[In the following essay, Ellis delineates the role of music in “After the Winter,” “At Cheniere Caminada,” and “A Vocation and a Voice.”]

In The Awakening, Mlle. Reisz's piano music triggers Edna Pontellier's first emotional arousing: “The very first chords … sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier's spinal column. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an empress of the abiding truth. … The very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her” (Kate Chopin's Awakening, 27). Throughout the novel, Edna continues to be awakened in various ways, one of which is Mlle. Reisz's music. Another is the consciousness of physical touch, which Chopin expresses frequently with hand imagery.

But Edna is not the first of Chopin's characters to be stirred to an emotional awakening by music. In an early story, “With the Violin,” she uses the “pleading, chiding, singing” tones of the instrument to rescue a despondent man from suicide. His experience is dramatic, but so are others in the early fiction. The character development on which the author focuses in “After the Winter” and “At Cheniere Caminada” grows from an awakening born of a single distinct musical experience. In both stories the notes of a church organ stimulate in the lives of two men profound emotional changes that most likely would not have occurred otherwise.

The 1896 novel by Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware, also describes the passionate power of music. Frederic's descriptions are as moving and intense as Chopin's:

There fell upon this silence—softness so delicate that it came almost like a progression in the hush—the sound of sweet music. … Then it rose as by a sweeping curve of beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive with the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly pure and pitilessly great.

Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. He almost resented the discovery, when it was presented to him by the prosaic, mechanical side of his brain, that he was listening to organ-music, and that it came through the open window from the church close by: He would fain have reclined in his chair and closed his eyes, and saturated himself with the uttermost fulness of the sensation.¹

Reminiscent of Edna's sessions with Mlle. Reisz, Chapter XIX of The Damnation (197-209) is filled with passages descriptive of music, specifically by Frederic Chopin, including the “Berceuse” that Kate Chopin used in “Wiser than a God.”

Yet another awakening associated with music dominates Chopin's “A Vocation and a Voice.” But this awakening seems to prefigure Edna Pontellier's. Rather than the experience of one moment, music becomes a refrain that continues to stir the boy to an awareness of himself and his world.

“After the Winter,” written on December 31, 1891, and published in the New Orleans Times-Democrat on April 5, 1896, is such a simple story that the reader can hardly miss Chopin's thematic symbols (Collected Works of Kate Chopin [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin], 1011). Chopin's M. Michel experiences an awakening, a rebirth, on an Easter Sunday and thus right “after the winter.” M. Michel has lived a misanthrope's life for the past twenty-five years after returning home from the Civil War and finding his child dead and his wife gone wanton. His bitter withdrawal from society has naturally inspired intriguing, murderous stories about him that fascinate the local children.

Trezinie, the blacksmith's daughter, longs to have wonderful flowers to add to the altar decorations of Easter morning, and her sense of pride compels her to try to outdo the others who have already taken flowers to the church. Chopin creates a vivid awareness of the young girl's spirit and environment by pointing out that the child has tried unsuccessfully to make her charred yard beautiful with colorful flowers. But the resourceful youth is inspired by the idea of gathering wildflowers fresh on Easter morn. Her resourcefulness and determination to work with what she has is reminiscent of Fifine in Chopin's “A Very Fine Fiddle.” She, Cami (the cobbler's son), and La Fringante (a little Negress) go into the forest early Easter morning to gather fresh wildflowers. When they come upon Michel's crude empty cabin, they examine it with childlike curiosity before they strip the hillside of its flowers.

M. Michel, returning to his cabin, finds that “his woods had been despoiled.” He grows angry not because he cares about the flowers but because someone has invaded his privacy: “Why had these people, with whom he had nothing in common, intruded upon his privacy and violated it? What would they not rob him of next?” Because he has recently been to town, he knows that it is Easter and that the flowers are being used “to add to the mummery of the day.” In his anger he determines to “go down among those people all gathered together, blacks and whites, and face them for once and for all. He did not know what he would say to them, but it would be defiance—something to voice the hate that oppressed him” (CW [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin], 185).

After entering the church and removing his hat as a mulatto tells him to do, he finds that being surrounded by people after so many years of being alone “affected him strangely.” Still he resolves to speak out, “just as soon as that clamor overhead” stops. But this clamor, the music of the organ “filling the small edifice with volumes of sound” and the “voices of men and women mingling in the ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo,’” confuses and stirs him. Chopin describes the intensity of his experience:

The words bore no meaning for him apart from the old familiar strain which he had known as a child and chanted himself in that same organ-loft years ago. How it went on and on! Would it never cease! It was like a menace; like a voice reaching out from the dead past to taunt him. “Gloria in excelsis Deo!” over and over! How the deep basso rolled it out! How the tenor and alto caught it up and passed it on to be lifted by the high, flutelike ring of the soprano, till all mingled again in the wild paean, “Gloria in excelsis!”

