SOURCE: Gunning, Sandra. “Kate Chopin's Local Color Fiction and the Politics of White Supremacy.” Arizona Quarterly 52, no. 3 (autumn 1995): 61-86.

[In the following essay, Gunning examines issues of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and male aggression in “In Sabine,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” and “A No-Account Creole.”]

In Kate Chopin's 1894 local color story “A No-Account Creole,” Euphrasie Manton charts a course to economic and romantic happiness with Wallace Offdean, the New Orleans businessman whose company holds the mortgage on a local plantation in Manton's native Natchitoches parish. But while Chopin seemed to have originally conceived her story around the life of a woman, the plot centers squarely on a man's struggle with destiny and (dis)empowerment, since Euphrasie's discarded Creole lover, the plantation's former owner, Placide Santien, produces much of the story's emotional force. Indeed Placide holds the story hostage when, gun in hand, he sets out to murder the Yankeefied Offdean for winning both his family's land as well as his childhood sweetheart.¹ Bloodshed is narrowly averted when, as an ultimate demonstration that no one but a Creole knows “how to love,” Placide decides to free Euphrasie from all romantic obligations (Collected Works [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin] 101).

Chopin's story might well function as simply a tribute to the ideal of self-sacrifice, were it not for the fact that Placide's initial impulse toward murder is distinctly tied through antebellum traditions of Southern honor to a legacy of white violence produced and nurtured by the region's defining history of slavery. Evoking the complex past that inevitably shapes the natures and actions of the story's characters, the black laundress La Chatte comments that as a slave on the Santien plantation she too had stared down the barrel of Placide's gun if she didn't move quickly enough to fix the young man a meal; her hints of even more horrendous deeds committed by the Santien patriarch, Jules, suggests a family history of destructive masculine action that continues to disrupt the lives of blacks and whites within the turn-of-the-century context of progressivism and reconciliation that frames Euphrasie's story.

Ironically, such figures as La Chatte call to mind a disenfranchised black population whose presence and collective memory speak both to the historical brutality of black-white relations under slavery, as well as the dual hope and disappointment fostered by Reconstruction and the years beyond. However, in “A No-Account Creole” Chopin has no interest in confronting interracial politics: the story's sympathetic focus seems to leave room only for Placide as the real victim of post-Civil War social upheaval, and only for Euphrasie and Offdean as the inheritors of a New South full of potential for New Women and their men. Yet through its concern for the impact of history on the lives of its white characters, Chopin's “A No-Account Creole” articulates a distinct preoccupation with white adjustment in the wake of black Emancipation, with the problem of internal ethnic and class divisions, and with the shift from rural to urban, from Southern to Northern bases of power. And it is precisely at the moments when Kate Chopin's stories about men and women engage the problems of particular racially- and regionally-bound identities that ideologies of white supremacy surface not just as a subject for her social commentary, but indeed, as a structuring discourse in her own fiction. Ranging anywhere from the benign paternalism of Henry W. Grady's orderly, segregated New South, to the racial radicalism of politician Benjamin Tillman and novelist Thomas Dixon, white supremacists most often articulated an anxiety over Anglo-America's perceived loss of economic and political power in the after-math of Emancipation and Reconstruction, often at the very historical moment when African Americans themselves were struggling with the effects of widespread discrimination in the form of segregation, lynch law, and voter intimidation.² Clearly Chopin was no Thomas Dixon, but as has been said of Mark Twain in another context, the “force” of her fiction rests not “in the author's detached judgment against the world depicted, but in [her] … participation in such a world” (Rogin 74).

In Chopin's story, Placide's anxiety of failure engages with but is not analogous to the “failure” of blacks to move from slavery to freedom. Rather, the historical and political isolation suffered by white characters such as Placide both recalls and denies the isolation imposed on American blacks in the post-Reconstruction. If Placide is celebrated on white ethnic terms as a romantic Creole lover, his final disqualification as an overly passionate suitor and irresponsible landowner echoes both the sexual criminalization of black men as Black Beasts under the regime of late nineteenth-century white supremacy, and their disenfranchisement as post-Civil War citizens. Placide's story references that of countless black men in the South in that both he and his creed must be evacuated to make room for a presumably more acceptable type of lover and landowner in the New South. Thus Chopin's structuring of white male heroism evokes the tragedy of black life, only to appropriate that tragedy to consolidate rather than critique late nineteenth-century notions of Southern white privilege, in the midst of a story about the would-be decline of the old order.³ And while Placide is presented as an anachronism, as citizens of the New South Euphrasie and Offdean constitute a partnership of rural ambition and urban capital that is just as dependent on the subjugation of black workers for economic survival as Placide's Old South had been.

In delineating the nature and needs of male and female whites in her story, Kate Chopin engages with turn-of-the-century white-supremacist ideologies that drew their popularity from an urgent need to reconfigure the social, political, and economic landscape after national and regional moves from black slavery to freedom. Thus, consistent with its production in the 1890s, the multifarious themes of “A No-Account Creole” (the rise of the New Woman; adjustments to be made to an era of black wage labor) transform the story into a veritable touchstone for cultural and political change in late nineteenth-century America. In particular “A No-Account Creole,” and as I will be arguing in this essay a number of Chopin's other local color fictions, operate against the backdrop of increasingly powerful racial ideologies which structured prescriptive social roles for whites as well as blacks.

Turn-of-the-century literary returns to the antebellum world were of course generally staged in plantation and to a large extent in local color fiction, where displaced white Southerners become ubiquitous fixtures in works such as Grace King's Monsieur Motte (1888), Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia (1887) and Joel Chandler Harris' Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887) and his semi-autobiographical On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures During the War (1892). Chopin's work drew freely on both the patterns of historical recall signified by plantation fiction, as well as the delineation of quaint types characterized by local color. But if writers such as King, Page, and Harris paid romantic tribute to tragic but picturesque stereotypes of Old South cavaliers and their belles on the one hand, they also paved the way on the other for a newer stereotype of the post-Reconstruction white male hero, a figure whose fight was for racial purity and familial protection in the wake of black freedom, and who sought to undermine any possibility of a demeaning social equality between blacks and whites. Produced at the very moment of the seeming chaos of anti-black violence, this stereotype of white male heroism would be dramatically articulated throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Reconstruction novels such as Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898), later in Thomas Dixon's Klan novels The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905). The stereotype of a new racial manhood was finally reaffirmed for even wider audiences when filmmaker D. W. Griffith decided to adapt Dixon's novels for the early Hollywood blockbuster Birth of a Nation (1915).

