SOURCE: Brown, Pearl L. “Awakened Men in Kate Chopin's Creole Stories.” American Transcendental Quarterly 13, no. 1 (March 1999): 69-82.

[In the following essay, Brown discusses Chopin's depiction of men who experience liberation from cultural restrictions in their relationships with women.]

Much has been written about Kate Chopin's defiant women. Not only Edna Pontellier, the rebellious heroine in The Awakening, but also the independent-minded women in her Creole stories have received extensive commentary. However, very little has been written about Chopin's defiant men, some of whom have experiences that parallel those of the women. Just as a woman in an intimate moment with a man awakens to an inner self buried beneath a culturally sanctioned social one, so does a man in an intimate moment with a woman discover a subjective self buried beneath a public persona. Just as women defy social expectations for women in the Creole culture, so do men defy that culture's masculine norms. In fact, in Chopin's Creole stories revolving around an intimate moment between a man and a woman, whether a story is told from a male or a female perspective, the narrative follows a similar pattern of discovery. For both men and women such epiphanies lead to self-knowledge as well as a better understanding of cultural norms and of the ways these norms do not satisfy psychological needs. As a consequence, these stories embody a vision of a society considerably more liberated than the social hegemony of nineteenth-century America in general or that of the old South and French Louisiana in particular.

In Chopin's collections, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, certain stories come together around common features of plot and characterization and can be grouped accordingly. In one group of stories men and women are already established in a social identity and gender role, the men in the workplace and the women in marriage. In these stories both men and women during moments of sexual intimacy and intense feeling awaken to a buried self and to an understanding that the social identity they have created or have accepted from their culture is not compatible with newly discovered psychological needs. Consequently, even men and women who seem already to have begun rebelling against cultural norms are affected by such moments of intimacy. In a second group of stories, men and women, typically young and unmarried, are unawakened both psychologically and socially. Before their intimate experiences, they neither knew themselves nor had given much thought to the gender expectations of their culture or to life choices for themselves. Hence, the intimate encounters come at a turning point in their lives when they are presumably still open to alternative life choices. However, regardless of the groupings, stories have one common feature: both men and women are changed by such intimate moments; both awaken to the possibilities of a fuller, richer life. Though readers of these stories have focussed almost exclusively on female awakenings, Chopin insists on the importance of social and psychological awakenings in men as well as in women.

Though readers might agree with Nancy Walker's assessment that Catholic Creoles lived a freer, more sensuous life-style than their Protestant counterparts (95-103), the social structure reflected in Chopin's Creole stories set in New Orleans and rural Louisiana does not allow for much deviation from cultural norms. Helen Taylor is certainly correct in her observation that the stories set in the Cane River region in particular reflect “fixed social relations and ideologies” and depict a culture in which “characters are allowed limited autonomy …” (165). That world of the plantation aristocracy during and after the Civil War embodies the values of a conservative culture, values re-enforced by both the Catholic Church and the close-knit rural community. It is a culture that measures a woman's worth by her devotion to family, her self-abnegation, and her graciousness and charm in performing her social duties and a man's worth by the degree of authority he exercises over his household. Indeed, even New Orleans Creoles in Chopin's fiction are on the whole isolated in their own cultural enclave with close ties and easy access to their rural origin. In The Awakening urban Creoles like the Lebruns and Ratignolles rarely venture across Canal Street to the American side of the city, and the Pontelliers maintain close ties with Leonce's rural home. It is against such an insular world that the rebellion of Chopin's women has been measured. It is against such a world that her men's rebellion must also be measured.

To explore male norms and departures from them in these stories, Chopin introduces a range of Creole male types from both rural and urban Louisiana and variations on the pattern of a story climaxing with an awakening. She introduces the urban businessman and the professional as well as the independent farmer and the plantation owner. She introduces men who are very conservative in their social and political views, and others who see themselves as socially progressive, even outside the traditional masculine norms of Creole society. Some are in the position of having already made life choices which they come to re-evaluate during an intimate experience with a woman. Others seemingly have no such moments or, if they do, have only limited insight into themselves or their culture. Still others are just beginning to plan their lives when they experience such moments. However, regardless of differences in circumstances, lifestyle or ideology, certain men in these stories are presented with epiphanic moments that are potentially as liberating and thus life altering as the moments women experience. Chopin's narrative strategy in a story is to introduce two men who represent contrasting or opposing male types to suggest alternative life styles and the possibility of different life choices. Stories can also be paired as companion studies suggesting variations on the pattern of self-discovery and of insight into cultural norms. In fact, comparing men from stories in the two different groupings, a man already committed to a social role and one just beginning to consider his choices, can also be illuminating in that such a comparison reveals more clearly the consequences of making wrong choices or of denying the subjective self or of acquiescing too unreflectingly to cultural norms.