How insistent was the refrain! and where, what, was that mysterious hidden quality in it; the power which was overcoming M'sieur Michel, stirring within him a turmoil that bewildered him?

(CW, 185-86)

Compelled to flee the church filled with music and people, Michel is followed by the sounds of “Bonae voluntatis” and the refrain “‘Pax! pax! pax!’—fretting him like a lash.”

The description of Michel's experience recalls an 1867 diary entry, a composition on Christian art that Chopin wrote as a seventeen-year-old.

There remains yet to be considered the influence of Christianity upon music, that art so powerful as an agent in awakening the slumbering passions in the heart of man. From the time that David tuned his harp in Salem, and Jeremiah with prophetic voice sang forth his “Lamentations,” music has continued to gain in perfection of expression and harmony without entirely abandoning the mutation of the voices of nature. It arose to the dignity of an art, only when Christianity ennobled the muses, by accepting their services to add to the splendor of her ceremonial; then was heard for the first time beneath the Gothic arches of the Cathedral of Milan the exultant strains of the “Te Deum” which have lost none of their original power after sixteen centuries—then was heard amid the pillard isles of the Cistine Chapel the harmony of that wondrous “Miserera,” now, now stealing forth from the darkness like the first wail of a broken heart, growing fainter and fainter while it dies away in silence as if the grief were too great for the strain; then leaping forth, not like the voice of song, but on agony—floating and swelling with irresistible power till it sinks again into the low broken tunes of intense anguish.

(KCM, 54)

Chopin continues to emphasize the emotional power of the music. Even when Michel is back in his hut, the music of the organ and choir echoes within him and causes “restlessness” and “a driving want for human sympathy and companionship … [to reawaken] in his soul.” His reawakened desire for human companionship will be echoed in Mme. Martel's experience that is “born” on a Christmas Eve (“Madame Martel's Christmas Eve”). Both of these characters, wedded to the past with worship or hatred, enter scenes filled with music and create a small stir. Michel responds to this need by retracing a path he has not taken in years. He returns to his former homesite, expecting it to be grown over totally. Instead, under the beautiful moonlight, he finds his house and fields waiting for him. His old friend and neighbor Joe Duplan, magically appearing and explaining that he has been taking care of the place, offers this advice: “‘Let the past all go, Michel. Begin your new life as if the twenty-five years that are gone had been a long night, from which you have only awakened.’”

Chopin uses the music of the organ and the choir as the experience that awakens Michel and the refrain “Pax!” that accompanies his flight from the church as the song of his rebirth that returns him to his place among men.

Antoine (Tonie) Bocase, an innocent fisherman, is another Chopin character awakened by the power of music. Unexpected music from the usually silent church organ stirs Tonie, initiating him into his first experience with love in “At Cheniere Caminada.”² Shy and clumsy, the simple fisherman, who still lives with his mother, has “no desire to inflame the hearts of any of the island maidens.” However, the unexpected music at mass one morning changes Tonie.

Emphasizing the importance of music's role in Tonie's awakening, Chopin describes what happens while the priest chants the mass in “measured tones” that rise and fall “like a song”:

Some one was playing upon the organ whose notes no one on the whole island was able to awaken; whose tones had not been heard during the many months. … A long, sweet strain of music floated down from the loft and filled the church. …

It seemed to Tonie … that some heavenly being must have descended upon the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes and chosen this celestial way of communication with its people. But it was no creature from a different sphere; it was only a young lady from Grand Isle. A rather pretty young person with blue eyes and nut-brown hair.

(CW, 309-10)

From this moment on, Tonie is in love. Catching a glimpse of his celestial organist after church, Tonie wanders aimlessly around the island. He is not alert to anything and cannot answer his mother's customary questions when he returns home. But she has some information for him; she gives him the name of the organist, Claire Duvigne. Simply knowing Claire's name captures Tonie even further.

