[In the following essay, Cutter traces the development of Chopin's resistance to patriarchal authority as evinced in her short fiction.]

In “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening,” Patricia S. Yaeger argues that The Awakening describes “a frightening antagonism between a feminine subject and the objectifying world of discourse she inhabits” (211).¹ This antagonistic relationship also is present in Chopin's short fiction, which depicts women's inability to voice their own experiences. And yet, although Chopin continually demonstrates the way patriarchal forces exclude women from discourse, a comparison of Chopin's early and later short works shows her moving towards a clearer understanding of how women most effectively can resist patriarchal suppression. In her earlier works, Chopin frequently depicts both silent, passive women—women who seem incapable of expressing themselves or their desires—and women who overtly attempt to enunciate their desires and experiences only to have their voices labelled meaningless or “insane.” Early works such as “At the ‘Cadian Ball,” “Wiser than A God,” and particularly “Mrs. Mobry's Reason,” depict a voice of pure resistance which attempts to locate itself outside of patriarchal discourse; however, these resistant voices are quickly erased, negated, or labelled “insane” by patriarchal structures.

In some of Chopin's later works, however—particularly those written during or after 1894—she moves towards depicting women who are more active and more vocal. Moreover, these stories' strategies of resistance often entail what I call a “voice couvert”: a voice which attempts to undermine patriarchal discourse through mimicry and through hollowing out the patriarchy from within its own structures. These covert female voices attempt to force patriarchal discourse into a subversive dialogue, a dialogue which shows patriarchal categories to be non-absolute.² Works such as “An Egyptian Cigarette,” “Her Letters,” “Elizabeth Stock's One Story,” and “Charlie” depict a discourse of insubordination which attempts to bridge the gap between women who speak “a language which nobody understood” and women who are silenced by prior social inscriptions.³ Chopin realizes that, as Jane Gallop explains, “Infidelity … is a feminist practice of undermining the Name-of-the-Father. … [However] Infidelity is not outside the system of marriage, the symbolic, patriarchy, but hollows it out, ruins it, from within” (48). These later works therefore reject a resisting voice that operates outside of patriarchal discourse, finding instead a voice that disrupts and mimics patriarchy from within its own discursive parameters.

Although Chopin is concerned with women's relationship to discourse throughout her career, I do not mean to suggest that in her short fiction we can discern a linear movement from silence to voice.⁴ Rather, as her career progressed Chopin continued to test the ways women could—and could not—achieve articulation, finding eventually a “voice couvert” which (at its most effective) undermined the patriarchy from within its own paradigms. Given her own experiences as a writer, Chopin's development of a covert voice seems logical. Early in her career, when she wrote charming Creole stories with happy endings, she had little difficulty finding publishers. Moreover, when she depicted women who were silent and submissive, the reading public readily accepted her works. As Chopin developed as a writer, however, she found herself testing the limits of her publishers and her audience. As Emily Toth has shown, after 1894 Chopin attempted to be more daring in her fiction; concurrently she had more difficulty finding publishers for her short stories.⁵ Moreover, her most subversive works—works which often involved heroines with strong desires and voices—were repeatedly refused by publishers and, of course, the public and literary critics alike condemned Chopin's portrayal of the unconventional Edna Pontellier. Toward the end of the short decade during which Chopin wrote, she did not even attempt to publish works such as “The Storm” which posited a direct challenge to the literary and moral standards of her time. Yet she did not give up entirely on challenging these standards; rather, her challenge went “underground”—it became less open and direct, more covert and inscribed. These covert strategies of resistance were Chopin's most effective weapon, because they allowed her to slip subversive messages past the censoring dictates of her own society. In the end, then, Chopin did find a voice of resistance which was an effective strategy for undermining patriarchal repression of female voice.

Early in her career, Chopin is concerned with the repression of female voice, yet her concern takes the form of depicting women who are silent, women who seek but do not find a voice, or women who find a voice only to have it misunderstood, labelled insane or meaningless. In an early story like “A No-Account Creole” (1888; 1891),⁶ for example, Euphrasie becomes engaged to Placide Santien simply because “she saw no reason why she should not be his wife when he asked her to” (86). When Euphrasie realizes she loves another man, Wallace Offdean, she takes no steps to end her engagement; in fact, even when Offdean declares his love for Euphrasie, she still cannot enunciate her desire: “She could not speak. She only looked at him with frightened eyes” (98). Throughout the story Euphrasie remains incapable of expressing her marital preferences and embarrassed about her sexual attraction to Offdean.⁷ Similarly, in another early story, “Love on the Bon-Dieu” (1891), Lalie's silence causes her great harm: “Because she had been silent—had not lifted her voice in complaint—[the village people] believed she suffered no more than she could bear” (162). For Lalie, speech is a great effort: “Lalie had spoken low and in jerks, as if every word gave her pain” (160). And like Euphrasie, Lalie seems incapable of enunciating her desire; she almost dies with her secret—her love for Azenor—completely unspoken.

These female characters are relatively passive, so perhaps it is no surprise that their voices seem ineffective or inarticulate. Yet even more aggressive women—such as Calixta and Clarisse of “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (1892)—have difficulty enunciating their sexual desires. In this story, Calixta exhibits verbal dexterity, swearing “roundly in fine ‘Cadian French and with true Spanish spirit” (219) and wittily chiding Bobinôt for standing “planté là like ole Ma'ame Tina's cow in the bog” (224). Yet Calixta's society dislikes her linguistic proficiency, as the crowd's reaction to this sally demonstrates: “Madame Suzonne, sitting in a corner, whispered to her neighbor that if Ozéina were to conduct herself in a like manner, she should immediately be taken out the mule-cart and driven home. The women did not always approve of Calixta” (224). Apart from her linguistic forwardness, Calixta also behaves aggressively, slapping her friend Fronie's face when insulted, and eventually forcing Bobinôt to marry her.