This fantasy of a white manhood dedicated to the salvation of the race sparked an alternate focus on white female body, which had (and still has) immense repercussions for African Americans. As Martha Hodes has described, after the Civil War the need to guard white woman's virtue and thus ensure the racial integrity of her white offspring in turn justified and sustained a long history of supposedly defensive white violence against black men, who it was assumed, were naturally driven to rape once the restraints of slavery had been thrown off. This myth of the black rapist (the so-called terror of the Black Beast) originated from a line of white supremacist argument which cast African-American political struggle increasingly as a social rape of both the white woman (social equality) and the white nation (equal rights): hence the traditional rationale behind lynching as a necessary act of violence to preserve the nation through the defense of the purity of white womanhood. White women were thus objectified as the mediating moment in an interracial homosocial contest between black and white men, and thus denied existence as sexual or political agents. Though, as Wilbur Cash has argued, “the actual danger of the Southern white woman being violated by the negro … was much less … than the chance that she would be struck by lightning” (115), the belief in black male desire for white women served to contain the threat of white female sexuality and support what Jacqueline Dowd Hall terms as “the comforting fiction that at least in relation to black men, white women were always objects and never agents of sexual desire” (336-37). Ironically, the fear of the black rapist proved so strong, that some early feminists such as Georgia's Rebecca Latimer Felton urged white men of the South to “lynch a thousand times a week if necessary” (qt. Williamson 128). Clearly more disturbed than Felton by the violence of lynching itself, the Women's Christian Temperance Union president Frances Willard, as well as social worker Jane Addams would eventually come out publicly against the practice. However, both believed, in Willard's words, that “the safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their roof-trees” (qt. Wells 152).⁴

Though her own attitude toward white supremacy, lynching, and the myth of the black rapist has never been recorded, Kate Chopin's encounter with slavery, Southern Reconstruction, and white supremacy was ensured initially through her own St. Louis, Missouri, roots in a slave-holding family that had staunchly supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, then later through her marriage to Louisiana resident Oscar Chopin. Settling with her husband in the 1870s first in New Orleans, then in the Chopin family home of Cloutierville, Natchitoches Parish, Chopin maintained close ties with her Louisiana in-laws, and even after she returned to St. Louis following Oscar's death in the 1880s, she still chose to set most of her local color fiction in this region. Throughout the period of Chopin's association with Louisiana, the state (and indeed the parish of Natchitoches itself) was notorious for white racial violence and electoral corruption. By 1898 blacks were disenfranchised with the inclusion of the “grandfather” clause in the state constitution, and in 1900 New Orleans was the site of one of the most infamous race riots in American history, where a bloody white rampage against the city's black population lasted for four days.⁵

In 1874 the realities of white supremacist violence infiltrated Kate Chopin's own household when, enlisting in the paramilitary Crescent City White League of New Orleans, Oscar Chopin joined in the unsuccessful storming of the Republican City Hall. Though the attack left twenty dead and a hundred wounded, white city residents were not in the least perturbed by the bloodshed, viewing the attack as a stand for sectional independence. Not surprisingly then, while the legitimate Republican government was eventually restored through federal intervention, the rioters—including Oscar Chopin—were never brought to trial.⁶ Almost at the same historical moment in Cloutierville, a young lawyer named Phanor Breazeale was enthusiastically engaged with local white supremacists in a freewheeling campaign of election fraud and murder, ambushing and then lynching “troublesome” blacks who resisted white supremacist intimidation (Miscellany [A Kate Chopin Miscellany] 157-56). Breazeale eventually married Oscar Chopin's sister, and in later years he served as a friend and confidant to Kate Chopin, entertaining her with tales of his Reconstruction-era activities. According to some it was Breazeale who told Chopin the story which later became The Awakening, and he may have also served as a model for attractive but ungovernable characters like Placide Santien (Toth 323-24, 177).

In such a formative context Chopin's fiction engages with everpresent class, sectional, and ethnic tensions that lay below the surface of white supremacists' stereotypes of monolithic white national identities. The myth of a heroic white male response to the Black Beast suggested solidarity based on race sympathy and a natural communal outrage at the rape of white womanhood/nationhood: as Thomas Dixon put it, “in a moment the white race … [would be] fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate, and revenge. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the banker and the blacksmith, the great and the small, they … [would all be] one now” (The Leopard's Spots 372). If in Dixon's fiction race instinct holds at bay normally disruptive class and sectional differences, in Chopin's stories such differences surface obliquely, mediated through localized representations of domestic disputes and rural community clashes among whites with differing class, regional, and ethnic affiliations (upper-class French Creoles still living on the land, urban New Orleans residents, lower-class Cajuns, “American” whites). However, while Chopin's fiction might question the efficacy of violence and restrictive white racial identities as an appropriate response to social change, she does not necessarily support black civil rights or oppose white racism; rather, she sees such violence and identity restrictions as ultimately detrimental to white communal recovery.⁷

CLASS, RACE, ETHNICITY, AND MALE AGGRESSION IN CHOPIN'S FICTION

Kate Chopin's local color stories draw on a regular cast of invented characters who inhabit the region in which her Cloutierville home was located. In particular Chopin uses the fictional Santien family as a means of creating a sustained portrait of Creole aristocracy in crisis.⁸ The first part of my discussion will focus on two of Chopin's texts about the Santiens, namely her first novel, At Fault (1890), and the short story “In Sabine” (1893), with an eye to “the considerable amount of social and historical density” these works provide (Ringe 26), in order to track Chopin's staging of the contradictions around class, white male aggression, and idealization of white masculinity that emerge after the Civil War.