From then on, nothing is normal for Tonie. He cannot even work. In his innocence and inexperience, he does not recognize “the powerful impulse that had, without warning, possessed itself of his entire being,” but instinctively he obeys the impulse “as he could have obeyed the dictates of hunger and thirst.” He is awakened to a part of his own nature he cannot identify. Claire's image, “connected with that celestial music which had thrilled him and was vibrating yet in his soul,” is stamped in his mind. He abandons the repair work on his lugger and sails to Grand Isle where he hires out his boat and runs errands. Rather than turning to society as Michel does, Tonie isolates himself by spending his summer days, one by one, watching Claire with the other young people. Only once does Claire hire his boat alone. While they are out on the water, she is able to sense his love for her and flippantly finds it amusing “to pose” for “even a rough fisherman—to whom she felt herself to be an object of silent and consuming devotion. She could think of nothing more interesting to do on shore.” The force and extent of Tonie's infatuation, which Chopin describes as a “savage instinct of his blood,” is beyond Claire's ability to understand. Finally the ringing of the angelus bell and Claire's “musical voice” telling him to return to shore startle Tonie out of his passionate reverie. As memories of the Sunday that he heard the organ return to him, Tonie once again sees Claire as “that celestial being whom our Lady of Lourdes had once offered to his immortal vision.”

Tonie's internal struggle between his passionate instinct and his spiritual vision continues when the insensitive young woman, maintaining her pose and playing romantic heroine, pays him with a silver chain from her wrist. The simple “touch of her hand fire[s] his blood.” Tonie presses the chain to his lips, watching her walk away. His thoughts, prompted by the passion that has been awakened, are surprising in their intensity:

“He was stirred by a terrible, an overmastering regret, that he had not clasped her in his arms when they were out there alone, and sprung with her into the sea. It was what he had vaguely meant to do when the sound of the Angelus bell weakened and palsied his resolution. … He resolved within himself that if ever again she were out there on the sea at his mercy, she would have to perish in his arms. He would go far, far out where the sound of no bell could reach him. There was some comfort for him in the thought.”

(CW, 315)

Following Tonie's dramatic confession, Chopin advances from the summer to the next January when Tonie is in New Orleans on business. By this time, he is a “wretched-hearted being” because he has not seen Claire. He has finally told his mother of his consuming love for the organist, and his mother fears that Tonie will not return, “for he had spoken wildly of the rest and peace that could come only to him with death.” In New Orleans, Tonie meets Mme. Lebrun and her mother from Grand Isle, who are in the city “to hear the opera as often as possible,” and from them Tonie learns that Claire Duvigne has died “simply from a cold caught by standing in thin slippers, waiting for her carriage after the opera.” Stunned by the news, Tonie gets drunk; however, “from that day he felt that he began to live again.” Her death releases him.

Later, talking to his mother, he explains that he had known he had no chance of winning Claire's love because he was only a rough fisherman and had no way to compete with the men who were always around her. He knew that one day she would marry, have children, and return with them to Grand Isle. Since Claire is now in heaven “where she belongs,” he feels he has a chance to win her love because at last “she will know who has loved her best.” Although Chopin does not express the idea directly, Tonie is obviously a man frightened by his intense feelings of love. He is more comfortable with his images of Claire as a “celestial organist” and an inhabitant of heaven than with the real woman.

Part of the importance of this story lies in its connections with The Awakening through shared characters and locations, and similar incidents. Tonie, his mother, and Mme. LeBrun reappear in the novel, which begins and ends on Grand Isle. Edna Pontellier and Robert Lebrun spend a day on Cheniere Caminada, Tonie's home. When Edna flees from mass at the church where Tonie hears Claire play the organ, she and Robert spend the afternoon at Mme. Antoine's. Tonie later takes the two back to Grand Isle in the same boat with the red lateen sail that he had once sailed for Claire. Chopin even mentions Claire by name as the “sunlight” in which Robert spent two previous summers. Claire died between the seasons spent at Grand Isle (KCA, 12). Chopin also uses hand imagery, the potential sensuousness of the simple touch, in both stories. Perhaps the most interesting connection between the novel and the story lies in Tonie's desire to perish in the sea with Claire because of his unattainable love, foreshadowing Edna's suicide in the same waters.