Clarisse, too, is aggressive; she rides out alone in the middle of the night to “rescue” Alcée from Calixta, and forces him away from her rival. Yet while Calixta is linguistically aggressive, Clarisse plays the role of the soft-spoken, respectable woman; she speaks in a restrained and maidenly way, trying to console Alcée with “soft, purring words of condolence” (221). Of course, she is shocked by the “hot, blistering love-words” Alcée pants into her face one day, and responds with a minimal emotional and verbal response: “‘Monsieur! … Par Exemple!’ she muttered disdainfully, as she turned from him, deftly adjusting the careful toilet that he had so brutally disarranged” (220-21). Even when Clarisse does feel an emotional response for Alcée (or at least a desire to keep him away from Calixta), she invents pretexts to get him away from the dance, only obtusely hinting at her jealousy: “I thought, Alcée—maybe you were going to—to Assumption. I got wild. An' then I knew if you did n't come back, now, tonight, I could n't stan' it,—again” (227). Eventually, Clarisse admits she loves Alcée, but Chopin switches to indirect discourse and narrates this moment through the eyes of Alcée: “He began to wonder if this meant love. But she had to tell him so, before he believed it. And when she told him, he thought the face of the Universe was changed. … The one, only, great reality in the world was Clarisse standing before him, telling him that she loved him” (227). For the delicate Clarisse to enunciate her desire for Alcée would break the narrative parameters established for her character—as well as for the series of women Chopin portrays in these early works. And as we know from “The Storm” (1989) (the sequel to “At the 'Cadian Ball”), more linguistic aggressively women such as Calixta end up with boring men like Bobinôt, and have to wait five years for the consummation of their desires.

In Chopin's earliest works, then, women are portrayed as repressing their desires, and women who speak out are often punished for their transgressions. Even as late as 1896, Chopin sometimes censored her linguistically aggressive female characters—mainly at the demands of her publishers. For example, “A Night in Acadie” depicts another woman who is much too unrestrained: Zaïda Trodon. Chopin's description emphasizes Zaïda's independence from feminine norms: “She carried herself boldly and stepped out freely and easily, like a negress. There was an absence of reserve in her manner; yet there was no lack of womanliness. She had the air of a young person accustomed to decide for herself and for those about her” (487). As in other places in her writings, Chopin here associates freedom from social norms with certain races; Zaïda's having the freedom of movement of a “negress” sets her apart from other white women bound by conventional stereotypes of femininity.⁸ Yet Zaïda's freedom is only momentary; after she realizes that her would-be fiancé is a drunkard, after she must be rescued by the stolid Telèsphore, she loses her self-control and even her voice: “Her will, which had been overmastering and aggressive, seemed to have grown numb under the disturbing spell of the past few hours. … The girl was quiet and silent” (498-99). The last phrase—that the girl is both “quiet and silent”—may seem repetitive for the usually concise Chopin, yet this phrase marks Chopin's double attempt to appease her editors, who had complained about the story's first ending, in which Zaïda forces Telèsphore to marry her. According to Toth, this ending offended Chopin's publishers, and Chopin bent to the literary tastes of her time.⁹ Even in her later works, then, Chopin sometimes was forced to censor her aggressive and vocal heroines.

The series of works I have discussed so far depict women whose aggressive voices are suppressed, but another series of Chopin's texts show women who find overtly resistant voices only to have these voices labelled “insane” or meaningless. In “Wiser than A God” (1889), Paula Von Stoltz's suitor, George Brainard, talks fluently, utilizing the language of romantic passion, while Paula is silent: “I have been mounting into higher and always higher circles of Paradise, under a blessed illusion that you—cared for me. … Say if you love me, Paula. I believe you do. … Why are you speechless? Why don't you say something to me!” (46). Paula does finally attempt to explain her emotions to George:

“What do you know of my life,” [Paula] exclaimed passionately. “What can you guess of it? Is music anything more to you than the pleasing distraction of an idle moment? Can't you feel that with me, it courses with the blood through my veins? That it's something dearer than life, than riches, even than love?” with a quiver of pain.

(46)

Paula's speech calls upon codes other than those of romantic love and articulates the view that to an artist—even a female artist—art is life. None of this is understood by George, who only exclaims: “Paula listen to me; don't speak like a mad woman” (46). Paula flees from George and pursues her art, eventually becoming a successful pianist. Perhaps in the end language is simply not important to Paula—she succeeds without it. But Paula continually finds that her attempts to explain her needs are not heard at all; even her mother tells her not to “chatter” (40).

Even later in her career, Chopin sometimes depicts the way patriarchal forces undercut female voices by labelling them “mad” or “meaningless.” Chopin wrote to support herself, and the need to be accepted by publishers and readers may at times have lead her to compromise her efforts to create a voice of resistance. “Athénaïse” (1895), for example, contains a potentially subversive equation of slavery and marriage, as well as a vocal heroine who repeatedly protests sexual and linguistic repression. Athénaïse repeatedly denounces the institution of marriage, which inscribes her under her husband's name: “It's jus' being married that I detes' an' despise. I hate being Mrs. Cazeau, an' would want to be Athénaïse Miché again” (431). Athénaïse has realized the oppressive social structure of marriage wherein, as Nelly Furman explains, “differences among individuals are seemingly dissolved under one name, the name of the father” (76). Athénaïse cannot escape the social and linguistic oppression marriage sustains, nor can she escape the sexual oppression marriage permits. She detests the physical side of her relationship to Cazeau, perhaps because it involves marital rape: her husband knows that he can “compel [Athénaïse's] cold and unwilling submission to his love and passionate transports” (438).

Athénaïse finds herself enmeshed in a patriarchal structure—marriage—which excludes her own sense of identity and permits her oppression, and she attempts to use language to protest this oppression. Yet these attempts go unheard: “Her friends laughed at her, and refused to take seriously the hints which she threw out,—feeling her way to discover if marriage were as distasteful to other women as to herself” (436). Moreover, her husband refuses to discuss their marriage, despite her many pleas. When Cazeau finally does speak to Athénaïse, the exchange is clearly based in his own discourse, for he uses the language of commerce: “I don' see anything to do but make the best of a bad bargain, an' shake han's over it” (435). Certainly, Athénaïse finds marriage to be more than “a bad bargain,” but no one hears or understands her protests. It is no wonder, then, that after a brief period of rebellion, Athénaïse miraculously becomes indoctrinated into the views of her society. Finding herself pregnant, she suddenly feels desire for her husband and forgets her dislike of the institution of marriage. She also forgets the resistant voice she has utilized up to this point: “She kept looking from the carriage window, silent, and embarrassed as Eve after losing her ignorance” (453). She opts instead for a discourse of domesticity and love, and Athénaïse's final words in the story concern the domestic realm: “Listen, Cazeau! How Juliette's baby is crying! Pauve ti chou, I wonder w'at is the matter with it?” (454). Chopin depicts a woman who indoctrinates herself into the “cult of domesticity,” foregoing her earlier attempts to use language as an instrument of resistance.