In Chopin's fictional Creole community, the once-wealthy Santiens have fallen on hard times: without free black labor to cultivate their thousand acres they face economic impotence in the altered conditions of the South. After the death of patriarch Jules and the retreat of Madam Santien to France, the sons Hector, Placide, and Grégoire fall into confusion. As Grégoire tells the story in At Fault, their recovery is hopeless: “Hec, he took charge the fir' year an' run it in debt. Placide an' me did'n' have no betta luck the nax' year. Then the creditors come up from New Orleans an' took holt. That' the time I packed my duds an' lef” (Collected Works 751). With their land gone the family referred to in “A No-Account Creole” as “the best blood in the country” has disintegrated: Hector chooses to live among the low-life of New Orleans, and Placide earns the nickname of “a no-account Creole” because of his desultory attitude toward work (Collected Works 84). Only young Grégoire seeks alliances with a postwar community when he goes to help out on the thriving plantation Place-du-Bois, owned by his young, recently widowed aunt Thérèse Lafirme in At Fault.

At Fault adheres to the standard plot of the North/South reunion romance between Thérèse, the enlightened despot of Place-du-Bois, and the St. Louis businessman David Hosmer: since Hosmer runs a timber mill on Thérèse's estate, their relationship signifies the merger of Southern agricultural power with Northern commercial and business interests. The subplot of racial discontent and violence, however, belongs on the one hand to Grégoire Santien and on the other to the mixed-blood mill worker Joçint. The tension between antebellum white ideals and the post-emancipation threat of “color” comes when Grégoire guns down Joçint after he surprises him in the act of setting fire to Hosmer's mill. While Chopin's condemnation of Grégoire's murderous impulse is unmistakable, her narrative allows no sympathy for the victim. Donald Ringe has suggested that Chopin creates parallel figures in Grégoire and Joçint, figures whose “inner natures simply will not permit” assimilation into the postwar South (29). However, anachronism or not, as a Creole Grégoire is allowed a certain heroic measure. Joçint on the other hand—rude, animalistic, and “extremely treacherous” (Collected Works 757) as a direct consequence of his mixed blood—represents a version of the Black Beast stereotype of pro-lynching fiction; as the unruly worker turned saboteur who refuses to adhere to the new order, Joçint and not Grégoire stands as the final obstacle to national progress, and he becomes the primary embodiment of evil in the novel's Southern white community, a fact which demands his extermination.⁹ Consequently, as an act of salvation for the New South, Grégoire's murder of Joçint “is seen as less threatening and forgiven more easily by the whole community” (Taylor 170). Grégoire's act of racial aggression creates exactly the same effects that the real-life lynching, Klan rides, and race riots engaged in by Chopin's husband and Phanor Breazeale were supposed to achieve: the black workers who have been pilfering from the Lafirme plantation regard the show of white power with awe, and are suitably respectful of traditional racial hierarchies. Thus Chopin's lack of complete condemnation of Grégoire suggests that though she may not approve of white violence, she respects its efficacy.

While Chopin's characterization of Joçint is consistent with aspects of white supremacist ideology, she disrupts at least some of the traditional racial assumptions around the Black Beast in order to re-vision gender and race politics among the white characters. For one thing, the subplot repudiates the specific notion of the black as rapist, since Joçint is never a sexual threat to Thérèse. While the bloodshed in At Fault mirrors that of the real-life lynching of blacks, Chopin here implies in part that violence occurs, as even Thomas Dixon himself would later have to acknowledge, “when the Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man” (“Booker T. Washington” 2). Thus the conflict between Joçint and his white employers is figured as primarily a clash of racially determined goals over the use of land and labor, rather than the rape and possession of the white female body. This presentation fractures the rhetoric of white supremacy that identifies the white female body with the white nation. As a white woman who does not rely on the necessary protection of white men, Thérèse is self-sufficient, independent, and willing to cultivate a love for the married Hosmer, qualities which mark her as the kind of dangerous woman the Black Beast stereotype was meant to corral.

The reformulation of Thérèse's role in the white South's social and political future articulates a new rhetoric of race, gender, and power which is further exemplified in the contrasts between Grégoire and Thérèse as managers of the land and its black labor force. As an example of the new order of white female management, Thérèse Lafirme handles her intractable black workers with a disciplined yet kindly hand, replacing the male violence of slavery with her Southern knowledge of the “darky” character.¹⁰ Though the novel begins after the Civil War and affords us little information about her life as a wife and slave mistress, Thérèse Lafirme's ability to successfully weather changing economic and social conditions speaks to Chopin's revision of the myth of the Southern belle. Specifically, Chopin replaces this myth with the idea of Southern woman as a white man's equal in leadership and business acumen. The roots of such a revision had taken hold during the Civil War when white plantation mistresses had been left to manage the slaves and land when their men joined the Confederate army. Through Thérèse, Chopin argues for a trend identified by her contemporary Wilbur Fisk Tillett: “a woman is respected and honored in the South for earning her own living, and would lose respect if, as an able-bodied woman, she settled herself as a burden on a brother, or even on a father” (“Southern Womanhood” 12).¹¹

Significantly, Chopin will challenge the status quo only enough to liberate her white heroines, while embracing at the same time a structuring of race relations to consolidate their power. Rather than functioning as the embodiment of the besieged nation, Chopin's heroine thus becomes a feminized literalization of Grady's New South community spirit, a community which, when dealing with racial inferiors relies not on “the cowardly menace of mask or shot-gun, but [on] the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility, massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation of its liberty” (The Race Problem 546). Chopin's portrayal of Grégoire confirms Grady's admission that even “under this fair seeming there is disorder and violence” (The Race Problem 542), but Chopin also has Thérèse signify an alternate reality that is respectful of traditional racial codes and racial balances of power, without losing sight of the Southern white need for controlling black labor. As Grady himself might suggest, Thérèse Lafirme's world, at least for ex-slaves, “is simply the old South under new conditions” (The New South 146).

