, then, Chopin gives a tacit endorsement to Martinette's vision of him as alien, in which the different (“the stranger gentleman”) even becomes slightly diabolical (“he wore a pointed beard”). Sublet himself remains silent about his motives until after Evariste brings in Sublet's son Archie, whom he has saved from drowning. When Sublet at last speaks, he returns specifically to the idea of a caption for his picture of Evariste, implying that Martinette's earlier challenge of him based on Aunt Dicey's information is not without merit. “You will let me make your picture now, I hope, Evariste,” says Sublet, in a vein that seems on the surface to bestow great respect on Evariste. “I want to place” the picture, he says, “among things I hold most dear, and shall call it ‘A hero of Bayou Têche’” (324). While Sublet's gesture seems to transform positively his initial impulse for condescending local color, Evariste's distress over this new title shows that Sublet still does not see the people of Bayou Têche as they are or even as they see themselves. “No, no, … it's nuttin' hero' to take a li'le boy out de water” (324), protests Evariste, implying that he is simply doing what he thinks anyone else would do. Moreover, Sublet's title of “hero” further prevents the picture from representing Evariste's story. For it inextricably ties Evariste to the story of Sublet and his son, and not to Evariste's own long history along the Têche.

Mr. Hallet, the local planter who is Sublet's host, finally mediates between the two positions, enabling the local color and regional visions to reach a sort of compromise. Hallet proposes that Sublet make the picture but that Evariste choose the title. This intervention effects a narrative return to the beginning of the story. For when Evariste says deliberately, “You will put on'neat' de picture … ‘Dis is one picture of Mista Evariste Anatole Bonamour, a gent'man of de Bayou Têche’” (324), he gives us, in this appositive, a near approximation of the title of Chopin's story. But we do not, of course, get the exact title, and Evariste's directive here, though closing the story, does not give us the final word on either him, Sublet's painting, or Bayou Têche. Chopin herself transforms Evariste's dialect to the more formal designation in her title, though it remains more authentic to Evariste than either of the titles Sublet proposes.

Despite this series of mediations, the story still suggests that Sublet's picture, just as Chopin's story itself, will be but “one picture,” not the definitive record, of Evariste or Bayou Têche. In this way Chopin employs all the techniques of local color—dialect, eccentric characterizations, colorful landscapes—to reveal the inherent deficiencies of local color, which in its attempts to show the “real” picture can do no more than offer one picture. We hear the dialect of Evariste and Martinette; we remember the eccentric Aunt Dicey who apparently sees to the heart of things. We witness the glass-like water of the bayou that does not reflect the image of Sublet's son, but somehow reaches out to draw him beneath its surface. But if we recall the deceptive stillness of this landscape that remains threatening and dangerous to outsiders, we do so only through Evariste's depiction of it. The primary action—saving Sublet's son—occurs outside the frame of the story, off stage. We have access to it, as with the landscape, only through Evariste's account, an account made from within “true” local life. In these transmissions of character and action, Chopin demonstrates the need for a more participatory narrative rendering of local life. As the ironic coda makes clear, such a rendering will not come solely through linear-causal chain narratives that move forward irrespective of the reader's engagement. Those stories can never offer a complete picture of life, nor can they impart adequate knowledge about local life. That knowledge comes to us not through the lens of local color but through a confrontation—perhaps even through the threat of death—with the local environment on its own terms.

The story preceding “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” in Bayou Folk demonstrates an even greater concern with the ethical consequences of formal innovation in narrative and offers a far more complicated picture of life along the bayous of Louisiana. In “La Belle Zoraïde,” the story that Manna-Loulou tells of Zoraïde, a slave who disobeys her mistress and suffers the loss of her lover, her child, and her mind, follows multiple and sometimes simultaneous narrative trajectories. What is more, it supplements and shadows an existing situation, for it is one tale in a ritual of nightly tale-telling between Manna-Loulou and Madame Delisle. The descending and spiraling movement of the story perhaps makes the reader or listener more and more dispirited about the possibility of real ethical action, as the story's self-reflective turnings keep its fictive nature before the reader. Yet the helical form of this story can also allow for less incapacitating responses, which make visible the complexity of human life in ways that configure the lives of others as real—and not merely notional or imaginary. The alternative perspective drawn from these other lives challenges our own certainty and desires, our own ways of living.