In the stories in which men and women seem already established in a gender role, Chopin pairs men who are opposites ideologically and socially. On one end of the socio-political spectrum is the unmarried Creole man who shares an intimate moment with a married woman, an experience that inspires a psycho-sexual awakening in both. Introduced as a social rebel, this Creole bachelor has created for himself an unconventional public image which separates him from more conventional Creole men. In fact, his unconventionality serves as a stimulus for the awakening in the woman he encounters. However, he too is awakened by the intimate experience in that he gains self-knowledge that compels him to question the public or social self he has created and the life choices he has made.

On the other end of the socio-political spectrum is the woman's conventional husband, who has accepted his culture's norms for men. Such a patriarchal male figure has as his primary function the embodiment of the conventions of masculine social and public life against which the defiant men rebel. For example, Gouvernail, who becomes a married woman's confidante in two of these Creole stories, “A Respectable Woman” and “Athenaise,” is a liberal-minded journalist with ties to the bohemian community in New Orleans. He is much less conventional than the husbands of the two women he has encounters with. Both Cazeau, Athenaise's husband, and Gaston Baroda, the husband in “A Respectable Woman,” are conservative and conventional in their understanding of the political and social norms that define Creole masculinity. In another story with close parallels to “A Respectable Woman,” “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” Sepincourt similarly has attempted to distance himself from the socio-political norms for men. Presumably a Creole aristocrat by birth, he has established himself as an outsider to the Creole plantation culture he is a part of even before he meets the married woman who will inspire him to reconsider his life choices. He has rejected the traditional plantation values by refusing to support the Southern cause in the Civil War. Unlike Madame Delisle's husband, Gustave, and presumably other Creole aristocrats, Sepincourt has not joined General Beauregard's military campaign in Virginia. Thus, even before their encounters with women, both Gouvernail and Sepincourt are depicted as having rejected some aspect of the traditional public life of a Creole man. In fact, Gouvernail has rejected even some of the accepted social rituals for men. In “A Respectable Woman,” Madame Baroda has been told by her husband, Gaston, that his old school friend is definitely not the typical Creole bachelor, a “man about town” (333). At home in New Orleans he frequents gatherings in the American quarter rather than attend the Sunday social functions in the Creole section of the city. And his retreat to the country does not include the customary male recreations Gaston Baroda had been looking forward to, fishing and hunting. Gouvernail has no interest in either.

However, though both Gouvernail and Sepincourt are unconventional in their expression of a discontent with the prevailing masculine order, until their intimate moments with the women who come into their lives, both have either ignored or repressed psychological needs. Presumably, Gouvernail has never before acknowledged his feelings of loss, emptiness, and unfulfillment in the life he has chosen until his talk with Mrs. Baroda. This discussion moves him to speak of his past friendship with Gaston when the two meant something to each other and of his past “blind ambition and large intentions.” Only then is he able to admit to himself that over the years all he has been left with is a “philosophic acquiescence to the existing order” with “only a desire to be permitted to exist” (335). What the intimacy of the night and the presence of his hostess open him up to is the realization that neither in terms of personal relationships nor in terms of the direction his life has taken does he currently feel fulfilled. Withdrawing to the country to find some solace from an existence to which he can only acquiesce, he discovers that “little whiff of genuine life” (335) which at least momentarily lifts his spirits as he sits on a bench savoring the night and sharing his most private reflections with his hostess.