If Grégoire functions as a means of demarcating the space for the existence of a kind of Southern “New Woman,” he also exists to help refigure the significance of white violence. As a throwback to the antebellum South, Grégoire displaces contemporary white anxiety over lynching. No matter what their position on lynching and the myth of black rape, many whites were horrified at the idea of white supremacist violence, precisely because, as Emory professor Andrew Sledd argued, the “heroes” of a lynch mob in actuality were often “coarse, … beastly, and drunk, mad with the terrible blood lust that wild beasts know, … hunting a human prey” (68). In contrast to this view, the violence displayed by the aristocratic Grégoire's is depicted as tragic rather than merely destructive, and he is doubly romanticized as a gentleman and the passionate suitor of Hosmer's sister Melicent. As she does with Placide, Chopin specifically accounts for Grégoire's predilection for violent racial control by linking his behavior to antebellum male models: he is fascinated by the memory of McFarlane, the first owner of Place-du-Bois, whose exercise of complete control over the lives of his slaves made him “the meanest w'ite man thet ever lived”; he “can't res' in his grave fur the niggas he's killed” (Collected Works 751).¹² Thus Grégoire's violence has no roots in the present political or domestic world of Place-du-Bois, and the racial and economic management of the South engineered by Thérèse and Hosmer is vindicated from its own historical submersion within a world of racial turmoil. Their system is based on a subjugation of black labor, but their dominance is masked behind the figure of Grégoire; white racial violence is accounted for as simply a declining problem of Creole arrogance out-of-bounds, not a longstanding white antipathy to black economic and political rivalry that would extend into the twentieth century. So, the story implies, violence will disappear upon Grégoire's removal, rather than with a reform of black and white power relations.

In keeping with the need to distance her vision of the postwar South from the reality of lynching and to secure racial boundaries, Chopin uses Grégoire's behavior to repudiate violence as a practice which might put whites in the position of imitating (and thus embodying) the moral deficiency of the racial Other. As an “enlightened” intersectional coalition of white characters, Thérèse, David, and his sister Melicent Hosmer are disturbed by the fact that Grégoire does not “understand [why] … he should receive any thing but praise for having rid the community of so offensive and dangerous a personage as Joçint,” and collectively they register an emotional shock at his complete “blind[ness] to the moral aspect of his deed” (Collected Works 824). The Northern characters exhibit a more extreme response. Indeed, Hosmer's inward abhorrence of the murder situates Grégoire in the same role of destructive animal inhabited by Joçint:

Heredity and pathology had to be considered in relation with the slayer's character. … [Hosmer] was conscious of an inward repulsion which this action of Grégoire's awakened in him,—much the same as a feeling of disgust for an animal whose instinct drives it to the doing of violent deeds,—yet he made no difference in his manner towards him.

(Collected Works 824)

In an outward show of racial solidarity with Thérèse's nephew, Hosmer is silent before his black workers, but his private characterization of Grégoire draws again on the rhetoric of heredity and eugenics, and registers a growing fear that violence achieves only the destruction of white morality.

As a potential mate for Grégoire, Melicent Hosmer responds to the young man with a sort of social segregation that mirrors general white hysteria over physical contact with black men. Immediately she makes plans to leave Place-du-Bois and berates Thérèse for tolerating Grégoire's presence after the murder:

“I don't understand you at all, Mrs. Lafirme. Think what he's done; murdered a defenseless man! How can you have him near you—seated at your table? I don't know what nerves you have in your bodies, you and David. … Never! If he were dying I wouldn't go near him.”

(Collected Works 828)

Melicent is criticized throughout the novel for her dislike of black servants and for her harsh judgment of Southerners, yet her disciplined enforcement of proper separation between races and types stands in contrast to Grégoire's later undisciplined attempts at integration. Angered by Melicent and Thérèse's condemnation of Joçint's murder, Grégoire becomes a parody of the Northern integrationist when at gunpoint he forces his fellow townsmen to drink with blacks. This chaotic, last-ditch attempt to reaffirm his power as an aristocrat only results in the disruption of the community's moral and racial harmony, since whites, angered at this social imposition, begin to threaten the innocent black men Grégoire has ordered into the bar. As the black workers remark “Grégoir gwine be Grégoir tell he die” (Collected Works 833), leaving Thérèse's only option as the expulsion of her nephew from Place-du-Bois.

Still, it is significant that though Grégoire must be exiled, he undergoes an apotheosis in the tradition of Thomas Nelson Page's plantation fiction heroes. When Thérèse learns that Grégoire has been killed in a Texas barroom brawl, all is forgotten as she and her workers unite in their grief and respect for his memory—even the black ferryman Nathan, “who had been one day felled to earth by a crowbar in Grégoire's hand, [and] had come himself to look at that deed as not altogether blamable in light of the provocation that had called it forth” (Collected Works 853). This posthumous reclamation of the Creole as a hero makes sense given that Chopin does not criticize Grégoire's racial attitude, but only his methods of racial control. Joçint is reprehensible because as a mixed-blood figure he is driven to impulsive destruction; Grégoire is reprehensible because his acts begin to imitate the violence, moral vacuity, and anti-progressivism of nonwhites. In their emotional restraint, their benevolent paternalism to blacks, their civilized acknowledgment of social rules, and their stand for modernization, Hosmer and Thérèse together represent for Chopin an alternative route for white development in the context of North-South social and economic alliances, even as they look respectfully back to the region's previous golden age.

In At Fault Chopin deconstructs white supremacy's myth of the black rapist just enough to free her white female characters from restrictive social roles, and her embrace of the entitlement offered by a validation of whiteness is exemplified in her story “In Sabine” where, like many of her contemporaries, Chopin turns from the planter class to lower-class whites for a portrait of real white evil. “In Sabine” traces Grégoire's doings from the time he leaves Place-du-Bois until his fatal arrival in Texas; specifically, the story is less concerned with articulating Creole shortcomings than with defining the class-bound dimension of idealized whiteness. “In Sabine” also functions as a commentary on ethnic division among whites themselves, specifically Americans and Creoles in the context of an increased anxiety over racial purity after emancipation.