Regardless of the connections with The Awakening, “At Cheniere Caminada” needs to be considered on its own merit. While the organ music in “After the Winter” awakens Michel to a rebirth, the unexpected music from the organ awakens the unprepared Tonie to new emotions that nearly destroy him. The surging, assailing, instinctive passions that Tonie feels are also experienced by the boy in “A Vocation and a Voice.” These emotional awakenings illustrate that Chopin was not simply a feminist. She understood human nature in all its complexity, not just the woman's plight that many critics like to demonstrate through Edna Pontellier. As Arthur Hobson Quinn writes, “There is an unusual understanding of man's passion in ‘At Cheniere Caminada,’ in the depiction of Antoine Bocaze's relief when the summer visitor whom he has been hopelessly worshipping at a distance dies, and the torturing thought that some other man may possess her is over.”³

Joyce Coyne Dyer describes Tonie's first emotions as “marked by sentimentality and juvenile idealization” and later ones as “an issue of sexual need rather than childish infatuation.” She goes on to claim that “Chopin assures us symbolically … that there are natural forces within each man that he cannot resist”:

Not only Chopin's women slumber and awake. The recent popularity of The Awakening has given many the idea that Chopin is a woman who writes best about women and their nature. But a review of several of her best, though little-known, short stories indicates that she recognized and understood the passions and needs of men as well as women. Tonie and the boy of “A Vocation and a Voice” are sexually awakened and aroused by the soft skin, magical voices, or disturbing and mysterious personalities of women. … As these stories and others suggest, her true subject was both men and women. Her true subject was human nature.”

Chopin does write that Tonie follows his new instincts as he would those of “hunger and thirst” and that there is a “savage instinct in his blood.” Even though the angelus bell temporarily brings Tonie's imagination back to his first pictures of Claire, Dyer points out that “violent fantasies” quickly return and Tonie dreams of going beyond the reach of the bell.⁴

Tonie's desire to escape the reaches of his conscience suggests the strength of his physical feelings and indicates the struggle between his spiritual and physical natures. Chopin explores this conflict further in “A Vocation and a Voice.” And once again Chopin chooses to accompany an awakening with music. But this time, rather than a single musical experience, Chopin uses the musical sounds as an unworded vocal refrain heard at intervals throughout the story, even as the voice of the sea speaks to Edna in The Awakening. Peggy Skaggs also sees this relationship.⁵

The awakening in “A Vocation and a Voice” is a positive one, a joyous affirmation of life.⁶ The story tells of an unnamed fifteen-year-old boy who leaves his makeshift home to join a pair of vagabonds who travel the countryside telling fortunes and selling patent medicines. Chopin emphasizes the boy's innocence of spirit and experience in many ways. She includes bits of information about his background as an altar boy; he “belonged under God's sky in the free and open air.” Hungry for the outdoors, he thrives in the first weeks of roaming with the strange pair, Suzima and Gutro.

As the source for the recurring music, Chopin uses the beautiful singing voice of the “robust” and “comely” Suzima, a young woman of about twenty. At one time Suzima sang in the chorus of an opera company, and her youthful experience contrasts greatly with the boy's innocence. What is special about Suzima at first is her voice, although he does not yet know why the music moves him. When she “lifted her voice and sang,” he thinks he has “never heard anything more beautiful than the full, free notes that come from her throat, filling the vast, woody temple with melody.” Always she sings the same thing, a “stately refrain from some remembered opera.” There are times when the boy sings with Suzima as she plays her guitar, but the days of their pleasing duets are cut short because as he matures, his voice changes. The young woman's companion, the rough Gutro, is always associated with his prized pair of mules. Gutro takes better care of the mules than of people. Frequently drunk, he often abuses Suzima and becomes “the beast” in the boy's thinking. Chopin uses both of these characters to awaken the boy to a knowledge of different aspects of his own nature.

After a while, the odd threesome settle into an abandoned cabin for the winter. The lad has a chance to serve as an altar boy again and even works in the village to pay for new clothes required by his growth. Chopin gently lets the boy roam between the contrasting worlds of the little village and the independent vagabonds. Whenever his allegiance seems to lean toward the standards of the village and church, Chopin woos the lad through Suzima. An example of this occurs after the boy and Suzima have dinner with the village priest. The boy has been a little nervous about how Suzima will behave and is relieved when they head home. Feeling she has been “respectable” long enough, Suzima begins to sing the familiar “stately refrain.” In fact, Chopin notes, it is so familiar that he has begun to hear it “sometimes in his dreams.” Although Chopin describes the boy's next remark as delivered “impetuously,” it is still a significant statement: “‘I'd rather hear you sing that than anything in the world, Suzima.’” Another example of Suzima's wooing the lad away from the village occurs when she informs him that they are going to start traveling again. She sits and waits, “a shadowy form … lurking nearby,” while he takes leave of the villagers.