The story begins with a brief description of a summer night, out of which Chopin summons the figure of Manna-Loulou. The opening sentence calls attention to the region with the word “marais” (marsh), followed by the colloquial directive, “yonder.” From these small elements, we discern that the narrator speaks from a familiarity with the surroundings of Manna-Loulou. Those surroundings are francophone and rural, but they are also decidedly southern in their racial hierarchies. This particular imaginative terrain suggests a usually static locality that changes only when something from a region “yonder” arrives. An internal impulse for change, however, always threatens to speak through the guise of the seemingly pretty pictures and stories told from within the region, especially those told from the mouth of Manna-Loulou.

Out of an opening description of the Bayou St. John emanate the notes of a song sung by a man in a boat “that had come out of the lake and was moving with slow, lazy motion down the bayou” (303). The progression of this song into Manna-Loulou's story proceeds just as slowly from sentence to sentence, and each line presents an element that the next sentence takes up and fleshes out for its own use. So, for instance, after we learn that “a man in the boat was singing a song,” we discover that

the notes of the song came faintly to the ears of old Manna-Loulou, herself as black as the night. … Something in the refrain reminded the woman of an old, half-forgotten Creole romance, and she began to sing it low to herself. … And then this old song, a lover's lament for the loss of his mistress, floating into her memory, brought with it the story she would tell to Madame, who lay in her sumptuous mahogany bed, waiting to be fanned and put to sleep to the sound of one of Manna-Loulou's stories.

(303)

The old Creole romance that the boatman's song recalls for Manna-Loulou is transcribed by the narrator with a stanza in the patois of Manna-Loulou, and her story of la belle Zoraïde similarly transcribes each of these other tales of lost love into the patois of Madame Delisle's customary bedtime story.

Before Manna-Loulou even speaks to Madame Delisle, then, Chopin's narrative presents at least three different origins of the “authentic” story of Zoraïde. What is more, though none of these are identified decisively as the true account, each begins and ends with the sound or the invocation of a story. Thus, the importance of the form of stories for understanding the “story” of Zoraïde is trebly underscored before we ever discover the content of the “story of Zoraïde,” not to mention the origin of that content. To further complicate the line of transcription of “the story [that] was all there [perhaps already?] in Manna-Loulou's head—the story of la belle Zoraïde,” the narrator informs us that Manna-Loulou tells the story “to her mistress in the soft Creole patois, whose music and charm no English words can convey” (304). The report that Chopin provides of this dialogue, however, is in English. The account, then, concedes the prosaic deficiencies of English to configure the authentic “feel” of Manna-Loulou's story. The English translation implicitly claims only to give us the content. But the twisting lines of the narrative bring us to the beginning of the story. They frustrate any attempt to move simply to the origins behind that story, suggesting in their own helical pattern the ensuing theme of Manna-Loulou's tale about the types of mental and emotional constraints that systems of unequal power place on the oppressed.

After such an intricately stylized rendering of the sounds and songs along the Bayou St. John, the story that follows is a rather straightforward one about the descent into madness of Zoraïde. When her previously indulgent mistress begins to assert her dominance over Zoraïde and further constrains her freedom, Zoraïde understandably suffers a crisis of identity. As a mixed-race servant to one Madame Delarivière, Zoraïde has enjoyed a state of quasi-freedom—so long as she accedes to the wishes of her mistress. But when Zoraïde rejects the wishes of her mistress that she marry M'sieur Ambroise, “a union that will please [Madame Delarivière] in every way” (304), and falls in love with a slave, “le beau Mézor,” the system of power that operates between the two women appears more clearly. When Zoraïde requests permission to marry Mézor, Madame at first can only exclaim her distaste in specifically racial terms: “That negro! That negro! Bon Dieu Seigneur, but that is too much!” (305). Zoraïde then confronts Madame Delarivière with a question that goes to the heart of the system of power governing their relations.

“Am I white, nenaine?” pleaded Zoraïde. “You white! Malheurese! You deserve to have the lash laid upon you like any other slave; you have proven yourself no better than the worst.” “I am not white;” persisted Zoraïde, respectfully and gently. “Doctor Langlé gives me his slave to marry, but he would not give me his son. Then, since I am not white, let me have from out of my own race the one whom my heart has chosen.”

(305)

Zoraïde's request, while powerfully delivered and convincing in its appeal to justice, always remains unanswerable under Madame's system. For the master-slave relationship here concedes no appeal to justice based on fairness or equality. In this system, the logic of the master remains iron-clad and inviolable: if Zoraïde is not white, then she has no right to request that she be awarded the one whom her heart has chosen. By this logic, she can only concede to the demands of her mistress.