Sepincourt's response to the war echoes Gouvernail's alienation from “the existing order.” He shrugs his shoulders “over this strife between brothers, this quarrel which was none of his” (298). His rejection of the Southern cause certainly represents a departure from the prevailing masculinist social and political views; yet, until his meetings with Madame Delisle, his unconventionality rings hollow. His initial remark to Mrs. Delisle about the war—that “it made life uncomfortable” (298)—certainly does not reveal a deeply felt political ideology. He comes to understand, like Gouvemail, that his discontent has a psychological rather than a social or political origin. Like Gouvernail, he is compelled to acknowledge the existence of a subjective self buried beneath his superficial public persona of the rebel. Ironically, it is a child-like Creole woman, herself unawakened both psychologically and socially, who inspires this sophisticated Creole man to drop his public pose as he begins to respond to the intimacy that permeates their afternoon walks. He begins to relish those moments when they are “unconsciously unfolding themselves to each other” (299). Certainly, his proposal to Mrs. Delisle that they leave Louisiana to live outside Creole social and moral norms reveals a more deeply felt rebelliousness than his earlier protest against the Southern cause. Though the life he envisions with Madame Delisle is not meant to be, he has had his moment of self-knowledge and has had to acknowledge psychological needs not satisfied by a public image as a sophisticate and a political critic.

Both women caught in these intimate encounters are at least momentarily awakened to psychological needs that their culturally defined social roles as Creole wives do not sanction. To depict the society these women are inspired to rebel against, Chopin explicitly delineates the culturally sanctioned separation between the domestic and feminine, on the one hand, and the public and masculine, on the other. In the context of the separate spheres, Chopin reflects on what was a reality about gender roles until very recent times. A man's social or public identity was defined primarily by his work and only secondarily by his marital status, though in the Creole culture a man was expected at some point in his life to assume his proper role as the patriarchal head of a household. A woman's social or public identity was defined exclusively by her preparation for marriage and the marital state itself. In stories such as “A Respectable Woman” and “A Lady from Bayou St. John,” the male world of purposeful action is carefully demarcated from the isolated, passive world of feminine concerns. In “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” the husband's guarded letters from the war front are intended to communicate little of the realities of war to the child-wife he has left behind. Indeed, for Madame Delisle the image of her husband has receded into a misty memory. As she begins to awaken sexually and psychologically, the one activity she remembers sharing with her husband, walks beneath the magnolias, seems unreal and inconsequential compared to her intimate walks with Sepincourt. Her walks with Sepincourt are filled with incessant talking or silences in which neither feels the need to talk.

In “A Respectable Woman,” the separate worlds of Creole husband and wife meet in the fulfillment of social obligations demanded by the plantation culture. Gaston encourages his wife in her feminine “work”—the social life of the plantation culture. He accompanies her to New Orleans for the seasonal parties and balls, the “mild dissipations” (333), and he indulges her trips for spring fittings necessary for a fashionable Creole wife. But the world he identifies with as a Creole man is revealed in his anticipation of some hunting and fishing and some male talk when his old college friend Governail comes to visit. Her conversation with Gouvernail introduces her to a world far removed from the social rituals of a Creole wife. Like Madame Delisle's moments with Sepincourt, Mrs. Baroda's encounter with Gouvernail is intimate, deeply felt, and individualized, and thus socially unsanctioned by the culture.

Until their encounters with Sepincourt and Gouvernail, Madame Delisle and Madame Baroda apparently had settled into the conventional roles for Creole women in marriage and in society. The two in fact represent different Creole female types as a kind of parallel to Creole male types in the stories. Madame Delisle has passively accepted her asexual and completely dependent role as the Creole child-woman who is not expected ever to grow up; and, until her encounter with Gouvernail, Mrs. Baroda has remained sexually unawakened in her role as the charming social hostess for her husband. When Gouvernail is first mentioned to her, Mrs. Baroda can only think in terms of social stereo-types, but she soon discovers he is not the charming conversationalist she had come to expect an unmarried Creole man to be. Instead, she finds him “mute and receptive before her chatty eagerness to make him feel at home” (333), decidedly lacking in the courtliness of the Creole gigolo. It isn't until the night Gouvernail shares with her his intimate reverie that she is aroused out of her smug world of superficial social functions and respectable behavior as the desire to draw close to him and touch him almost overwhelms her. That night she is able to repress these unsanctioned desires, but the story ends ambiguously. When Gouvernail comes again to visit, she may be ready to liberate more completely the suppressed sexual self of the respectable Creole wife.