Yet while the plot concludes on a note of domestic and marital bliss, the imagery of the story undercuts this harmony. When Cazeau retrieves Athénaïse from her family, he recalls his father's recapturing of a runaway slave, Black Gabe; Chopin thus imagistically connects Athénaïse's return to her marriage with the institution of slavery.¹⁰ Even the story's conclusion enforces the connection between marriage and enslavement; a “little negro baby” is crying somewhere (454) and Athénaïse wonders what “is the matter” with the child. The story's imagery clearly suggests that something “is the matter” with this picture of domestic “bliss.” Yet the imagistic dissonance does not negate the inscription within a discourse of domesticity that the story's ending enforces. The story as a whole remains a tantalizingly suggestive but only partial critique of patriarchal repression of women's voice and agency.

Like “Wiser Than a God” and “Athénaïse,” “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” (1891) depicts women trapped between patriarchal silence and a discourse labelled meaningless or insane.¹¹ Indeed, as the title indicates, the story focuses on sanity, on reason, but it also concerns a generational struggle for voice in which the mother, Editha Mobry, acquiesces and is silenced, while the daughter, Naomi, resists and becomes insane. Editha is reluctant to marry John Mobry, but he is “of that class of men who, when they want something, usually keep on wanting it and striving for it so long as there is possibility of attainment in view” (71). Editha cannot resist such a superior force of “wanting,” despite her own obvious lack of enthusiasm for the marriage: “Her tired face wore the look of the conquered who has made a brave fight and would rest. ‘Well, John, if you want it,’ she said, placing her hand in his” (71). Linguistically, Editha also succumbs to John's desire; she never explains her reason for being unwilling to marry, and she never voices any direct opposition to her husband's wishes.

Editha Mobry therefore enters the symbolic order of language only by internalizing male desire; she phrases her wishes in terms of the male's—“Well, John, if you want it”—even enclosing her body—her hand—within the masculine sphere of desire. Because Editha enters the symbolic through the masculine gaze she silences herself; as feminist critics of Lacanian theory have pointed out, “in a psycholinguistic world structured by father-son resemblance and rivalry and by the primacy of masculine logic, woman is a gap or a silence, the invisible and unheard sex” (Ann Rosalind Jones 83). Editha Mobry also tries to make her daughter part of this “invisible and unheard sex.” Mrs. Mobry is a firm believer in the late nineteenth-century view that women should not develop their intellect and minds; she believes that “ologies and isms and all that for women” (72) are useless and possibly injurious to women's mental stability, and she will not allow her daughter to engage in intellectual pursuits.

Mrs. Mobry, then, takes a passive stance towards language, and she bars her daughter from the portals of knowledge and education which might promote a mastery of language. However, Mrs. Mobry has a secret, unexpressed reason for her behavior. Her lineage contains a hereditary strain of insanity (possibly caused by venereal disease) and her reluctance to marry stems from a fear of passing on this taint to her children. She also tries to prevent the spread of insanity by keeping her daughter unmarried; as she tells Naomi's suitor, Sigmund: “it's our intention, and Naomi's, too, that she shall never marry” (74).

Mrs. Mobry attempts to shield her daughter from both sexual and intellectual knowledge, from learning and love. Yet her attempts are unsuccessful; Naomi falls in love with Sigmund, and caught between her desire for Sigmund and her desire for her mother's approbation, she loses her mind. Moreover, when Naomi loses mental self-possession, she begins to speak a language which is not grounded in any normative conception of meaning. She believes that she has mastered all discourse and even can understand what nature is saying: “I know everything now. I know what the birds are saying up in the trees … I can tell you everything that the fishes say in the water. They were talking under the boat when you called me—” (78). Naomi claims to know and understand everything: all of nature, all knowledge, all language. Naomi's unrepressed language also is tied to a sexual liberation: “‘Sigmund,’ she whispered, and drawing nearer to him twined her arms around his neck. ‘I want you to kiss me, Sigmund’” (78). But Naomi speaks “a language which nobody understood”—a language which is so contradictory and illogical that it can only be considered insane. Sigmund, for example, reads Naomi as a blank; looking into her eyes, he finds that “there was no more light in them” (78). Furthermore, by the end of the story Naomi has become silent: “Naomi sat upon a lounge. She was playing like a little child, with scraps of paper that she was tearing and placing in rows upon the cushion beside her” (79). Naomi finally can only escape from patriarchal dictates by regressing into the silent passivity of childhood.

The discourse Naomi achieves in “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” is thus a form of escape from patriarchal repression which renders the escapee insane and erases her personality. Between the “silent women” in the corridor (the mother) and the daughter's insane babble, there must be an alternative discourse. This is the discourse not of overt resistance, but of covert subversion depicted in several of Chopin's stories written during or after 1894. This “voice couvert” is a risky strategy, for it may be so hidden that its message goes unheard. Yet at its most successful, it creates a subversive dialogue which undermines patriarchal repression of women's voices. Chopin's female characters (and Chopin herself), then, may not escape patriarchal discourse, but they do succeed in calling it into question. In so doing, they give voice to a kind of feminist critique of language, for as Furman has explained, “Although it may be impossible, in the end, to escape the hegemony of patriarchal structures, none the less, by unveiling the prejudices at work in our cultural artefacts, we impugn the universality of the man-made models provided to us, and allow for the possibility of sidestepping and subverting their power” (76). The covert voices created in Chopin's later fiction give voice to women's Otherness and create the possibility of sidestepping or subverting patriarchal discourse.