As we learn from Manna-Loulou, Zoraïde does not in fact conform to Madame's desires. She meets with Mézor and eventually becomes pregnant with his child. Madame Delarivière continues her attempts to control Zoraïde, however, and first lover and then child are parted from her. Describing the continuing devolution of Zoraïde's happiness into sorrow, Manna-Loulou tells Madame Delisle that Mézor is “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). These details perhaps strike a note of pathos and may even effect some sort of change if the value of local life and an intact community maintain privilege in the life-world of the reader. When Zoraïde looks for the child that can be the only consolation for the lost Mézor, Madame and the nurse who are there sever the bonds of community Zoraïde desires: to be with one “out of [her] own race”: “both told her in turn, ‘To piti a toi li mouri’ (‘Your little one is dead’).” Under the privilege of community, the response seems cruel, particularly since it is done in the name of another communal bond. As Manna-Loulou explains to Madame Delisle, Madame Delarivière “had hoped, in thus depriving Zoraïde of her child, to have her young waiting-maid again at her side free, happy, and beautiful as of old” (306). Manna-Loulou's gloss on these motives makes visible for Madame Delisle (the readerly double of Madame Delarivière) the injustice of imparting a degree of freedom to someone only to then enslave that person to one's own desires. Madame's impulse to make Zoraïde “free” by returning her to the place and position of her enslavement not only does not restore her relationship to Zoraïde, but it also leaves Zoraïde in a drastically diminished and fragile mental state.

Zoraïde resists Madame Delarivière's desires by acting as if the separation has not occurred at all. She makes literal what her mistress proposes, that nothing has changed in their community. Deprived of her baby, Zoraïde takes to cuddling a bundle of rags that she claims is her child. “In short,” Manna-Loulou explains, “from that day Zoraïde was demented” (307). When Madame Delarivière—“stung with sorrow and remorse”—attempts to recover her Zoraïde by returning the child to Zoraïde, Zoraïde balks at the attempt and prefers the bundle of rags.

Zoraïde looked with sullen suspicion upon her mistress and the child before her. Reaching out a hand she thrust the little one mistrustfully away from her. With her other hand she clasped the rag bundle fiercely to her breast; for she suspected a plot to deprive her of it.

(307)

At the end of the story, “la belle Zoraïde” becomes “Zoraïde la folle, whom no one ever wanted to marry. … She lived to be an old woman, whom some people pitied and others laughed at—always clasping her bundle of rags—her ‘piti’” (307).

With this ending, Manna-Loulou asks Madame Delisle if she is asleep, asking in effect if the story has been “true” enough for Madame Delisle to induce her sleep. But, of course, such a question as Manna-Loulou poses can never be answered affirmatively. The impossibility of an answer suggests in the context of Manna-Loulou's tale-telling the always troublesome nature of fictions which try to impart the truth. Madame Delisle's response acknowledges the power of the story to affect her as if it were true: “Ah, the poor little one, Man Loulou, the poor little one! better had she died!” (307). The unspoken grammar of Madame's judgment—“[it were] better had she died”—makes her response all the more ambiguous. Either Zoraïde's fate or the story itself would be better if she had died. Both options point to a listener unable to imagine herself outside of her own position of privilege and power. Yet in acknowledging the truth of the story, Madame herself unravels the motive for hearing a true tale in the first place—to help her sleep. This “as if” situation does not apparently bring Madame to any change in ethical comportment, at least not one that Chopin allows her to find in this story, though it does cause her to remain (in the pages of the story) forever awake, suggesting perhaps a troubled conscience.²² In either case, the “insomnia” of the ending delivers a fatal blow to the ethic of local color, showing the paralysis that attends an un-self-critical nostalgia for the past that grows out of an idealized vision of regional life.

Here as in “Elizabeth Stock” and “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” Chopin's primary device for bringing about this complex effect is the narrative perspective. Manna-Loulou's manner of story-telling seems at first glance, however, to be highly conventional and carries the markings of a fairy-tale or myth. Her transitional elements are flat, absolute statements that call attention to their arbitrariness. For instance, at one point Manna-Loulou says that “La belle Zoraïde's sorrows had now begun in earnest,” but she does not describe the sorrows. Instead, she spins out a series of general statements to advance the time of her tale. The coordination and subordination of the sentences place each of the clauses either on grammatically equal footing, achieving an advancement of time that suggests a causal logic that is never explicitly revealed, or else in a grammatical relationship that mirrors the subservience Zoraïde has in relation to Madame Delarivière. The narration thus continues:

Not only sorrows but sufferings, and with the anguish of maternity came the shadow of death. But there is no agony that a mother will not forget when she holds her first-born to her heart, and presses her lips upon the baby flesh that is her own, yet far more precious than her own.