In search of shelter near the Louisiana border in Sabine Parish, Grégoire encounters Bud Aiken, the “disreputable so-called ‘Texan’” (Collected Works 326) who habitually abuses his Cajun wife, 'Tite Reine. In the context of his rejection by Thérèse and Melicent, Grégoire is mindful of the need to control his behavior in the presence of women and so chooses not to kill Aiken; instead Grégoire merely distracts him with a long poker game and liberal supplies of alcohol. Exhausted from hours of carousing, Aiken falls into a deep, drunken sleep, allowing Grégoire to put 'Tite Reine on a horse headed back to her family in Natchitoches Parish.

While Grégoire represents for Chopin the aristocratic white man made rigid by his adherence to past values, the alien class and ethnic origins that mark Bud Aiken as malevolent afford the Creole Grégoire a certain absolution in the aftermath of Joçint's murder. As the enemy of the kind of refinement symbolized by Thérèse's regime, Aiken treats Reine like a black slave, sending her “out into the field to pick cotton with old Uncle Mortimer” (Collected Works 331), the neighboring black sharecropper. Such an attempt to appropriate the lifestyle of a wealthy antebellum planter marks Aiken as a social upstart, while his enslavement of 'Tite Reine resembles the corruption of the kinds of social relations epitomized at Place-du-Bois. 'Tite Reine's degradation in Aiken's household is rendered complete when, as she stares at Grégoire from the shock of seeing a familiar face from home, Aiken insults her racially: “‘Well, is that all you got to say to my frien' Mr. Sanchun? That's the way with them Cajuns, … ain't got sense enough to know a white man when they see one’” (Collected Works 327). Aiken's racial humiliation of 'Tite Reine, echoed in her literal enslavement, evokes the familiar nineteenth-century feminist alignment of helpless white femininity with disenfranchised blackness. Indeed, Reine suspects that Aiken really wants her not as a wife but as a slave concubine:

“sometime' he plague me mos' crazy; he tell me 't ent no preacher, it's a Texas drummer w'at marry him an' me; an' w'en I don' know w'at way to turn no mo', he say no, it's a Meth'dis' archbishop, an' keep on laughin' 'bout me, an' I don' know w'at the truth!”

(Collected Works 330)

Anna Shannon Elfenbein suggests that 'Tite Reine's tale of abuse is tantamount to a “denial [on Chopin's part] of the chivalrous claims of white men and their rationalization of lynch law as a means of dealing with the brute ‘nigger’,” demonstrating that “Chopin clearly anticipates the dawning racial awareness of white women” who would later agitate against lynching (119). This idea would seem to hold out with respect to the actions of the story's only black character: as Reine tells the story, Bud “‘would 'a' choke' me to death one day w'en he was drunk, if Unc' Mort'mer had n' make 'im lef go—with his axe ov' his head’” (Collected Works 329-30). This scene of a black raising an ax against a white man might ordinarily result in a lynching, and yet Chopin revises the usual white construction of black violence, not to point to ex-slaves' capacity for heroism but rather to their imagined faithfulness to good whites (a fallback here on particular plantation and local color fiction stereotypes). Mortimer is presented as asexual, a move which further draws on the plantation fiction stereotype of black men in order to underscore Aiken's capacity for lawless sexual desire. And since 'Tite Reine is abused by one white man only to be delivered by another in the form of Grégoire, her story functions less to revise the myth of the Black Beast for the benefit of African Americans, than to protect traditional Cajun and Creole ethnic categories.¹³

Since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 tensions between Creoles and Americans had run high, a fact replicated in Chopin's designation of Aiken as the alien villain. According to historian Joseph G. Tregle, such tensions were further heightened after the Civil War because black emancipation brought (at least for a time) de jure black equality: “In the midst of this convulsion the Creole was caught up not simply in a general Southern explosion of antiblack fanaticism, but as well in a peculiar complication which once again set him apart.” As Tregle suggests:

Whereas once the danger of confronting them had been humiliating loss of Gallic identity to a devouring Anglo-Saxon homogenization, now it was the infinitely more horrible possibility of being consigned to debased status in the “inferior” race, identified as half-brother to the black, a sort of mixed breed stripped of blood pride as well as of any claim to social or political preferment. … In such a manner was the cardinal tenet of the now familiar myth born: for those so threatened, henceforth to be Creole was to be white.

(173)

Traditionally Cajuns would have been “rigorously excluded [from the Creole world] having arrived in the colony not straight from the Continent but by way of Canada”; yet in spite of 'Tite Reine's ethnic origins, because Chopin decries the sexual enslavement and “negroization” of her heroine she proves the latter's value as a white woman, and thus argues the case for her salvation.¹⁴ Thus, the urgency to rescue the Cajun 'Tite Reine is also the urgency to open up a space for the articulation of new white American ethnicities chafing under restrictive definitions of Anglo-Saxonism, without altering the racial designation of blackness as undesirable. What will make Grégoire Aiken's social and ethnic superior, what will affirm his racial and moral purity, is both his designation of 'Tite Reine as white (and therefore worthy of his respect for her), and his refusal to act on his sexual desire. Consequently Grégoire becomes the perfect model of the romantic white lover:

Grégoire loved women. He liked their nearness, their atmosphere; the tones of their voices and the things they said; their ways of moving and turning about; the brushing of their garments when they passed him by pleased him. He was fleeing now from the pain that a woman had inflicted upon him. … The sight of 'Tite Reine's distress now moved him painfully.

(Collected Works 329)

The potential critique of “In Sabine” might have been devastating: instead of the homosocial black/white male struggle over the white female body, Chopin shifts to an all-white male context which refocuses anxiety over sexuality and power within the terms of an intra-racial struggle. And since Reine's final savior is in fact the white Grégoire and not the black Mortimer, Chopin both opens and then forecloses a more extended (and dangerous) political discussion of race, masculinity, and desire.