Likewise, Madame Delisle's afternoon walks and talks with Sepincourt momentarily awaken her to an existence different from that of the passive child-wife absorbed in her own loveliness and Manna-Loulou's bedtime stories. With Sepincourt's declaration of love and his proposal for a new life abroad, she momentarily becomes “a woman capable of love or sacrifice” (299). But her awakening proves to be as brief as it is sudden. When she hears of her husband's death, she reacts to the tragic news by sublimating her awakened passion to a religious ecstasy, a life-long devotion to his memory. Her retreat to the stereotypical role of the grieving, devoted Creole wife and Mrs. Baroda's struggle to check her desires suggest that for Chopin moments of self-awareness do not necessarily mark the beginning of permanent change, but they are nonetheless deeply felt and thus life altering. The moment the two have shared is much more than a “tentative transgression” (Fluck 155). It is Chopin's reminder to her nineteenth-century readers of what the relationship between a man and a woman could be and should be.

“A Respectable Woman” and the other story in which Gouvernail appears, “Athenaise,” are companion studies of male and female awakenings with parallel scenes that follow a similar narrative structure. “A Respectable Woman” ends with a woman's awakening to an inner self-buried beneath an external self comprising social responsibilities. “Athenaise” ends with a man's awakening to an inner self buried beneath an external self, defined by his public image as the liberal-minded professional man. Though Gouvernail's moment of genuine life is important in “A Respectable Woman,” the focus of the narrative is much more on Mrs. Baroda and her psycho-sexual awakening. In contrast, in “Athenaise,” while the young wife's rebellion against social expectations for women is certainly important, the awakening placed at a climactic moment in the narrative is Gouvernail's. In a scene that parallels Gouvernail's awakening Mrs. Baroda with his reverie, Athenaise awakens Gouvernail with her intimate outpouring that arouses the buried emotional self in this detached, smugly complacent man. And, in contrast to “A Respectable Woman,” it is the unconventionality of a rebellious married woman that inspires an epiphany in a man. It is Athenaise's frank confession of her unhappiness in an oppressive Creole marriage that liberates the subjective in Gouvernail and compels him to reconsider the public image he has created for himself.

When Gouvernail first meets Athenaise and must share the breakfast table with her, he is “annoyed at having his cherished privacy invaded” and is relieved when she leaves (443). The extent to which he has acquiesced to the existing order of things alluded to in “A Respectable Woman” becomes clearer in “Athenaise.” In New Orleans he emerges as a professional man of regular habits and “invariable” customs, described by the narrator as possessing “a quiet, unobtrusive manner that seem[s] to ask that he be let alone” (443-44)—until his encounter with a weeping Athenaise one night. In “A Respectable Woman,” it is Gouvernail's discontent with the existing order that awakens Mrs. Baroda out of her superficial social existence, but in “Athenaise” it is the young wife's discontent with the existing order of things that awakens Gouvernail out of his orderly predictable life. And Athenaise's intimate moment of reverie is presumably inspired by her finding at last a receptive audience in Gouvernail, just as Mrs. Baroda's awakening was inspired by Gouvernail's reverie.

As Athenaise experiences the emotional freedom to talk about her married life and to ruminate longingly over the sights, sounds, and scents of her family home on Bayou Bon Dieu, Gouvernail feels “a wave of pity and tenderness [sweep] over him” (450), and he is once again in touch with his subjective self as he was when he savored the night and spoke to Mrs. Baroda of that “whiff of genuine life” in “A Respectable Woman.” And, as Gouvernail reflects on the possibilities of a future with Athenaise, he realizes that the fact of her being already married makes no difference to him: “When the time came that she wanted him—as he hoped and believed it would come—he felt he would have a right to her. So long as she did not want him, he had no right to her—no more than her husband had” (450). Unlike Edna Pontellier's conventional-minded lover in The Awakening who cannot imagine a union outside of social and moral norms, Gouvernail is ready to gamble all for a future with Athenaise. The young wife's reaction to her discovery that she is pregnant and her subsequent decision to return to her husband bring an end to Gouvernail's dreams of a future with the woman who has awakened him.