Some of Chopin's covert voices specifically reject a discourse of insanity located outside the realm of actuality, opting instead for more traditional arenas of struggle. In “An Egyptian Cigarette” (1897), for example, a male friend gives the narrator (a woman) a small box of cigarettes; she escapes “the incessant chatter of the women” (571) by retreating to the smoking room. The narrator (who may be a writer) allies the box of cigarettes with language, or more specifically with letters and texts:

The box was covered with glazed, yellow paper, so skillfully gummed as to appear to be all one piece. It bore no label, no stamp—nothing to indicate its contents.

“How do you know they are cigarettes?” I asked, taking the box and turning it stupidly around as one turns a sealed letter and speculates before opening it.

“I only know what he told me,” replied the Architect, “but it is easy enough to determine the question of his integrity.” He handed me a sharp, pointed paper-cutter, and with it I opened the lid as carefully as possible.

The box contained six cigarettes, evidently hand-made. The wrappers were of pale-yellow paper, and the tobacco was almost the same color.

(570, my emphasis)

Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's yellow wallpaper, these yellow cigarettes, covered in a box with yellow paper and rolled in yellow wrappers, become an emblem for the woman writer's difficulties with patriarchal discourse and her attempts to find an alternative voice. When the narrator smokes one of these cigarettes she has an incredibly intense, hallucinogenic vision. In the fifteen minutes that pass while the narrator experiences the vision, she feels pain, hope, love, exaltation, degradation, and ecstasy. The cigarettes, then, seem to provide a way to escape the everyday world of “women's chatter” and find a transcendent experience of artistic inspiration.

Yet Chopin's text reveals the limitation of this supposedly “free” realm of transcendent discourse. In this other realm, a large part of the narrator's vision centers on the suffering of an Egyptian woman who has been abandoned by her lover. The narrator's escape into an illusionary, timeless world therefore is not an escape from women's suffering: the visionary world only reveals that women's suffering is eternal. Furthermore, the escape into a magical world is not an escape into a “free” language; silence is a part of the Egyptian woman's suffering—the silence of her lover who abandons her, as well as her own silence, which may emblematize the silent woman under patriarchy: “The sand has crept between my lips and teeth and under my parched tongue” (572). Nor does Chopin's narrator see this world as a possible avenue of artistic liberation, for she specifically rejects this escape into a timeless, non-linear space of extraordinary discourse. Chopin's character specifically rejects, in other words, the hyperlinguistic language of insanity chosen by Naomi Mobry. Although the cigarettes promise other visions, the narrator destroys them:

As I looked at the cigarettes in their pale wrappers, I wondered what other visions they might hold for me; what might I not find in their mystic fumes? Perhaps a vision of celestial peace; a dream of hopes fulfilled; a taste of rapture, such as had not entered into my mind to conceive.

I took the cigarettes and crumpled them between my hands. I walked to the window and spread my palms wide.

(573)

The narrator rejects the dream of a transcendent, visionary language that is not implicated in patriarchal discourse. Instead, linguistic struggles must be waged in the here-and-now, in the daily “chatter of women.” For as Dale Bauer explains, “The feminist struggle is not one between a conscious ‘awakened’ or natural voice and the voice of patriarchy ‘out there.’ Rather, precisely because we all internalize the authoritative voice of patriarchy, we must struggle to refashion inherited social discourses into words which rearticulate intentions (here feminist ones) other than normative or disciplinary ones” (2). The narrator opts instead to continue the struggle for voice through covert, dialogic methods—through refashioning of inherited discourses, rather than fabrication of an “alternative” language.

To understand what these covert dialogic methods might be, however, we must look more closely at two of Chopin's portrayals of women who write. “Her Letters” (1894), an early version of a “voice couvert,” tells of a dying woman unable to destroy her adulterous love letters. Upon her death, she compels her husband to destroy the letters unread. The husband does so, but then finds himself consumed by the mystery of their contents. Unable to pierce the mystery, he eventually follows the letters to their watery grave, drowning himself.

Clearly the unnamed woman's letters are subversive in the most literal sense: they drive a husband to question his own perception of his wife and kill himself. However, these letters are also subversive in a discursive sense, both for the woman and for her husband. This forbidden discourse—not her husband's presence or counsel—has sustained the woman for the last four years of her illness: “they had sustained her, she believed, and kept her spirit from perishing utterly” (398). Moreover, the letters—not her husband, or even her lover—provide the story's one moment of erotic pleasure:

But what if that other most precious and most imprudent one were missing! in which every word of untempered passion had long ago eaten its way into her brain; and which stirred her still to-day, as it had done a hundred times before when she thought of it. She crushed it between her palms when she found it. She kissed it again and again. With her sharp white teeth she tore the far corner from the letter, where the name was written; she bit the torn scrap and tasted it between her lips and upon her tongue like some god-given morsel.

(399)

In this subversive revision of the Eucharist, the word becomes wholly sensual, yet wholly disembodied. It is not her lover's presence which the woman relishes, but the tokens of their mutual esteem, the words which made up their dialogic intercourse. For the woman, discourse has become a subversive replacement for the bodies of men.

For the husband, the letters function differently, forcing him into a subversive dialogue which completely undermines his sense of knowledge and subjectivity. His wife's secret letters irrevocably change his world, for he realizes their probable contents. Although he can find no other written evidence which documents that “his wife had not been the true and loyal woman he had always believed her to be” (403), he continues to believe that she had a secret, and he continues to attempt to penetrate it. He even searches through her books for tell-tale passages that she might have underlined, but discovers nothing: “nowhere, by the shadow of a sign, could he find that the author had echoed the secret of her existence—the secret which he had held in his hands and had cast into the river” (404). He can find no confirmation, but the letters seem to prove that his wife had a hidden, more sensual nature, a hidden personality which he could not discover while she was alive, and cannot fathom after her death.

These covert texts, these unfathomable letters force the husband into a subversive dialogue questioning his monolithic perception of his wife. He continues this dialogue with other men who have known her, but finds only that his friends also misperceive her: “Foremost he learned she had been unsympathetic because of her coldness of manner. One had admired her intellect; another her accomplishments; a third had thought her beautiful before disease claimed her, regretting, however, that her beauty had lacked warmth of color and expression. … Oh, it was useless to try to discover anything from men!” (404). Men believe his wife to be cold and asexual, but the letters seem to tell another story—a story which is closer to the stories told of her by women: “It was women who would talk of what they knew. … Most of them had loved her; those who had not had held her in respect and esteem” (404). The husband thus finds that the letters enact a subversive dialogue that undermines his perceptions of the woman he thought he knew so well.