At this point the lad is more aware of being wooed by the woods and the seasons than by the young woman. The boy's thoughts and heart respond to the “breath of Spring abroad beating softly in his face, and the odors of Spring assailing his senses.”

Spring, the season of love, brings new awakenings to the youth. Physically growing and thriving, the lad starts to grow in other ways. Gutro's tales told by the campfire stir him, sometimes leaving him “not so tranquil.” Then Gutro, forced by pains in his leg, allows the boy to tend the prized mules, the most manly job Gutro knows. Taking the mules to the stream to water them, the boy sees Suzima sitting naked as she bathes. The change in him is instant. Her image burns into his brain and flesh “with the fixedness and intensity of white-hot iron” just as Claire's image was stamped on Tonie's mind. Quickly turning away and going on with watering the mules, the boy reacts later in rage: “For the first time in his life he uttered oaths and curses that would have made Suzima quail.” The awakening within him causes him to flee into the woods where he cries.

For a while, Suzima and the lad are irritable with each other. Then the moon comes out one night, and the vagabonds travel on, Gutro driving the wagon, the other two walking behind. Suzima sings her song that echoes “from a distant hillside” until she tires and climbs into the wagon to sleep. Her bare feet “peeped out, gleaming in the moonlight.” Finally, “in submission to a sudden determination moving him, seemingly, without his volition,” he springs into the wagon. Once again, Chopin's awareness of the powerful sensation of touch is important, but this time the touch is of bare feet, not hands. Soon Suzima is holding the lad “with her arms and with her lips.” (A similar scene, though totally coincidental, can be found in Faulkner's Light in August when Byron Bunch struggles with thoughts of climbing into the truck beside Lena Grove. Byron is not welcomed, as the boy is, and runs off into the woods, like the boy.)

The changes in the boy in the next few days are great. His sexual initiation makes him totally responsive to nature all about him and to Suzima, who becomes the “embodiment of desire and the fulfillment of life.” Her song is now clearly and symbolically powerful: “When she sang her voice penetrated his whole being and seemed to complete the new and bewildering existence that had overtaken him.” But Chopin prepares another profound awakening. The lad discovers evil in himself. Trying to protect Suzima from one of Gutro's beatings, the boy comes close to killing the crude man with a knife. His sudden self-knowledge is the crux of one of the main conflicts in the story. “He had always supposed that he could live in the world a blameless life. He took no merit for he could not recognize within himself a propensity toward evil. He had never dreamed of a devil luring unknown to him, in his blood. … He shrank from trusting himself with this being alone. His soul turned toward the refuge of spiritual help, and he prayed to God and the saints and the Virgin Mary to save him and to direct him” (CW, 542).

The lad retreats to a monastery the trio has passed recently and eventually becomes Brother Ludovic, “hero of the wood” to the other brothers and students. His interest in nature and his strength are outstanding; he exhausts himself daily as protection from “that hideous, evil spectre … lurking outside, ready at any moment to claim him, should he venture within its reach.” But Chopin understands the strength of human nature. There are still nights when he has “disturbing vision[s]” of “following, [but] never overtaking a woman—the one woman he had known—who lured him.” With the determination of “a fixed purpose in life,” Brother Ludovic undertakes to build a stone fence around the sacred grounds. It will be a solid stone wall, a “prison,” some of the brothers joke.

Then comes the final awakening for the boy-man, which Chopin chooses to describe in terms of instinct. With the “mute quivering attention of some animal in the forest, startled at the scent of approaching danger,” Brother Ludovic is flooded by vivid memories of Suzima—the day he saw her naked, the night he climbed into the wagon. His response becomes attentive rather than fearful when from a distance he recognizes the “voice of a woman singing the catchy refrain from an opera.” Brother Ludovic watches the paradelike movement of the lone woman in the road below. Physically and symbolically, he crosses the wall, “conscious of nothing in the world but the voice that was calling him and the cry of his own being that responded.” At last he follows the “voice of the woman.”

The words in the title of this story are clever choices. Vocation seems to refer to the priestly calling of the boy-man, but it also can refer to any “calling,” secular or religious. Voice seems to signify Suzima's song that casts its spell over the boy. But Chopin suggests another meaning for voice when she notes that Brother Ludovic is “hardly past the age when men are permitted to have a voice and a will in the direction of government.” Thus voice also becomes a reference to one's being old enough to make his own decisions. Perhaps what Chopin is saying is not the obvious “priest and song” that come so quickly to mind but that each man must find and respond to his own calling. That is the ultimate awakening and the ultimate fulfillment.