In “Athenaise” Gouvernail is not introduced until section VII of a narrative divided into eleven sections. At that point Athenaise's rebellion from her oppressive Creole marriage to the autocratic Cazeau takes her to New Orleans and her encounter with Gouvernail who has rooms in the same house where she is staying. Chopin's strategy is to prepare for the introduction of a culturally deviant Creole male such as Gouvernail by carefully establishing masculine norms in the depiction of Athenaise's husband. In fact, one variation on the narrative pattern of stories in this group is that this one is more concerned with the Creole marriage and family and the culture's codification of norms for both husbands and wives than either of the two stories discussed earlier. Athenaise's patriarchal husband serves as a foil to Gouvernail, who has allowed himself to respect marriage but has apparently chosen to disregard his culture's expectations for a Creole man—that he marry and assume his role as head of a household. Cazeau has accepted his role as master over his wife and plantation—until his wife leaves him to return to live with her parents. Self-controlled and controlling, he has expected his wife to accept as uncompromisingly as he does the rules of their society—that he be the authority in their marriage and that she passively submit to him.

When Athenaise leaves her husband the first time and seeks a haven in her family home, even her parents assume that it is Cazeau's right as a husband to discipline their rebellious daughter. For his part, Cazeau refuses to admit that her actions bother him except in his musing that “he would find means to keep her at home hereafter” (428). He is “quite prepared to make the best” (428) of the marriage, accepting as he does his culture's view that it is a lifelong arrangement between a man and a woman. Furthermore, when he acts the role of the patriarchal husband and goes to his in-laws to fetch his wife home, his pride will not permit him even to speak to her or to allow her to voice her grievances.

To expand on her exploration of masculine self-discovery, Chopin has even the rigidly patriarchal Cazeau experience a moment of epiphany as he “drives” his wife home. As he follows her on horseback, an image from the past—of him and his father driving a runaway slave back to the plantation—is superimposed on the scene unfolding before him in the present, as he follows behind his runaway wife on their way home. He suddenly realizes that his relationship to his young wife duplicates that of a master over a slave. So disturbing is that revelation that he quickly rides to catch up with her and escort her home, and, when she leaves him a second time to escape to New Orleans, he resolves to let her go because he does not want to feel again the baseness of a master subduing a slave. This epiphany prepares the way for his acknowledging to himself his deep sense of loss at her second leaving, a significant psychological change in this conservative man whose behavior has established him as a stereotypical patriarchal male. Though the story ends without elaborating on the difference in this marriage after the wife's return to her husband, one can only speculate that the awakenings in both will have a salutary effect on their relationship.

In the second group of stories with common narrative features, men and women have barely begun the process of learning about themselves, but they are at a turning point in their lives, a time when they will soon be expected to take a place in a society that endorses gender specific roles. Unlike socially and publicly established men like Gouvernail and Sepincourt, the men in this second group of stories have just begun or have not yet begun to define themselves in terms of a social identity or public image. In fact, their epiphanies come at particularly decisive moments because they are on the verge of making critical decisions around life choices. If not for such moments, Chopin implies, they may have acquiesced to masculine norms, as have the conventional husbands in the other group of stories, or have created a public image that ignored or repressed psychological needs, as have Gouvernail and Sepincourt. Of course, the women awakened by such intimate experiences are also approaching a decisive period in their lives, a time when they will have to decide on a mate and attempt to assert some influence on the kind of marriage they will have. Similar narrative patterns emerge among the stories in the two groups. For example, in these stories about young uninitiated people, unconventionality again stimulates epiphanies; however, unconventionality in women instinctively rebelling against feminine social norms, rather than unconventionality in men, is at the center of such experiences.