The letters, besides creating a dialogic problem, also create a linguistic problem, causing the husband to question his own understanding of how words function. Previously, when his friends boasted of their conquests of women, he had “heard the empty boast … and had always met it with good-humored contempt” (403). Now, however, he distrusts his perception that these words are “empty”: “to-night every flagrant, inane utterance was charged with a new meaning, revealing possibilities that he had hitherto never taken into account” (403). The letters alert the husband to a play of truth and untruth within language, to levels of covert meaning which he has previously believed he could fathom, but now finds he cannot: “He was remembering how she had conducted herself toward this one and that one; striving to recall conversations, subtleties of facial expression that might have meant what he did not suspect at the moment, shades of meaning in words that had seemed the ordinary interchange of social amenities” (403; my emphasis). The husband seems to have an awakening into the unreliable and potentially disruptive possibilities of language—an awakening which profoundly destabilizes his whole universe.

Ultimately, the husband's identity and sense of language is so destabilized that he kills himself. If subjectivity is irremediably founded on the oppression of the Other, then endowing this Other with some unfathomable but private sense of self—as Chopin's covert letters do—undermines the construction of male subjectivity. As Luce Irigaray explains: “If there is no more ‘earth’ to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire (for one's own), no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the ex-sistence of the ‘subject’?” (133). Covert texts such as these letters take away the pedestal for the existence of the subject by suggesting that men do not really know the women they marry, live with, and believe they construct.

Texts, it seems, have a life of their own, a life that can create a subversive dialogue which begins to undo some of the erasures of the patriarchal story, the “master plot.” The wife dies, but her letters take on an existence of their own, undermining the “official version” of this exemplary woman's life, affirming the presence of a subject who subverts patriarchal ideals and patriarchal discourse. Similarly, the title character of “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” dies but leaves behind a text which undermines patriarchal control of discourse by giving voice to her subjectivity.¹²

Unlike Editha Mobry, Elizabeth Stock insists on controlling and speaking her destiny, and in this sense she resembles several heroines present in Chopin's later fiction. In “The Unexpected” (1895), for example, Dorothea refuses to marry a wealthy man for whom she no longer feels any desire, finally finding her voice and asserting her preferences: “She had never spoken a word after bidding him good-by; but now she seemed disposed to make confidants of the tremulous leaves, or the crawling and hopping insects, or the big sky into which she was staring. ‘Never!’ she whispered, ‘not for all his thousands! Never, never! not for millions!’” (461). In “A Family Affair” (1897), a resourceful young woman named Bosey reclaims her family's possessions and silences her possessive and greedy old patriarchal aunt. Bosey engages in a covert war against the reigning order; she seems to be a perfect domestic saint, a wonderful housekeeper, but in reality she is manipulating events in order to reclaim her mother's share of an inheritance.

Like Bosey, Elizabeth Stock's strategy of resistance is inscribed within the existing order, but works to hollow it out from within. First Elizabeth disarms her readers by seeming to be perfectly forthright: “My name is Elizabeth Stock. I'm thirty-eight years old and unmarried, and not afraid or ashamed to say it” (587). Elizabeth is an independent woman who supports herself through her job as post-mistress in the small village of Stonelift, and claims that she has “been pretty comfortable and contented most of my life.” As Barbara Ewell has noted, Elizabeth is one of Chopin's strongest, most self-possessed females; she is not a “woeful ‘old maid,’” but rather “a proud, independent woman of responsibility” (167).

Within the society Chopin depicts, however, an independent woman cannot be tolerated for long. When Elizabeth reads and delivers an urgent postcard that arrives late, officials dismiss her for “reading postal cards and permitting people to help themselves to their own mail” (590). Rather than respecting the fact that only privileged figures have access to “letters,” Elizabeth allows people to help themselves. Therefore, she must be dismissed by an “official” text for her transgressive, unofficial textual practices: “one morning, just like lightning out of a clear sky, here comes an official document from Washington, discharging me from my position as postmistress of Stonelift” (590). After her dismissal from her job she becomes ill and dies. Ultimately Elizabeth's transgressive reading of texts deprives her of both her income and her life; official texts turn upon her, attacking her body and her mind, driving her away from both. Males retake the mail.¹³

According to the narrator who introduces Elizabeth's story, the physicians at the hospital where Elizabeth is sent to recuperate “say she showed hope of rallying till placed in the incurable ward, when all courage seemed to leave her, and she relapsed into a silence that remained unbroken till the end” (586). Yet Elizabeth's silence is not “unbroken to the end”; her silence is only the final battle in a long but covert war for self-expression which she has waged. Elizabeth is not content with the limits that a patriarchal society has placed on her access to texts. There is a certain “Bartlebyesque” kind of irony in her job as a post-mistress: she is responsible for the care and sorting of letters, yet she is not supposed to read these letters. But, as she explains, it is human nature—especially feminine nature—to want to possess knowledge: “I leave it to any one—to any woman especially, if it ain't human nature in a little place where everybody knows every one else, for the post-mistress 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 a sealed envelope” (587). Elizabeth believes that certain types of writing—i.e., postcards—are not under “a sealed envelope” and tries to obtain access to them.

Elizabeth's subversive reading practices insist that everyone has access to texts, not just a privileged minority. But Elizabeth desires to do more than just read texts; she also desires to produce them, as the narrator informs the readers: “In Stonelift, the village where Elizabeth Stock was born and raised … they say she was much given over to scribbling” (586). But again, patriarchal forces must attempt to control and limit women's discursive potential; Elizabeth's writing, like her body, must be deemed hopeless and incurable. The narrator finds the story—Elizabeth's one and only story—in her desk, “which was quite filled with scraps and bits of writing in bad prose and impossible verse.” Out of “the whole conglomerate mass” the narrator can discover only one item which “bore any semblance to a connected or consecutive narration” (586).¹⁴ Elizabeth's one story, then, is a found narrative, and after this belittling introduction, the narrator disappears, letting the story speak for itself.