The other awakening in “A Vocation and a Voice” stems from two levels of conflict that Chopin explores. Bert Bender sees the “opposed forces in this story” as “work, conventionality, orthodox religion, and the will” versus “idleness, unconventionality, a kind of pantheistic religion, and impulsiveness.” He credits Suzima's voice that weaves in and out as the story's “lyric quality.” Peggy Skaggs sees the story in terms of basic human drives: “the drives for a sense of belonging, for love relationships with others, and for selfhood.”⁷ But examining these conflicts, the first is the simple physical development and sexual initiation (awakening) of the lad. The other is a spiritual one that rages on several levels.

Not only is the boy torn between worship as he knows it in a liturgical sense and experiences it instinctively in nature, but he also finally awakens to the struggle of good and evil, to a knowledge of sin within himself. (This struggle between the secular and the sacred is also evident in Chopin's “Lilacs” through the pull that Adrienne Farival experiences.) This knowledge does not come through physical awakening or sexuality but through Gutro, who is constantly associated with beasts.

At one point, Chopin seems to mock the boy's religious devotion through Suzima's fascination with seeing him serve mass. Elmo Howell comments that Chopin treats the church with respect and that “in describing the sensual, she never denies the validity of the spiritual.”⁸ The beautiful robes and mysterious language seem to be props not unlike those she and Gutro use to fool the people in the villages. Although the church is a refuge for the boy, his instinctive love of nature is also expressed romantically in terms of worship and religion. As the story opens, he is sitting in the park, speculating that heaven is “like this” rather than a “celestial city paved with gold.” The first time he hears Suzima's voice, it fills “the vast, woody temple.” When the boy wanders in the woods at night, he walks fearlessly, “holding communion with something mysterious, greater than himself, … something he called God.” It is as if he were in Eden before the Fall. Just as Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness and hid themselves, after seeing Suzima naked, the lad runs into the woods, hiding himself for a time. But early on, Chopin tells her readers: “He belonged under God's sky in the free and open air.” The vocation this boy-man has is the one he must follow. His manhood cannot be found behind some solid stone fence. He must follow Suzima's song, long in his dreams.

Dyer takes the view that the boy is innocent about the nature of nature. He mistakenly thinks “nature is gentle” and thus remains “oblivious to its driving insistence.” Seeing nature as “semi-divine,” the boy's response is like a child's. Dyer interprets Suzima as representing “sexual desire”; Gutro, “violent tendencies.” And by association the boy uncovers both within himself. Dyer notes that the boy tries to control his own nature and to recover his innocent belief in nature at the monastery, but Suzima's voice reawakens needs of his flesh that “are more imperative than those of this spirit.” Dyer concludes that “Chopin was fascinated by the basic, primitive desires of both men and women … who are complex creatures who have no choice but to discover their passion, in spite of risks, confusion, and guilt.”⁹

Each of the major characters in these three stories experiences a significant self-discovery that the author deliberately initiates through musical experience. The awakenings of these men are as deeply passionate as the initial awakening of Edna Pontellier that Chopin also signals through music.

Music, as ordinary and extraordinary experience in secular and sacred situations, becomes a thematic and symbolic expression in the lives of her characters. Whether male or female, conventional or defiant, the people of Kate Chopin's stories are influenced and changed by the power of music.

Notes

1. Harold Frederick, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896; rpr. Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 79-80.

2. Written in October, 1893, and published in December, 1894, in the New Orleans Times-Democrat. See CW, II, 1016.

3. Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: A Historical Survey (New York, 1936), 356.

4. Joyce Coyne Dyer, “Kate Chopin's Sleeping Bruties,” Markham Review, X (1980-81), 11, 12.

5. Peggy Skaggs, “The Boy's Quest in Kate Chopin's ‘A Vocation and a Voice,’” American Literature, LI (1979), 270-76.

6. Written in November, 1896, not published until March, 1902, when it appeared in the St. Louis Mirror. See CW, 1027.

7. Bert Bender, “Kate Chopin's Lyrical Short Stories,” Studies in Short Fiction, XI (1974), 257-66; Skaggs, “Boy's Quest,” 271.

8. Elmo Howell, “Kate Chopin and the Pull of Faith: A Note on ‘Lilacs,’” Southern Studies, XVIII (1979), 104, 108.

9. Dyer, “Sleeping Bruties,” 13-15.