SOURCE: Shurbutt, Sylvia Bailey. “The Can River Characters and Revisionist Mythmaking in the Work of Kate Chopin.” The Southern Literary Journal 25, no. 2 (spring 1993): 14-23.

[In the following essay, Shurbutt maintains that in her fiction Chopin “revises accepted myths about duty, marriage, and sexuality in order to achieve a more realistic understanding of the human condition.”]

One of the threads weaving its way through the writing of women from Amelia Lanier to Virginia Woolf is the attempt to recast into a more palatable form traditional Western myth with its patriarchial point of view—a point of view which molds our realities, fixes our values, and limits the vision of individual possibilities. A sizable portion of feminist literary criticism in recent years has been devoted to discovering and decoding those female retellings of archetypal human experience and to explaining how the process of revisionist mythmaking works as women from the past have tried to “rewrite” their stories.

In “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and the Revisionist Mythmaking,” Alicia Ostriker explains the process of revisionist mythmaking: “Whenever a poet employs a figure or story previously accepted and defined by a culture, the poet is using myth, and the potential is always present that the use will be revisionist: that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible” (317). Ostriker details how “old stories are changed … by female experience, so that they can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy. Instead … they are corrections; they are representations of what women find divine and demonic in themselves; they are retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered; in some cases they are instructions for survival” (316).

There are few better examples of the revisionist process at work than in the regional stories and tales of Kate O'Flaherty Chopin. The Creole characters in such collections as Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie become the perfect vehicle for Chopin's revisionist writing: her Natchitoches folk, with their “directness and lack of sophistication,” their “more genuine and spontaneous, more natural and wholesome” zest for “a hedonist enjoyment of the present” (Seyersted 96), are set apart from the traditional types more susceptible to the patriarchal colorings employed to construct myths about marriage and female sexuality current in Chopin's gilded America of the 1880s and 1890s. In stories like “Charlie” and “The Storm” Chopin presents revised portraits of women achieving fulfillment in roles other than marriage and of women evincing a passionate nature considered inappropriate by conventional, patriarchal standards of “Victorian” America.

Chopin had little patience with the saccharin myths that molded the lives of men and women in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Emily Toth points out in her recent biography, Chopin, as the unconventional wife of a Creole planter, did her best to flaunt the feminine standards of provincial Cloutierville in her own life—galloping through the cane fields astride her stallion, managing the plantation store and her amiable husband, Oscar Chopin, and perhaps even carrying on a torrid affair with friend and neighbor Albert Sampite. Later, in an 1894 published review of the Hoosier poets, Chopin indirectly suggests her own realistic aesthetic, one wonderfully infected with the clear-sighted attempt to revise the limiting images offered by a patriarchal society: “[in their] garden of Eden,” she says of this particular group of Midwestern local colorists, “the disturbing fruit of the tree of knowledge still hangs unplucked.” The real world, as Chopin knew it, was one far removed from the philosophic pablum offered America by this collection of poets; indeed, it was one where, as she wrote, “human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning” is “stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it” (Works [The Complete Works of Kate Chopin] 691-92). Chopin has many of her Creole characters purposefully pluck “the tree” in order to discover their own awakenings; in so doing she revises accepted myths about duty, marriage, and sexuality in order to achieve a more realistic understanding of the human condition. In this article I wish to examine some of those accepted myths of the patriarchy that Chopin attempts to reinterpret or rewrite in her regional fiction.

Pearl K. Bell has written that Chopin was an artist who “dissented from the cultural shibboleths and popular taste” of her time (238). And Barbara Ewell has developed this idea even further as she discusses Chopin's major themes: “the unresolved tensions between a developing self and a rigid social code, the consequences of sexual awareness and its repressions, the nature and cost of self assertion, the role of perception in human behavior” (88). These motifs, which mark “a recurring cadence” in her fiction, however, are female defiance of social convention (Ewell 57) and an affirmation of female selfhood independent of the masculine shadow which generally limits the lives of many Chopin characters.