Perhaps influenced by certain masculine notions of literature which were current in the late 1880s and early 1890s, the narrator faults Elizabeth's writing for lacking a coherent, linear style.¹⁵ Elizabeth's Uncle William, on the other hand, derides her stories because they lack a unique and adventurous plot, as she explains: “Once I wrote about old Si' Shepard that got lost in the woods and never came back, and when I showed it to Uncle William he said: ‘Why, Elizabeth, I reckon you better stick to your dress making: this here ain't no story; everybody knows about old Si' Shepard’” (586). Like the narrator, Uncle William believes Elizabeth's writing is “incurable,” and he sends her back to more feminine pursuits like dress-making. Elizabeth's society extols masculine, heroic narratives—“new adventures” Elizabeth finds herself unable to produce:

[T]he trouble was with plots. Whenever I tried to think of one, it always turned out to be something that some one else had thought about before me. But here back awhile, I heard of great inducements offered for an acceptable story. … I tried to think of a railroad story with a wreck, but couldn't. No more could I make a tale out of murder, or money getting stolen, or even mistaken identity; for the story had to be original, entertaining, full of action and Goodness knows what all. It was no use. I gave it up.

(586-87)

Elizabeth cannot come up with any original, action-packed, muscular design for a plot; she cannot come up with a tale of adventure or heroism, of train wrecks, murder, or money.

Yet Elizabeth still wants to write: “But now that I got my pen in my hand … I feel as I'd like to tell how I lost my position, mostly through my own negligence, I'll admit that” (587). Admitting the negligence of the story, itself, as a story, Elizabeth's tale nonetheless asserts its right to textual existence. If Elizabeth cannot tell the tale of an American Adam, she may be able to tell the tale of an American Eve—the tale of a woman who tastes of forbidden knowledge, forbidden discourse, and thereby loses a privileged status. Her style also reflects her impulses and desires, for she articulates her story in a language that emphasizes its differences from patriarchal forms of writing. Elizabeth's story is fragmentary and nonlinear, moving far back into Elizabeth's childhood, plunging forward into the present, receding to the past events of Elizabeth losing her job. The story vacillates, waffles, digresses, gives details that do not relate to the “plot” of Elizabeth losing her job, and frequently draws attention to its own flaws. Furthermore the tone is personal, subjective, colloquial: “Often seems like the village was most too small”; “Anyway, the train was late that day. It was the breaking up of winter, or the beginning of spring; kind of betwixt and between; along in March” (587). Most important, at the heart of the story there is a mystery: was Elizabeth the victim of a plot to oust her from her position as post-mistress? And is she aware of the details which could support such a reading of events? On this crucial point the text is silent; it remains a riddle, a structure which resists closure by asserting its own mysteriousness.

According to Barbara Ewell, Elizabeth's voice is “colloquial and elliptical”; furthermore, “the one story Elizabeth Stock finally tells … has no conventional plot” (166). Elizabeth's story emphasizes its difference from patriarchal forms of writing through its cumulative, rather than linear structure, its multiple narrative viewpoints, and its open ending: “But indeed, indeed, I don't know what to do. … After all, what I got to do is leave everything in the hands of Providence, and trust to luck” (591). Elizabeth also allies her writing not with masculine novelty and heroism, but with the repetitive, non-linear structures of piecing and quilting: “I laid awake most a whole week; and walked about days in a kind of dream, turning and twisting things in my mind just like I often saw old ladies twisting quilt patches around to compose a design” (586-87). So while Elizabeth's other scraps and bits of writing have been read as babble and discarded, the tale itself endures, pieced, patched, and puzzling, but uniquely expressive of her own voice. Thus Elizabeth's silence is not “unbroken to the end,” as the narrator claims; sometime after losing her job, but before she dies, she describes her experiences in her own, unique way.¹⁶

In earlier depictions of women writers such as “Miss Witherwell's Mistake” (1889), Chopin shows women content to write about domestic topics such as “Security Against the Moth.” But Elizabeth refuses to force her writing to conform to patriarchal dictates, either in style or content. Elizabeth's tale is not a form of patriarchal discourse like Miss Witherwell's domestic advice or the letter Elizabeth receives from “Uncle Sam,” but it is also not totally outside the realm of patriarchal understanding, like the “scraps and bits of writing” which the narrator finds in Elizabeth's desk and discards. The unknown narrator does not see this one particular tale as stylistically “incurable”; believing it to tell a connected, consecutive narrative, he admits it to the sanctified halls of discourse. Elizabeth's tale exists in a middle ground: it is neither a linear, masculine, patriarchal plot, nor an insane, illogical, fragmented feminine discourse.

Unlike Naomi Mobry, whose discourse of insanity erases her personality, Elizabeth finds a covert voice with which she can express herself, but which will not be entirely repressed by the patriarchy. Elizabeth disarms her readers with her forthright, simple tone; in other words, she plays the fool. But she is no fool. She remembers the name on the postcard well enough to tell it to her readers—Collins—yet apparently does not make the connection that the post-man hired to replace her after her “negligence” is also named Collins. She blithely informs the reader that the only one who ever actually helped himself to his mail was Nathan Brightman, while apparently not recalling that Nathan Brightman was also the only person who had other concrete evidence for her dismissal and the only person in town who knew the Collins family. Elizabeth presents the reader with “two plus two,” but does not add them up to four. She plays the fool, creating a subversive dialogue between the reader and the text, a dialogue in which we are left to ponder just how much Elizabeth actually knew. If, as Bauer argues, a fool represents “a resisting reader within the text” who provides “the means of unmasking dominant codes” (11), then Elizabeth fits this paradigm perfectly. Elizabeth's resistant “stupidity” unmasks patriarchal repression of women's discursive and economic capacities.

Moreover Elizabeth's text, while seeming to conform to patriarchal dictates (at least in terms of being non-offensive or non-inflammatory) still asserts its difference, its Otherness. Though pressure is exerted on the tale externally, by a hostile narrator, and internally, by an unsympathetic interpretive community, the text does not succumb. Elizabeth is able to refashion patriarchal discourse, to make it take account of her own specific experiences, her own specific subjectivity. Elizabeth's greatest creation, finally, is her own voice, her own self, which, as Ewell argues, rises “well above any conventional characters she might invent” (167). “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” depicts its own exclusion from “proper” discourse, but in so doing nevertheless subverts male control of texts, and perversely insists upon women's right to write/right their own stories.