Another common narrative pattern Chopin uses is contrasting male types as a device with which to comment on masculine norms in the Creole culture. In such stories of young adulthood, two men who are rivals for the hand of an unawakened woman are opposites, both temperamentally and socially. In “A No-Account Creole,” for example, Placide Santien is in some ways a younger version of Athenaise's autocratic husband, Cazeau. He has never questioned his right as a man in this plantation culture to dominate Euphrasie, the daughter of the manager of his family's plantation and the girl he has loved since childhood. Both he and his community assume she will submit to his will and agree to marry him. And Euphrasie herself has not really questioned that assumption. Unambitious and irresponsible, Placide is the no account Creole of the title of the story and the perfect foil to Euphrasie's other suitor, the ambitious, goal-oriented Wallace Offdean. Indulged by both his community and his family, Placide has yet to assume the responsibility of restoring the family plantation. In contrast, his rival for Euphrasie's hand, the Anglophile, Wallace Offdean, aspires to become an enlightened New Orleans businessman. Before his awakening, he reminds the reader of the repressed Gouvernail in that both are preoccupied with their public image, with a well-ordered life that balances respectability with progressive ideas. Offdean has had the predictable experiences of an intelligent young man of his social class and now, with his inheritance in hand, smugly envisions for himself a well-planned life, one that avoids “the maelstroms of sordid work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man may be said alternately to exist” (81). His objective is to model himself on the image of the emerging nineteenth-century businessman striving for success, unsullied by the vulgarities of traditional mercantilism. At least that was his life's goal, until he is sent to appraise the Santien plantation and meets Euphrasie.

One variation on the narrative pattern of discovery and self-discovery in this story is that the psycho-sexual awakening necessitates a departure from the gender-specific roles of the Creole culture. During Offdean's first conversation with Euphrasie, he wonders why he is bothering to discuss the property with “a mere girl”; but, after she joins him on his daily excursions to appraise the land, he gains respect for her knowledge of the plantation and for her practical intelligence. Of course, the land inspection is a cover for their awakening passion, though neither is able to acknowledge or express that love until a near violent confrontation between Placide and Offdean over Euphrasie forces the three to make decisions. Euphrasie is compelled to examine what her community approves of, marriage to her old childhood friend, Placide. She comes to understand that marriage to Placide would put an end to what she has come to desire—applying her newly discovered interest and talent in managing land to make the decaying Santien plantation productive again. For his part, Offdean makes the decision to put aside his carefully planned future as an enlightened urban businessman. Instead, he wants to share Euphrasie's life and her dream to rebuild the Santien plantation. Theirs surely will be a non-traditional marriage with Euphrasie actively involved in running the plantation side by side with her husband. Even Placide, like Cazeau in “Athenaise,” has an awakening. When Placide relinquishes his claim on Euphrasie, it is because he finds he must reject the Creole man's sense of ownership and entitlement in relation to a woman. Creole male pride must give way to a sense of honor and respect. In this story both men and the woman gain a better understanding of what it is about the gender norms of their culture they cannot accept.

In at least two of these stories focussing on awakenings in young men, an epiphanie moment inspires a rejection of the notions of status and materialism that define masculine success for Creole men like Leonce Pontellier in The Awakening. When Telesphore in “A Night in Acadie” begins to think about acquiring a wife, he thinks in terms of one who will be the perfect ornament for his home, combining all of the virtues of the stereotypical Creole belle. She will be charming, beautiful and fair-skinned with no hint of racial impurities. She will also bring some wealth to the marriage as well as be an energetic homemaker who will enhance Telesphore's social status in the community. It is no wonder that, before his chance meeting with Zaida, he has been unable to settle on the right woman to be his wife. It is said of Telesphore that he has spent much of his young life trying to be the opposite of his disorderly, lazy, and socially disreputable uncle some had thought the young man resembled. Telesphore, as a consequence, has been cautious and indecisive, preoccupied with external appearance and not at all aware of personal needs. “A Night in Acadie” is similar to “A No-Account Creole” in that it follows the narrative pattern of two young men who are opposites coming together in a confrontation over a woman. In fact, the drunken, disheveled Andre Pascal probably reminds Telesphore of his uncle. The outcome of the physical confrontation between the two men is that Telesphore recognizes his attraction to Zaida and to the spontaneity and individualism she represents. Here Chopin offers a variation on the theme of the importance of deciding wisely on a mate. “A No-Account Creole” ends with the prospects of a marriage that will promote self-fulfillment for both husband and wife because it will be a joint partnership that will transcend the nineteenth-century ideology of the separate spheres. “A Night in Acadie” is more concerned with the choice of a mate as marking a departure from the conventional formula for masculine success and respectability in Creole Louisiana.