Helen Taylor finds that in Chopin's canon the Creole characters play a significant role in developing these themes. Of the regional stories, Taylor writes, “Her ironic and resonant use of historical, topographical, and mythical Louisiana materials … functions to interrogate both the southern ideology of womanhood and contradictory constructions of southern femininity in the 1890's” (165). Indeed, Taylor believes that the Louisiana characters offered Chopin a unique opportunity to focus on “issues of gender and sexual definition.” As Chopin's “fiction increasingly exploded taboos around female sexuality and desire,” Taylor continues, “it is perhaps not surprising that she turned to unfamiliar and exotic locations and subjects for fiction. The rural Cane River community of northwest Louisiana … [operates] as symbolic [site] of that elemental sensuality and erotic bliss” that were inappropriate for a woman writer to speak of in her contemporary St. Louis (165). This fact, coupled with the ready market for local color stories during the period, made the Cane River locale particularly suitable for Chopin's revisionist purposes.

The myth most often promulgated by the patriarchy for the purpose of keeping female passions under rein, and the one Chopin finds immense pleasure in revising, is that Victorian notion of woman's somewhat anemic sexuality. The Cane River locale offers a number of particularly successful characters who have no intention of subverting their sexuality merely to conform with patriarchal standards of behavior. Perhaps the vampish Calixta of Chopin's “At the 'Cadian Ball” and the companion story “The Storm” is the best known example of a woman bent on fulfilling her complete sexual potential. However, Gaston Baroda's wife in “A Respectable Woman” is one of the most intriguing examples. When her husband's friend Gouvernail is up from New Orleans “to spend a week or two on the plantation,” she is at first unhappy with his intrusion on her family and home (Awakening and Selected Stories [The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories of Kate Chopin] 194). As she spends time with the gentle, quiet-voiced Gouvernail, so unlike her husband's other men friends, she begin to warm to him, though “why she liked him she could not explain satisfactorily to herself” (194). The attraction she feels for Gouvernail grows, and one evening she experiences the impulse to “draw close to him and whisper against his cheek—she did not care what—as she might have done if she had not been a respectable woman” (197). Some months later as Gaston prepares to invite Gouvernail again to the plantation, he tells his wife, “I am glad, chère amie, to know that you have finally overcome your dislike for him; truly he did not deserve it.” His wife presses a “long, tender kiss on his lips” and replies with curious and playful ambiguity which, however perplexing to her husband, is understood by the reader for its sexual implication: “Oh … I have overcome everything! You will see. This time I shall be very nice to him” (197).

Perhaps the most complex revisionist mythmaking on Chopin's part occurs as she portrays the variety of marital relationships in her fiction. Chopin's own attitude toward marriage was extremely complex. Although Seyersted insists that she was a most contented wife and had extraordinary affection for her Creole husband, Oscar Chopin, enjoyed family life and the presence of her affectionate brood of children around her, her diary records ten years after Oscar's death what she calls “the past ten years of my growth—my real growth.” She goes on to note, however, that were “her mother and husband to return to earth, she would willingly give up everything she had become since their deaths, so the sense of freedom,” as Helen Taylor suggests, “is by no means unequivocal” (141-42). Chopin's personal writing and the reminiscences of her children indicate she did indeed adore her family, the close and loving physical relationship with her husband, and the extraordinary sensations accompanying motherhood; however, much of the fiction suggests that she believed the demands of family and marriage to be diametrically opposed to a woman's achieving her own personal selfhood. Edna Pontellier is perhaps Chopin's best known character to have grappled with the complexities and limitations of marriage; however, the Cane River stories offer Chopin an opportunity to portray the full range and variety of her ideas about marriage and to revise many of the myths associated with women and marriage in the 1890s.

Elizabeth McMahan has written that “Chopin's young women appear to marry because society offers them no other options” (32). Certainly, this is the case with Athénaïse, who marries “because she supposed it was customary for girls to marry when the right opportunity came” (Sel. Stories [The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories of Kate Chopin] 212). Athénaïse is a rebellious, headstrong young woman, whose family had felt that “marriage” would provide for her, as tradition had always mandated it would for a woman, “a wonderful and powerful agent in the development and formation of [her] … character” (216). Her husband Cazeau would provide “a master hand, a strong will that [would compel] obedience” (216), surely what every young wife needed! This attitude of Athénaïse's family was typical for the day and was representative of a patriarchal myth Chopin found particularly offensive. Emily Toth's newly published study of Chopin's life makes it abundantly clear that the principle reason Kate and Oscar Chopin got along so well after marriage was that Kate had free rein to express herself in any way she wished, and Oscar received particular pleasure from seeing her flaunt the expected wifely rules and exert her independence.