WHITE WOMEN AND METAPHORS OF BLACK (FE)MALE SEXUALITY

At Fault and “In Sabine” reference post-Reconstruction fantasies of the Black Beast and the white female/nation as victim, without relinquishing the impulse toward white self-protection, a move which is reiterated again and again, even in Chopin's more daring stories about female sexuality. And in works such as “A Lady of Bayou St. John” (1893) and its companion, “La Belle Zoraïde” (1894), Chopin's critique of the restrictive linkage between white female bodies and the South depends upon the availability of an objectified black sexuality as part of a vocabulary of white desire. Not surprisingly, her evocation of black sexuality is heavily regulated through the use of the mulatta, the ubiquitous Western figuration for interracial sex. What results is a teasing play on miscegenation which excites and therefore challenges white sexual self-repression, without seriously threatening a contemporary white audience's abhorrence for integration.¹⁵

Set during the Civil War, “A Lady of Bayou St. John” focuses on the appropriately named Madame Delisle as a Southern belle effectively immobilized on the plantation of her soldier-husband Gustave. Cared for by her black mammy Manna-Loulou, Madame Delisle embodies the stereotype of a male-authored Southern femininity which denies female adulthood and independence to white women. Madame Delisle's inaction is contextualized by traditional sources of power in the South (the upper-class white patriarchy signified by the plantation), an idealized blackness in submission (the vague reference to her only companions, the slaves), and also the far-off violence of the Civil War, which eventually precipitates a shift in Southern social roles. Ironically this shift comes not in the form of social “rape” by an emancipated black population, but rather in Madame Delisle's near-seduction via the love letters of her white neighbor Sépincourt. Yet, though life with Sépincourt promises more richness and sexual possibility than her previous existence, Madam Delisle finally fails at the critical moment: learning of her husband's death in battle, she rejects Sépincourt and devotes herself to honorable widowhood, and in her embrace of so traditional a role, she becomes a living memorial to a past ideal of white manhood. Thus, while the Civil War will free her husband's slaves, Madame Delisle's adherence to old constructions will perpetuate a new kind of female restriction that ultimately signifies the death of white femininity, not its protection.

“La Belle Zoraïde” has traditionally been read as Chopin's commentary on what Madame Delisle has lost, since she implicitly contrasts her white heroine with the passionate main character of one of Manna-Loulou's bedtime stories. Like Madame Delisle, the octoroon slave Zoraïde is the tempter of male desire: “‘La belle Zoraïde had eyes that were so dusky, so beautiful, that any man who gazed too long into their depths was sure to lose his head, and even his heart sometimes’” (Collected Works 304). While white men have the option of losing head and heart, of lusting and even loving, Zoraïde (who is clearly a reference for Madame Delisle) does not. But Zoraïde's dilemma lies in the fact that she must choose between M'sieur Ambroise, a light-skinned body servant favored by her despotic mistress Madame Delarivière, and the black field hand Mézor. When Zoraïde takes Mézor as her lover and becomes pregnant, an angry Madame Delarivière arranges for Mézor to be sold, and then snatches away the newborn baby. Believing her child to be dead, Zoraïde goes mad, clutching at a bundle of rags in place of her infant. Insanity saves her from marrying M'sieur Ambroise, but it also cuts her off from motherhood, since she refuses the child returned to her by a remorseful Madame Delarivière. At the story's end, Madame Delisle's only reaction is to moan “‘La pauv' piti! Mieux li mouri!’” (“The poor little one! Better had she died!”), in an ambiguous response either to the fate of the child, or to that of Zoraïde, with whom she perhaps identifies (Collected Works 307). As Anna Shannon Elfenbein writes, Chopin's story suggests that “neither lady nor tragic octoroon can be free, since one is forced to live vicariously through tales of romance, and the other forced to escape the realities of her lot by going mad” (131). Certainly Madame Delisle suggests the tragedy of self-repression for white women, while Zoraïde suggests the tragedy of slavery: both conditions produce a loss of female potential in terms of sexuality and motherhood. But while Zoraïde's fate mirrors that of Madame Delisle, their stories are not analogous. Zoraïde instead becomes the final index of female hysteria and unsuitable sexual desire, the real symbol of excess in female behavior.

Zoraïde functions as a referent for the story's subtextual flirtation with miscegenation as a corrupting social practice. At the start of the story Madame Delisle is figured as a lonely picture of dormant white sexual energy lying sensually “in her sumptuous mahogany bed,” an energy answered by the ministrations of Manna-Loulou: “The old negress … bathed her mistress's pretty white feet and kissed them lovingly, one, then the other. She … brushed her mistress's beautiful hair” (Collected Works 303). Borrowing from Sander L. Gilman's analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual representation of race and womanhood where, in paintings such as Manet's Olympia “the figures of the black servants mark the presence of illicit sexual activity,” we can see the juxtaposition of Madame Delisle and Manna-Loulou as a coding of nineteenth-century white fears of the detrimental connection between masters and slaves, especially since Manna-Loulou's protection of the seemingly helpless Madame Delisle figures as a corruption, her soothing bedtime story perhaps inciting the chaste female mind to lust and infidelity (“Black Bodies” 209). Manna-Loulou even lends a dangerously homoerotic quality to the scene with caresses made more unnerving for a late nineteenth-century audience by the contrast of the servant's skin, “black as the night” with Delisle's blond paleness (Collected Works 303).¹⁶ Ultimately the forbidden collapse of white into black is reengaged in the story of Zoraïde herself. With her “‘café-au-lait’” skin and a figure envied by “‘half the ladies who visited her mistress’” (Collected Works 304), Zoraïde as mulatta rather than full black is finally the articulation of a more desired blackness, as well as desirable black female passion. Thus the envy, pleasure, and danger signified by Zoraïde's body would seem at once to defy and confirm the necessity of rabidly enforced Jim Crow segregation laws, which were well-established by the time of the story's publication.