Parallels with other stories are easy to find. The young Cajun farmer, Telesphore, certainly differs from Offdean, the urban intellectual. Still, in his naive quest for the perfect wife, Telesphore reminds one of Offdean's quest for the perfectly balanced life. Telesphore's plans to establish himself as a successful and respectable farmer and head of a household are as uninformed psychologically as Offdean's career plans before meeting Euphrasie. In addition, Zaida reminds the reader of the rebellious Athenaise. Both defy their culture's social norms for women. Zaida has openly defied her parents by making plans to meet and marry Andre secretly under the pretext of attending a dance. She would seem to be an even more inappropriate choice for Telesphore, given his ambitions, than Euphrasie for Wallace Offdean. Yet, everything about Zaida, her free and easy walk, her excited and excitable nature, her emotional frankness and unconventional behavior, her bold rebellion from parental rule, appeals to Telesphore as he begins to be less inhibited under the influence of his awakened passion for her. As a catalyst for a man's awakening, she has a similar effect on Telesphore that Athenaise has on Gouvernail. In fact, before his awakening, Telesphore seemed destined to have the kind of unreflective life of conventional-minded men in the plantation culture such as Gustave Baroda in “A Respectable Woman.”

In at least one of these stories grouped around young unawakened men and women, a man's awakening reflects critically not only on cultural norms defining masculinity and the materialistic values of status in the male world of work, but also on the Creole plantation hegemony itself. In “Azelie,” before his encounter with Azelie, ‘Polyte accepted without question the social and economic hierarchy of the plantation culture. His daily life revolved around the responsibilities of his work—running the plantation store. He never speculated that an impoverished, displaced family like Azelie's may not accept the social and moral codes that support the foundation for the plantation economy. Azelie certainly threatens “the calm orderliness of ‘Polyte's existence” (Dyer, “Sleeping Bruties” 72), as Euphrasie has shaken Offdean's identity as an urban businessman and Zaida has shaken Telesphore's as a successful farmer. It is not only ‘Polyte's understanding of his social identity as an assistant manager on a plantation that she threatens, but also his smug identification with the hegemony of the plantation culture in general. Azelie's defiance of the plantation culture forces ‘Polyte to examine the plantation world he has accepted. From her he learns much about the injustices of the system he has helped to perpetuate and re-examines his own values. His leaving the plantation to join Azelie and her family on Lile River represents not only an insight into his own personal needs but also an expansion of his social and moral consciousness. Unlike the two respectable men in the story, the morally unconventional Azelie actively rejects traditional principles of justice and morality as well as the values of the patriarchal southern plantation. She pays ‘Polyte for services rendered by stoically tolerating his caresses; but, when he asks her to stay behind with him when her family must leave, she chooses an uncertain future with her family over the security and respectability he could give her. ‘Polyte's decision to leave the plantation and join Azelie and her family on Lile River represents not only his acceptance of the life of the instincts and passions, but also his rejection of the emptiness of his morally conventional and materially secure world.

Awakenings in men in Chopin's Creole stories inspire them to reflect on their position in this highly patriarchal and hierarchical society, particularly to consider whether they should move toward an acceptance of values more consistent with their own psychic and social vision than those their culture validates. The vision that emerges not only encompasses the liberation of a buried self and a departure from gender norms and conventional social values, but also hints at the wisdom of a more androgynous union between a man and a woman than the nineteenth-century ideology of the separate spheres encouraged. Certainly, some awakened men in these stories become less preoccupied with order, rationality, control, and authority; and awakened women become less dependent, submissive, and self-abnegating. Like her awakened women, Chopin's awakened men cannot always effect a permanent change in their lives; but their moments of self-revelation are, nevertheless, important because they provide a vision not only of a more integrated, fuller life for a man but also of a union between a man and a woman which is freer of the traditional gender roles. Chopin scholarship has understandably concentrated on the awakening of her women, but the awakening of her men also deserves attention. In Chopin's vision of a progressive society, both men and women must strive for autonomy.

Works Cited

Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana SUP, 1969. Dyer, Joyce. “Kate Chopin's Sleeping Bruties.” The Markham R 10 (1980 Fall-1981 Winter): 10-15.

Fluck, Winfried. “Tentative Transgressions: Kate Chopin's Fiction as a Mode of Symbolic Action.” SAF 10.2 (1982): 151-71.

Walker, Nancy. “Feminist or Naturalist: The Social Context of Kate Chopin's The Awakening.” SoQ. 17.2 (1979): 95-103.