(306)

Throughout narrative moments like this one, Manna-Loulou supplants detail with sentiment, but Madame Delisle does not seem to notice. Manna-Loulou's platitude here raises the question of what is one's own. Zoraïde believes the “piti” to be her own child. Madame Delisle describes Zoraïde as a “pauvre piti.” In both cases Chopin allows the patois to carry the suggestion of pity, revealing, however, that perhaps Madame's sympathy for Zoraïde is itself unreal; it is “poor pity” or a poor showing of pity. In this way, Chopin subtly allows sentiment and convention to become effective critique. Later, Manna-Loulou interrupts her tale at the point when Zoraïde is told her baby is dead to reveal that the claim “was a wicked falsehood that must have caused the angels in heaven to weep” (306). Still later the storyteller opines that “there was a more powerful will than Madame's at work—the will of the good God, who had already designed that Zoraïde should grieve with a sorrow that was never more to be lifted in this world” (306). These elements suggest, if not that the history of Zoraïde is a total fabrication, at least that Manna-Loulou's telling of it is. For they rely on hyperbole and divine intervention to evoke the sympathetic response to Zoraïde that Manna-Loulou has already orchestrated through these vague comparisons.

If the comparisons have an element of un-truth to them, they nonetheless convey to Madame Delisle a sense of truth. For she makes an evaluative judgment on Manna-Loulou's story—“better had she died!”—that, unless she is providing a critique of the story's form, requires a reference to “real” life for it to make sense. More important perhaps, the comparisons and Madame's response tell us what kind of reader she is. Madame Delisle cannot sleep for thinking about the terrible fate of Zoraïde. She thinks the story is “true.” Whether it is or not, Madame Delisle's reaction attests to the power of narrative to affect the listener or reader with the lives of its characters. But her reaction also reveals her inability to discern the difference between fiction and reality. She is like Zoraïde in that she prefers her pity and her “piti”—the bundle of rags, the various songs, the stanza, the Creole romance that Manna-Loulou ties together to recall the story of la belle Zoraïde—to Zoraïde herself. But unlike Zoraïde, who in her tragic retreat into madness still manages what Barbara Ewell deems an “authentic self-assertion,” Madame Delisle cannot escape the power of the fictions she requires to fall asleep. Nor can she use those fictions to remove herself from her isolated, “romantic ‘isle’ of dreams. Clutching her own senseless bundle of memories, she can only mirror-gaze uninterruptedly, forever.”²³ For her, the “real”—her own life—has become a nostalgic “as if” fiction.

Chopin complicates any clear critique of Madame Delisle, however, by bringing us out of the English translation of Manna-Loulou's story, to tell us that

this is the way Madame Delisle and Manna-Loulou really talked to each other:—“Vou prè droumi, Ma'zelle Titite?” “Non, pa prè droumi; mo yaprè zongler. Ah, la pauv' piti, Man Loulou. La Pauv' piti! Mieux li mouri!”

(308, emphasis added)

By leaving us with the Creole patois, Chopin highlights the various translations and transformations that the story undergoes, and prevents us from knowing the “true” story of Zoraïde except through these transformations. The truth, Chopin suggests, is in the narration, the fiction. In featuring the regional elements in “La Belle Zoraïde,” Chopin also makes their truth relative to the telling of the story. The story has meaning primarily in the context of Manna-Loulou telling a tale to a woman who prefers the bundle of rags of her own private fictions to the larger world that lives and breathes and continues to change around her. Chopin prepares us to experience Madame Delisle's way of reading at the same time as she equips us with the tools to escape the moribund ethical and moral consequences of such a reading. The story begins as a “story,” a song sung by a local boatman of a time past, which moves across the bayou to take hold in the lives of its hearers. But even as a story, Manna-Loulou's tale is never static; it changes with each teller. It need not immobilize us the way it does Madame Delisle if we can recognize early on its limited usefulness as a pleasing picture of local life. When we are prepared to see the “as if” situation of the story as only a pretty picture, however, then we risk having to face the same pitiful horror as Madame Delisle: that even in stories we cannot escape death.