Elizabeth's hidden message seems to be that women are excluded from language—from reading and writing—and denied self-determination. Her strategy of linguistic resistance relies on a covert insistence on difference from patriarchal norms, but several of Chopin's other later texts use a covert voice which mimics patriarchal dictates in an attempt to subvert them, to hollow them out. In a late story called “The Gentlemen from New Orleans” (1900) for example, Mr. and Mrs. Buddie Bénoîte fit perfectly the pattern of over-bearing, patriarchal husband and silent, subservient wife: “Mr. Buddie was good looking, energetic, a little too stout and blustering; characteristics which were overemphasized by contrast with his wife, too faded for her years and showing a certain lack of self assertion which her husband regarded as the perfection of womanliness” (631). As Chopin's ironic phrasing points out, the perfection of womanliness, according to Buddie Bénoîte, is self-effacement. Chopin mimics the discourse of the patriarchy, while showing it to be utterly misguided, for Mrs. Bénoîte has lost all vestiges of personality, of will, of speech. She even seems to have lost her first name and is continually referred to as “Mrs. Buddie Bénoîte.”¹⁷

“Charlie” (1900) uses a more serious and complex strategy of mimicry, for the title character plays a dangerous game of using one man—a crippled father—to avoid becoming shackled to a husband. When the story begins, Charlie is a tomboy who dresses in a costume of her own devising which she calls her “trouserlets”; Charlie engages in many “masculine” behaviors such as riding horses and bicycles, shooting a gun, and telling heroic tales of killing lions and bears (the kind Elizabeth Stock could never write). Yet by the end of the story, Charlie has transformed herself into a perfect young lady, a good domestic saint who cares more for her family than for her own personal happiness. After her father loses the use of his right arm in an accident, Charlie returns from school to care for him and for her younger sisters. When proposed to by her friend Gus, she responds that she “couldn't dream of leaving Dad without a right arm. … And then the twins. I've come to be a sort of mother to them rather than a sister; and you see I'd have to wait till they grew up” (669).

Several critics have argued that by actively choosing to remain single, Charlie finds an alternative to the stereotypical model of femininity enforced by her society—definition through marriage and children.¹⁸ Yet Charlie has found this alternative by seeming to conform to stereotypical roles—she uses the role of dutiful daughter, her father's right arm, to avoid becoming a dutiful wife. In fact, Charlie mimics the role of dutiful daughter to attain power and voice. Certainly, she loves her father, but she also uses him to avoid becoming entrapped in relationships which offer her less autonomy. For example, at the end of the story Charlie avoids answering Gus's question about whether she loves him by invoking the “dutiful daughter” image: “Didn't you hear Dad cough? That's a sly way he has of attracting my attention. He doesn't like to call me outright” (669). By playing the good daughter, she is able to postpone a marriage to Gus, as well as to edge him from his control of her father's plantation. “I'm jealous of Mr. Gus,” she tells her father, “‘I know as much as he, more perhaps when it comes to writing letters. I know as much about the plantation as you do, dad; you know I do. And from now on I'm going to be—to be your right hand—your poor right hand,’ she almost sobbed sinking her face in the pillow” (667-68). This feminine demonstration of emotion is certainly appropriate for a dutiful daughter, but Charlie is merely performing this role, mimicking the language of a dutiful daughter in order to get what she wants; a few seconds later she is again speaking “cheerfully” (668).

Charlie's assertion of mastery over texts (the letters) and knowledge (the plantation) is thus embedded within the language of domesticity; her assertions of discursive and personal independence are “covered” by her mimicry of the role of dutiful daughter. “Charlie” also seeks a middle ground between “masculine” and “feminine” norms. The story mimics the wholesale adoption of the feminine ideal, suggesting that it is ridiculous. When Charlie becomes a “woman” she becomes a caricature:

[A]fter the feminine instinct had been aroused in her. … [Charlie] wanted lace and embroideries upon her garments; and she longed to bedeck herself with ribbons and passementeries which the shops displayed in such tempting array. … [S]he resorted to the disfiguring curling irons with results which were, to say the least, appalling to Julia who came in one afternoon and discovered her entertaining young Walton with her head looking like a prize chrysanthemum.

(657)

Charlie's wholesale adoption of the “feminine instinct” turns feminine stereotypes into a farce. But in the end, it is not this feminine ideal which Charlie embraces. Although she does not go back to wearing trouserlets, at the story's conclusion she discards a gooey hand cream that she has been using to render her hands white and flawless—as white and flawless as her perfectly womanly sister, Julia.

Thus while mimicking the role of a dutiful daughter, Charlie is actually finding a middle ground between masculine and feminine spheres of influence, a niche of independence and voice in the patriarchal world she inhabits. Charlie also seeks a middle ground in writing, for she is a poet who “had a way, when strongly moved, of expressing herself in verse” (641). In her youth Charlie's poems, like her actions, are heroic and bold, about adventure; when she goes to school, they become conventional and sentimental, about love. However, Charlie eventually burns these sentimental poems, an action which like her abandonment of the hand cream marks her abandonment of traditional feminine norms. Charlie has not ended her quest for a form of resistance to patriarchal norms—she has only made it less overt. And neither has Chopin. Despite the “failure” of The Awakening, she is still looking for ways to subvert patriarchal language.

“Charlie” was never published in Chopin's lifetime; neither was “Elizabeth Stock's One Story.” Chopin did not even attempt to publish her most daring story, “The Storm.” Chopin's short fiction as a whole thus depicts a distinct pattern of feminine linguistic regression—a pattern which is reflected within the lives of the characters she creates, as well as within her own career as a writer. A patriarchal society denies women's right to control their destinies, their desires, and their discourses, and censors or erases female voices which do not conform to its dictates. And yet to conform to patriarchal dictates is to be silent as women, as Xavière Gauthier has explained: “As long as women remain silent, they will be outside the historical process. But, if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history that, logically speaking, their speech should disrupt” (162-63). How to speak in a voice which disrupts patriarchal discourse, without being censored by patriarchal structures? Throughout her career, Chopin confronts this problem, trying various strategies for creating a voice of insubordination: characters who are mostly silent, characters who use overtly resistant voices which go unheard, characters who find a covert discourse, characters who mimic patriarchal language.