The connection between Zoraïde and Madame Delisle is clear: both are petted, both are fair, both are oppressed by similar rules of social behavior. But in contrast to Madame Delisle, who senses Sépincourt's desire in a “glance that penetrated her own” yet refuses to act upon her “awakening,” Zoraïde seems at first to reverse processes of objectification by tapping into her own sensual feelings: “‘Poor Zoraïde's heart grew sick in her bosom with love for le beau Mézor from the moment she saw the fierce gleam of his eye’” (Collected Works 229, 304). The octoroon whose body excites white male lust is herself capable of lust, but because of the story's framing, she must become the conduit for frustrated white desire, rather than a subject in her own right. Madame Delisle as well as Chopin's white readers can still fantasize about sex in comfort and safety: the spectacle of Zoraïde's sexual transgression furnishes the reader/listener with a moment of distanced sexual pleasure while the punishment for that pleasure (insanity and social exclusion) is distanced within the mulatta's body, itself the permanent reference to racial transgression. In a sense Chopin rewrites black sexual criminality (Mézor is not the black rapist, but rather the desired lover; Zoraïde is not the prostitute, but rather the desiring lover) to speak for white sexual lack, without necessarily disrupting the white supremacist linkage of blackness with bodily excess.

Chopin's complicated play on stereotypes of black and white femininity—to gratify Delisle's longing and then absolve her character of that longing—further grapples with patriarchal notions of white desire by underscoring the excitement inspired by the stereotype of black male sexuality. As a possible sign of her rejection of “her white godmother's racist values” (Elfenbein 133), Zoraïde spurns the mulatto M'sieur Ambroise, “‘with his shining whiskers like a white man's, and his small eyes, that were cruel and false as a snake's’” (Collected Works 304). In “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” Sépincourt's appearance is more appealing: darkened by the sun, he has “quicker and hotter blood in his veins” than his white neighbors; though he has a “slim figure, a little bent” (Collected Works 298-99), he is still more desirable than Gustave Delisle's portrait. (The dead man's impotent sword hangs near the painting.) But all three men are overshadowed by the sexually-charged Mézor. If Sépincourt seduces with words, Mézor seduces with the promise of the black phallus: “‘Mézor was as straight as a cypress-tree and as proud looking as a king. His body, bare to the waist, was like a column of ebony and it glistened like oil’” (Collected Works 304). As with the stereotype of the black rapist, in Chopin's and the reader's, and presumably Madame Delisle's eyes, Mézor is finally the object of white desire instead of white terror. And more than Sépincourt, who wants Madame Delisle but cannot “comprehend that psychological enigma, a woman's heart,” Mézor proves to be a compassionate lover, with “‘kindness’” in his eyes and “‘only gentleness in his voice’” (Collected Works 302, 305).

Despite such gentleness, Mézor also excites because of the very danger implied by his presence: Zoraïde (and through her the reader) first catches sight of him in New Orleans' Congo Square performing the Bamboula, one of a number of antebellum slave dances whites found both disturbing and fascinating. Here Mézor functions doubly as the romantic connection to an exotic African past, as well as a forbidding reference to a “savage” black passion which, according to Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, accounted for why “the Ashantee warrior knocks down his prospective bride with a club and drags her off into the woods.” Writing with his colleague Hunter McGuire in 1893, Lydston claimed that the primitive sexual feeling which marked the regressive African provided “an excellent prototype illustration of the criminal sexual acts of the negro in the United States” (7). But though Mézor personifies the black phallus, as the potentially violent lover who restricts his animal passion to his dances he is made safe in Chopin's narrative, always tethered to the earth, under white control, “hoeing sugar-cane, barefooted and half naked” (Collected Works 305), the subdued African body, in contrast to the more volatile mulatta Zoraïde.

Chopin's Mézor resembles another larger-than-life African prince, Louisiana slave, and sometime dancer of the Bamboula, the character Bras-Coupé, who appears in George Washington Cable's historical novel of 1803 New Orleans life, The Grandissimes (1880). Reverenced by the quadroon Palmyre but feared by whites, Bras-Coupé functions in The Grandissimes less as a character than as Cable's stereotype of enslaved black masculinity in all its passion and primitive power. A violent figure who showers curses on his master's family but bows down as a tributary before white women, Bras-Coupé is finally mutilated by exasperated slaveholders, and like the lynch victim of post-Civil War American history, he casts a shadow over the novel's Yankees and Southerners struggling to achieve national unity. In Mézor Chopin evacuates altogether the violence that distinguishes Cable's Bras-Coupé, but neither of these African figures has a presence coterminous with white characters; instead they are written out of the national narrative as actors, to remain finally as symbols of white guilt and desire. Consequently Mézor's safety is precisely his usefulness as a device to stage the articulation of Madame Delisle's suppressed lust. Under the burden of the story's framing, Zoraïde is a frustrated mulatta out of control who must stand in for a white woman unable to imagine herself out of control. Mézor, on the other hand, as a black man always in the narrator's grasp, is trapped within the white idealization of the perfect lover, referencing finally white, not black, social insurrection.

Chopin's articulation of an alternately unbounded and controllable blackness as a means of enforcing distance is also underscored by the mingled discourses of failed maternity, eugenics, and racial regression invested in “La Belle Zoraïde.” Within the context of the late nineteenth century, “miscegenation … was a fear not merely of interracial sexuality but of its results, the decline of the population” (Gilman 237). Consequently, Zoraïde's black maternity highlights the barrenness of both Madame Delisle and Madame Delarivière: Delisle moves from immaturity to childless widowhood, while Delarivière can only manage a surrogate black daughter instead of a white one. The play on black fecundity here as a sign of white disempowerment is further emphasized because the birth of Zoraïde's child in the story signifies the octoroon's disobedience to white law. By denying Zoraïde her child, Delarivière deprives her slave of any claim to a domestic identity, and here Chopin seems to be rejecting antebellum social relations much as she does in At Fault, because it allowed such abuses. Yet, though Chopin seems to be engaging in racial disloyalty by validating black female maternal rights, she sets into motion turn-of-the-century discourses about racial inferiority that deny blacks' capacity to exercise those rights.¹⁷ Zoraïde might reproduce, but she is ultimately unfit for parenting even when a regretful Madame Delarivière returns the child. Nineteenth-century medical discourse would have assigned her madness not only to her grief over the loss of the child, but to her own racial identity as an octoroon made unstable by virtue of racial interbreeding. The eugenicist language of the story casts M'sieur Ambroise as diminutive, imitative of whiteness, but finally deceitful and cruel, the product of racial refinement that does not improve physical or temperamental characteristics. In The Grandissimes Cable's quadroons are similarly afflicted: they suffer from either uncontrollable anger or from a failure of will. Thus at the moment of her rejection of white domination, Zoraïde proves herself to be a version of the “tragic mulatto” who goes mad at the restrictions set upon her identity.¹⁸