In the case of “Elizabeth Stock's One Story,” Chopin does present a character who manages to overcome the silence of death through the force of her own story. Like “La Belle Zoraïde,” the story layers narrative strains upon the site of our first encounter with regional characters and moves beyond simple linear progression to offer a densely rendered (in this case, sinusoidal) version of regional life. In returning now to Elizabeth's story, I want to offer my own brief sideshadowing explication of the frame narrator and the frame manuscript that will return us to the confrontation between local color and regionalism. The unnamed narrator, probably a journalist with a bent toward local color,²⁴ gives us a brief history of Elizabeth Stock's life and death. Despite the apparent paucity of detail to Elizabeth Stock's life, the narrator still finds it interesting enough to locate her previous residence. Or rather, the narrator's initial attempts at explaining who Elizabeth was and is are frustrated by the actual details of that life. We come to see that prior ways of knowing regional life prove inadequate when they come up against an authentic human voice. The narrator looking for local color in the material in Elizabeth's desk finds “in the whole conglomerate mass … but the following pages which bore any semblance to a connected or consecutive narration” (586). Seeking a linear tale, the frame narrator seems to find but a single example of one. What follows this discovery is an account of Elizabeth Stock's attempt to write a true account of her community that becomes a story of her own failure to overcome the nineteenth-century version of the glass ceiling and the old boys' network of the local post office.

The voice that begins in the third paragraph of Chopin's story is decidedly different from the authoritative and evaluative collector of local exotica of the framing section. The frame narrator cannot call Elizabeth Stock to life but must find a piece of her writing that will give us her voice. In a sense unmediated, this piece of “consecutive narration” can tell us in Elizabeth's own words that she “never had that ambition to shine or make a name” and that “whenever [she] wanted to write a story [she] never could think of a plot” (586). Elizabeth's decision not only comes within one strain of a sideshadowing story; it shows how a sideshadowing configuration can work to represent local life aware of itself as living and how that form manages to effect an ethical stance for its characters and its readers. Through the careful accumulation of seemingly minor details, Elizabeth manages to render a rather rich sense of her life. In describing her daily interactions with a long-time admirer, for instance, Elizabeth provides an incisive account of her history in Stonelift, and conveys something of her easy command over her own time and person. Vance obviously has a romantic interest in Elizabeth, asking her “as regular as clockwork” if there is anything waiting for him (587). He is more than willing to accompany Elizabeth home from work, but, she says, “that was a thing I'd broken him of long ago” (588). Through configurations such as this, Elizabeth renders a sense of her life and allows us to respond to her plight ethically. For we must have a life rendered as life for us to be able to respond empathetically. She must become real, call herself to life within her own narration, must move outside of the stereotype of the unwed woman offered by the obituary-like opening of the frame narration. Her story—and her life—have to work against the supposed linearity that has warranted their transmission to us by the inquisitive frame narrator.

Elizabeth recasts these other perspectives by demonstrating her own voice and actions, both of which echo roundly with self-deprecating wit, defiance, and common sense. She starts the story on a new trajectory, for instance, by beginning another history, much like the opening of the frame section in its detail, except that this comes from within the frame narrator's linear history of Elizabeth as writer. She declares herself boldly and unapologetically: “My name is Elizabeth Stock. I'm thirty-eight years old and unmarried, and not afraid or ashamed to say it” (587). This boldness acknowledges that some would see shame in her claim, but more important, Elizabeth's declaration charges the reader to accept this history on Elizabeth's own terms. In a story in which reading is a dangerous and damaging endeavor, Elizabeth's proclamation is certainly unsettling.

Later, in her own words, Elizabeth recalls the official explanation for her dismissal as postmistress. Significantly, her version does not gloss over the more serious charges, but allows their harshness to stand beside Elizabeth's reasonableness. According to the directors in Washington, Elizabeth loses her position at Stonelift “for incompetence and negligence in office, through certain accusations of … reading postal cards and permitting people to help themselves to their own mail” (590). As we learn through Elizabeth's “one story,” these charges are obviously the work of Nathan Brightman to remove Elizabeth from office to advance the fortunes of a young man named Collins. The same Collins (or his father or other older male relation) has sent a postal card to Brightman that calls for his urgent response by the following day. It reads:

Dear Brightman: Be on hand tomorrow, Tuesday at 10 A.M. promptly. Important meeting of the board. Your own interest demands your presence. Whatever you do, don't fail. In haste, Collins.