Clearly, for Chopin, certain voices (like Naomi Mobry's) are dead avenues; they sacrifice the self for a momentary eruption of language which no one can understand. And mimicry creates its own set of problems: wanting to critique patriarchal norms of silence and submission, Chopin sometimes ends up seeming to endorse them. Yet some forms of voice walk the delicate tightrope between sanity and insanity, between “a language which nobody understood” and the silence that is patriarchal repression of women's speech. So stories like “An Egyptian Cigarette,” “Her Letters” and “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” may be paradigmatic texts for women's experiences with patriarchal language and development of a covert voice. In Julius Caesar Mark Antony states that “the evil that men do lives after them.” But texts, too, have a life of their own—a life which may exceed the author's and one day undo the evil that men do. Chopin's texts live on after her, graphically depicting the way women were silenced and effaced, offering a scathing indictment of the society that rewarded the silent and submissive woman. I think Kate Chopin would be pleased to know that today, her most daring works—works like The Awakening, “Elizabeth Stock's One Story,” and “The Storm”—are widely anthologized, admired, read, and understood. In the end, Chopin had the last laugh. She may have lost the battle for feminine self-expression—but she won the war.

Notes

1. For other assessments of language in The Awakening, see Joseph Urgo, Paula Treichler, and Dale Bauer.

2. For the notion of Chopin's works as dialogic, I am indebted to Dale Bauer's Feminist Dialogics, particularly Bauer's idea that Edna Pontellier “forces herself into a subversive dialogue with the Creole culture” (xvii). Although Bauer only discusses The Awakening, I want to argue here that certain of Chopin's short stories also create subversive cultural dialogues.

3. “A language which nobody understood” is the phrase used to describe the parrot's speech in The Awakening (881).

4. No critic has examined resistance to patriarchal discourse in Chopin's short fiction, although a number have argued generally that liberation is a recurrent theme. See, for example, Patricia Hopkins Lattin and Winfried Fluck.

5. According to Emily Toth, Chopin grew more vocal and more independent during the first five years of her career (1888-1893). The final stories of Bayou Folk (for example), point “toward a different Kate Chopin, who would not be contented with charming local-color sketches” (224). Stories written in 1894, such as “A Respectable Woman,” “The Story of an Hour,” and “Her Letters,” also reveal “stronger, less conventional female characters” (232-33). She had difficulty publishing her later stories because “by the mid to late 1890s, Kate Chopin's stories no longer fit most magazines' expectations” (283).

6. All year references are to these stories' compositions, which Chopin was careful to record.

7. Chopin repeatedly revised this story for publication, perhaps softening the main character. In the end, as Toth notes, “Euphrasie owes her happiness to men's notions of honor” (203).

8. See, for example, Mariequita in The Awakening, who is portrayed as having much more freedom (sexually and otherwise) than Edna Pontellier. Of course, many of Chopin's women of mixed race have no freedom at all; see, for example, the enslaved Zoraïde in “La Belle Zoraïde” or the quadroon nanny in The Awakening who is described as being “patient as a savage” (939). Chopin's complex attitude towards African Americans and other racial groups at times borders on racism; for an excellent discussion of this topic see Anna Elfenbein.

9. As Chopin explained in a letter to The Century's editor Richard Gilder, she made certain changes based upon his criticism: “The marriage is omitted, and the girl's character softened and tempered by her rude experience” (Toth 283). Gilder still would not accept the story.

10. Several other critics have noted these parallels between the treatment of women and the treatment of slaves; see, for example, Anne Jones or Bert Bender.

11. “Mrs. Mobry's Reason” was written in January of 1891, but not published until April 1893; as Emily Toth notes, it was “Chopin's most rejected story” (198). Toth states that the story concerns venereal disease, a forbidden subject for most American authors. Certainly, several of the story's alternate titles—“A Common Crime” and “A Taint in the Blood”—confirm this analysis.

12. Chopin wrote “Elizabeth Stock's One Story” in March 1898, after The Awakening. Several editors refused the story and it was never published during Chopin's lifetime.

13. Ironically, Elizabeth's job is given to the son of the man who wrote the fateful postcard which she was fired for reading. Perhaps this irony explains why the story has been interpreted as a “mild criticism of political favoritism.” See Per Seyersted (214, n 64). Barbara Ewell, on the other hand, interprets this story as being about Chopin's own difficulties with writing (166).

14. The narrator's sex is never stated, but he or she does have an aggressive, objective tone which stands in marked contrast to Elizabeth Stock's personal and subjective one, as Barbara Ewell has noted (166). Elaine Showalter believes the narrator is either Elizabeth Stock's nephew or her longtime suitor (239-40), but the narrator tells us explicitly that he or she is an outsider to Stonelift.

15. As Ann Douglas notes, concerned with the “feminization” of American literature and culture, many men and women reacted during this period by an insistence on tougher, more “masculine” values (327).

16. Patricia Klemans has an alternative view, arguing that Elizabeth “is so bound by self-doubt and self-sacrifice that it is impossible for her to develop her writing talent” (41). Robert Arner similarly sees Elizabeth Stock as a pathetic figure, although he believes that Chopin's story contains an underlying critique of fiction based on great and monumental events (101-2).

17. Two other late short stories which seem to mimic patriarchal romantic paradigms through irony and hyperbolic exaggeration are “The Wood-Choppers” (1901) and “Polly” (1902). How consciously Chopin uses mimicry in these stories is difficult to determine, particularly since they were both apparently written as children's stories.

18. A number of critics have argued that Charlie finds a compromise, an alternative to stereotypical feminine roles. Elizabeth McMahan, for example, argues that Charlie is given “the chance to do something different with her life” (32). Wendy Martin also argues that Charlie finds a way of refusing patriarchal authority (10). But for a dissenting opinion see Anne G. Jones (144).

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