But if Zoraïde is trapped within madness and slavery because of the unchangeable features of race and blood, Madame Delisle, on the other hand, is trapped by Southern tradition and history, conditions about to undergo radical change in the story because of its setting during the Civil War. Thus, Zoraïde finally exemplifies black sexuality but also black powerlessness, if we read Madame Delisle's “‘La pauv' piti! Mieux li mouri’” as a comment on the slave's hopeless condition. On the other hand, Delisle exemplifies white female empowerment precisely because of her race: the frustration generated in the narrative by Zoraïde's tragedy as a black slave becomes finally a frustration at Madame Delisle, who does not exercise the choices Chopin implies are hers by virtue of her whiteness.¹⁹

In her local color stories, Kate Chopin was neither disengaged from the racial politics of the late nineteenth century, nor actively in resistance to white supremacist thought. Rather, her characterizations are as much a response to stereotypes of race, as they are a reaction to patriarchal domination. While traditional readings cast her as resistant to gender conventions of her age, I would argue that her feminism worked in tandem with her investment in turn-of-the-century racist discourses. As such, her work offers a hitherto neglected site from which to consider the racialization of gender within turn-of-the-century white women's fiction. Inasmuch as Chopin contributes to white supremacist thought with works such as At Fault, “In Sabine,” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” she affirms the multivalency of the stereotype of the black rapist in the imagination of American white male and female literary audiences, at the same time as she revises the white supremacist association of the white female body to suggest alternate possibilities for the development of a white female subjectivity. Chopin's work also registers tensions within “white” culture about the nature of whiteness itself, and the boundaries between ethnicity, race, and region in determining American enfranchisement. Thus, Chopin's work reveals the complex entanglements among white supremacist public discourses, “mainstream” white writing on regional and community development, and especially female fiction, as she articulates mutually constitutive feminist and white supremacist visions that both liberate and confine her.

Notes

1. “A No-Account Creole” was based on one of Chopin's first short stories. Variously titled in her notes “Euphrasie,” “A Maid and her Lovers,” and “Euphrasie's Lovers,” the story was eventually pared down and published in its present form in the Century. See Emily Toth 177-78.

2. For discussion of white supremacist thought, lynching, and race riots in the post-Reconstruction era, see Shapiro, Fredrickson, and Williamson. See also Wiegman for a discussion of the meaning of lynching as an American social practice.

3. I am indebted here to a number of important new discussions on the “reading” of race in American literature and culture; see especially Sundquist and Warren.

4. For a discussion of Willard, see Ware 198-205; for Addams' views on lynching, see her “Respect for Law.”

5. See Tunnell and Shapiro for a discussion of the high level of Reconstruction violence in the state.

6. See Toth 134-36. During Reconstruction, Louisiana Creoles from all classes, especially those in New Orleans, swelled the ranks of the state's many local white supremacist organizations such as the Innocents and the more familiar and increasingly violent Ku Klux Klan. In 1868 almost half the white male population of New Orleans belonged to the Knights of the White Camellia (KWC), an organization founded by the French Creole Alcibiade DeBlance, pledged towards “the Maintenance of the Supremacy of the White Race in this Republic” (Trelease 93).

7. Donald A. Ringe gestures toward this point in “Cane River World,” when he discusses the importance of Chopin's local color fiction as a study of how “the war … has had its effect on the society she depicts” (26).

8. See Lattin for an early discussion of the notion of repeating characters, as well as the image of the Santiens as a family in decay.

9. My reading of At Fault is informed by Taylor 166-70.

10. See also Taylor 167-69.

11. For an illuminating discussion of white female management of land and labor during the Civil War, see Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘Trying To Do a Man's Business’.”

12. According to both Toth and Taylor, Place-du-Bois is based on the old Chopin estate, and McFarlane is the renamed Robert McAlpin, the land's previous owner who was allegedly the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Simon Legree.

13. Aiken's ethnic identity is especially important, since Chopin is much more generous in her portraits of lower-class whites who are of French background (the Cajun characters). The bumbling but kindhearted Bobinôt in “At the 'Cadian Ball” and “The Storm,” and the gallant Telèsphore in “A Night in Acadie” are romantic portrayals of lower-class Cajun chivalry.

14. See also Dyer and Monroe for a discussion of the Cajun or 'Cadian balls, where Grégoire would have met 'Tite Reine, as places frequented by “sensual, ‘disreputable’ women who threaten domesticity and monogamy” (6).

15. See Dyer's useful but strangely uncritical description of Chopin's deployment of race to distance and connect her white readers with the sexual desire demonstrated by the black characters in “Techniques of Distancing.” See also Birnbaum's reading of the quadroon nursemaid in Chopin's The Awakening.

16. See Gilman's reading of blackness, female sexuality, and disease in “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” especially 237.

17. It is important to note, of course, that black female claims to equality with white women had been argued in the nineteenth century through the figure of the maternal, for instance in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). As both Carby and Tate show, by the 1890s domestic novels by black women stressed black female capacity for moral respectability, responsible motherhood, and racial uplift.

18. There was of course a separate discourse on womanhood and madness, and my argument here is that as a racial hybrid and a woman, Zoraïde bears the burden of a body doubly inscribed as the site of madness.

19. See also Birnbaum (304) for a discussion of race and female empowerment in The Awakening in “‘Alien Hands’.”

My thanks to Anne Goldman, Lemuel Johnson, Kerry Larson, Marlon Ross, Stephanie Smith, Patricia Yeager, and Rafia Zafar for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

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