(588)

But the card arrives after Brightman has called for his mail; Elizabeth sees the card and cannot rest that evening until she delivers it by hand to Brightman. By delivering the card she tacitly admits that she has read it; if she does not deliver the card, her supposed negligence will prevent Brightman from making an important meeting. In short, Elizabeth cannot win and seems to have been deliberately set up. Following Elizabeth's dismissal, the young Collins assumes her position. Elizabeth slowly deteriorates as a result of the cold she gets from delivering Brightman's mail until she dies of consumption at the St. Louis City Hospital.

Though the story does not overtly accuse Brightman or Collins of any wrongdoing, Elizabeth's prefatory self-defensive utterance shows that she knows what has been done to her. Nor do we know explicitly what Elizabeth knows, but we do know that her life, her career, and her death are not a simple story. The complex compression of Chopin's story underscores Elizabeth's implicit claim that the life of the postmistress of Stonelift is imbricated with layers of meaning that continue to turn in upon and inflect each other. Yet, in trying to order that life linearly (as the frame narrator looking for bits and scraps of local color does), we lose some explanation of the interrelationship, and the life itself falls prey to the parallel and competing lines of the narrative.

Chopin exploits this condition through a narrative that operates as Elizabeth's life does, seeming to offer one thing and giving many others. As a result, Elizabeth's narration throughout the story adopts a naïve quality that nonetheless (and perhaps even therefore) allows it to reveal dangerous truths.²⁵ “I leave it to any one,” she challenges,

to any woman especially, if it ain't human nature in a little place where everybody knows every one else, for the postmistress to glance at a postal card once in a while. She could hardly help it. And besides, seems like if a person had anything very particular and private to tell, they'd put it under sealed envelope.

(587)

In this defense, Elizabeth forcefully distinguishes between public and private utterances, unlike the frame narrator, for example, who goes through the scraps in Elizabeth's desk to find this “one story.” She also invites us to share a perspective that will make us complicit in her later defiance of postal regulations.

Chopin effects a complex reversal of these two “found” writings, in that Elizabeth's narrative, though locked away in her desk, is targeted at some sympathetic reader. Collins' card is ostensibly a private document directed toward Brightman, but it in fact ends up targeting Elizabeth. As Elizabeth argues commonsensically, the postal card is a public utterance, but Elizabeth's firing results from a supposed violation of private correspondence. Her transgression lies in reading the correspondence—public or private—between two men of position and power. For by reading the card at all, Elizabeth subverts the closed world of the old boys' network; by delivering the card, she has the effrontery to claim it or to claim her power over it, to deliver it or not. The card by its very design always has power over Elizabeth, and by reading it at all, she cannot escape the consequences of her transgression. The ending of the story (prefigured by the frame narrator's obituary-like prose) thus suggests that the only end for defiant, unmarried women is death. But the story itself suggests another option. Through her writing of the story, Elizabeth has the last word; she exposes Brightman and Collins, effectively returning the card to its senders, and vindicates herself.

Moreover, the force of Elizabeth Stock's story silences the smug authority of the frame narrator who may be able to tell us the rest of her writing is “bad prose and impossible verse,” but who cannot make us believe it. Elizabeth can make us believe her because of the local elements she includes, such as her dialect which couches her indignation (“Well, it don't seem like any use to dwell on this subject”; “Just like when you can't understand a thing because you don't want to” [590]), her reference to the people of Stonelift (Si' Shepherd, Uncle William, Filmore Green, Vance Wallace, men of the community who all support her position and condition to varying degrees), and the detail of her climb to Brightman's house in the storm, which evokes the slipperiness and treacherousness of the man she would help. These elements are not simply part of the story to adorn the background of a tale of small town politics; they are vital touchstones which allow Elizabeth to develop the character (herself) of her narration. We come to see that, despite her own and the frame narrator's disclaimers about her abilities, Elizabeth can in fact spin a captivating tale of intrigue and misadventure. Instead of the local color version of romance and quaint deeds, however, the tale that Elizabeth stitches together is one of needless betrayal and abuse of privilege, all in the name of continuing the dominance of a few men.

The accumulation of those elements—abuse of privilege, betrayal, dominant hierarchies—allows for the realistic impulse of Chopin to work in these stories, but it also allows for Chopin's ethical impulse to operate and to challenge the injustices of national and regional systems. As these stories demonstrate, an ethical position makes sense for Chopin only in terms of its placement or context; only then can the faithful portrayal of characters from a region bring about effective change. Through such configurations of local life, Chopin “revises accepted myths about duty, marriage, and sexuality in order to achieve a more realistic understanding of the human condition.” Yet even in this revisioning, we still see that “a sophisticated caste system operates, the effects of which are to prevent change and preserve traditional patterns of living.”²⁶ Based on an ethics of changelessness, this system remains profoundly anti-human, and in Chopin's eyes it is unnatural. “Human impulses do not change and can not,” Chopin says in her review of Garland's Crumbling Idols, “so long as men and women continue to stand in the relation to one another which they have occupied since our knowledge of their existence began” (693).²⁷ Rather than arguing for the status quo, however, the claim seems to suggest that change in human affairs is desperately overdue. By evoking sympathy in such artistically stylized narrations for the likes of Evariste Bonamour, Zoraïde, and Elizabeth Stock, Chopin's stories certainly argue that some kind of change from tradition is needed. The stories also imply that change does not come simply through telling about the effects of the traditional patterns of living, but doing so from the perspective of one previously excluded from that system.

All of the stories confront the fatal errors of the systems that deny full self-expression to those on the margin, but none of the stories succeeds fully in overcoming those systems. So, for instance, “La Belle Zoraïde” becomes a cautionary tale about the tragic implications of being bound to a fictional role, as is Zoraïde because of her race. Bound by fiction, she prefers fiction (the bundle of rags) and loses her grasp on reality. But as we have seen above, this critique turns on itself in the story, for the narrative strain is constantly calling into life new fictional forms out of the beginning locality. Each strain offers an option, though perhaps not the most viable option, to escape the confinement of restrictive fictions and the constraints of region. Evariste names himself, but does not move himself out of the region along the Têche; and Elizabeth Stock finally tells her story and exposes the corrupt local networks that orchestrated her downfall, but she cannot save her position or her life.

Chopin's short stories do not permit a simple refashioning into our pet ideologies as Madame Delisle would like to do with Manna-Loulou's stories or as the frame narrator tries to do with the scraps of writing in Elizabeth Stock's desk. Rather the stories call us back to their local points of origin and demand that we participate in that locality if we are to learn anything “true” about it, or about the characters who live there, or about ourselves. The use of the local, the regional by Chopin, then, is a deliberate attempt to unsettle readers from both inside and outside the region. Chopin gives us a “true story,” a faithful rendering of life, that always, self-consciously, remains a story.

The fact of the fiction is what the readers have to confront if they are to be able to see local life as it is. In so doing, the readers complete the circuit that Chopin begins, returning it to her grounding in the voice from within the region. Elias Lieberman, an early twentieth-century theorist of the American short story, and still one of the better articulators of what constitutes the form, calls this element in the short story a “flowing circle of cause and effect involving the triplicate elements of locality, writer, reader.” By Lieberman's reckoning, “the locality spurs the writer, the writer furnishes fiction to the reader, the reader creates the locality.”²⁸ The vacillation Lieberman describes is not unlike the sinusoidal pattern of Chopin's stories. The return of the final gesture is the ethical movement of the short story. For Chopin, this ethics has not the ensconced quality of the systems which move those who are weak or vulnerable or different to the margins. In her stories, this ethics is also never the final word, the one story, on the region. Rather Kate Chopin's “one story” is to make this process a component of her fiction so that an “as if” situation can become a lived experience that offers a simultaneous knowledge about oneself and about others in which both are aware of themselves as living.

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969), 691. References to all stories discussed in this essay are to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically as CW.

2. Published for the first time in 1963 by Per Seyersted, the story is often read as a commentary on the negative criticism The Awakening received. Since it was written only a few months after she finished the manuscript for her second novel, the story does seem to suggest that Chopin at least anticipated some less than positive outcome for the novel. But the fact of the chronology of publication remains and must be considered in spite of the appeal of such a reading. For an excellent corrective to much of the mythologizing that surrounds The Awakening and the end of Chopin's career, see Emily Toth, “A Vocation and a Voice: Why Was It Killed?” in Bernard Koloski, ed., Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1997), 135-40.

3. The differences acknowledged in the criticism often acquire a gendered focus. This attention to gender serves to recast literary history and re-evaluate the work of American women writers, but it can lead inadvertently to the assumption that regionalism is feminine and local color masculine. Regionalism's focus on the marginal and the overlooked clearly appeals to the concerns of nineteenth-century women writers, but its preference for the adaptability of provisional communities is not strictly or essentially a woman's literary mode (nor can local color be simply male).

4. Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story (New York: Random House, 1977), 128.

5. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, eds., American Women Regionalists (New York: Norton, 1992); Marjorie Pryse, “Reading Regionalism: The ‘Difference’ It Makes,” Regionalism Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field, ed. David Jordan (New York: Garland, 1994), 47-63; David Holman, A Certain Slant of Light: Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1995); and Jim Wayne Miller, “Anytime the Ground Is Uneven: The Outlook for Regional Studies and What to Look-out for,” Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1987), 1-20.

6. American Women Regionalists, xii; Pryse, 49.

7. Holman, 14.

8. David Steiling's “Multi-cultural Aesthetic in Kate Chopin's ‘A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,’” Mississippi Quarterly 47 (1994), 197-200, likewise emphasizes Chopin's ambivalence toward the local color school: “What this sketch makes clear … is a reaction to the ethical and aesthetic problems of representing distinct ethnic and regional cultures” (197).

9. Miller, 13.

10. Regionalism does not, of course, give voice to every marginal or overlooked group. Recent studies of Chopin's fiction, for example, focus on the ways that in giving voice to (usually white) women, Chopin reinscribes other hierarchies of race and class.

11. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 253.

12. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), 11.

13. Bakhtin, 289.

14. Joanne Dobson's “The American Renaissance Reconsidered,” in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1993), argues that this dual impulse is also a defining element of sentimental literature. See also Elaine Sargent Apthorp's “Re-Visioning Creativity: Cather, Chopin, Jewett,” Legacy 9, no. 1 (1992), 1-22 and “Sentiment, Naturalism, and the Female Regionalist,” Legacy 7, no. 1 (1990), 3-22 for a discussion of how nineteenth-century women's writing develops from and elicits “sympathetic imagination” for local life.

15. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 62, 66.

16. Werner Marx, Towards a Phenomenological Ethics: Ethos and the Life-World, trans. Stefan Heyvaert (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1992), 54.

17. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990), 1-2.

18. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 160.

19. Apthorp, “Re-Visioning Creativity,” 11.

20. Apthorp, “Sentiment, Naturalism, and the Female Regionalist,” 6.

21. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 2.

22. In Kate Chopin (New York: Ungar, 1986), Barbara Ewell notes that throughout this story (and its companion piece “A Lady of Bayou St. John”), Madame Delisle occupies the position of both Madame Delarivière and Zoraïde: she maintains an “egotistical, destructive desire for control” (72), which amounts to a demented clutching of the bundle of rags that is her past.

23. Ewell, Kate Chopin, 72, 74.

24. Criticism is divided on who this frame narrator might be. Barbara Ewell notes the narrator's impersonal reporting style but does not speculate as to the sex of the narrator. Martha Cutter's “Losing the Battle but Winning the War: Resistance to Patriarchal Discourse in Kate Chopin's Short Fiction,” Legacy 11, no. 1 (1994), 17-36, similarly notes that although the sex of the narrator is never given, the narrator has “an aggressive, objective tone which stands in marked contrast to Elizabeth Stock's personal and subjective one” (35n14). Heather Kirk Thomas's “Kate Chopin's Scribbling Women and the American Literary Marketplace,” Studies in American Fiction 23 (1995), 19-34, reads the narrator as female, “perhaps herself a successful literary woman in the manner of Jewett's narrator in The Country of Pointed Firs” (25). And Elaine Showalter sees the narrator as a “male editor, who may be either her nephew or her longtime suitor,” Sister's Choice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 158. Though I think the story itself gives little evidence for the narrator being someone who knew Elizabeth, the tone and the decidedly limiting evaluative perspective that the narrator employs to recover this one “linear” story suggest that the narrator is a journalist and probably male. I will, however, refer to the narrator as neutral, since the narrator's blindness seems less tied to his or her sex than to his or her profession and regional bias.

25. The reading I am offering here differs from others in that most critics of the story say that Elizabeth does not see what has been done to her. These readers arrive at this conclusion only, I believe, by reading the story as the frame narrator does—linearly and as a piece of local color. Elizabeth seems much more self-aware and in control of her narration throughout the story.

26. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, “The Cane River Characters and Revisionist Mythmaking in the Work of Kate Chopin,” Southern Literary Journal 25, no. 2 (Spring 1993), 14-23, 15; Thomas Bonner, Jr., “Kate Chopin: Tradition and the Moment,” in Castille and Osborne, eds., Southern Literature in Transition (Memphis: Memphis State Univ. Press, 1983), 141-49, 142.

27. The language is deliberately but interestingly vague, suggesting both the desire for change and a fatalistic resignation that change is impossible.

28. Elias Lieberman, The American Short Story: A Study of the Influence of Locality in its Development (Ridgewood, NJ: The Editor, 1912), 168.