As Cazeau slips comfortably into the dominant role society has provided him, so does Athénaïse come to despise their relationship—not the least disappointing aspect of which, to the sheltered, convent-reared Creole, is the sexual part of their life. Athénaïse, who has spent her short life in virtual ignorance of the sexual side of marriage, confides to her brother Montéclin her thinly disguised distaste for her physical relationship with Cazeau:

It's jus' being married that I detes' an' despise, I hate being Mrs. Cazeau, an' would want to be Athénaïse Miché again. I can't stan' to live with a man; to have him always there; his coats an' pantaloons hanging in my room; his ugly bare feet—washing them in my tub, befo' my very eyes, ugh!

(213)

When she runs away from Cazeau and returns to her family, he comes to fetch her home as a master would a run-away slave. Chopin's parallel between marriage and slavery—one given double potency in the tragic tale of Zoraïde, who is both a female and a slave forced into an unwanted marriage (“La Belle Zoraïde”)—is made unmistakably clear as Cazeau passes the “great solitary oak” where Black Gabe, his father's own runaway slave, had been recaptured: Cazeau thinks of his wife as he had thought of Black Gabe when he was a boy, and “the whole impression was … hideous” to him (215).

However, whereas Zoraïde, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous character in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” escapes in madness, Athénaïse merely attempts to escape the situation. When she runs away a second time, to New Orleans, Cazeau does not follow her, reconciling himself to the irrevocable mistake of their union. He writes to her a touching letter relinquishing her: “the loss of self-respect seemed to him too dear a price to pay for a wife” (221). He does not realize at the time that in setting her free, he will eventually win her back. With the help of her brother, Athénaïse establishes herself in a little apartment in New Orleans, there to become acquainted with Gouvernail, a character that we have previously met in “A Respectable Woman.” Despite the fact that he “suspected that she adored Cazeau,” Gouvernail forms a friendship with Athénaïse that for him melts into a deeper affection.

Barbara Ewell has written of this complex Chopin story that “Athénaïse's problem is that she has not recognized her own sensuality, the agreeable passion that would ameliorate the normal disillusionments of marriage” (110). Certainly, Chopin makes no mistake about exploding the myth that marriage is a woman's raison d'être and an institution which she ought lovingly to give up her identity for. But, at the same time, Chopin reveals the complex nature of female sexuality, tied as it generally was in the nineteenth century to monogamous relationships.

When Athénaïse discovers that she is pregnant, her attitude toward Cazeau and toward their relationship changes: “Her whole being was steeped in a wave of ecstasy. When she … looked at herself in the mirror, a face met hers which she seemed to see for the first time … [and when she thought of Cazeau] the first purely sensuous tremor of her life swept over her” (235). Her pregnancy makes Athénaïse, as Barbara Ewell says, “not only receptive to sexuality but offer[s] her a new power that she did not, and could not, have as a maiden … the possession of her body in its full potential.” Ewell adds that though Chopin was “demonstrably aware of the limitations of marriage,” she was “equally sensitive to the deeply satisfying pleasures of motherhood and the rich sensuality of reproduction. … That she could combine both awarenesses in a single story attests to the complexity of her insight and the maturity of her skills” (111).

One is reminded of this same ambivalence and complexity in the work of contemporary British writer Margaret Drabble, especially in such novels as The Millstone and The Waterfall. In the latter work, the sexuality of the central character, Jane Gray, is greatly enhanced after the birth of her child. Writing of her own experience with childbirth some twenty-three years after the fact, Kate Chopin suggests that particular degree of sensuality many women experience after giving birth: “The sensation with which I touched my lips and my fingertips to his soft flesh only comes once to a mother. It must be the pure animal sensation: nothing spiritual could be so real—so poignant” (Toth 128).

Other Cane River characters help Chopin to revise accepted myths about marriage as well. Mamzelle Aurélle in “Regret” rejects a proposal of marriage to find contentment without love or husband, though she discovers later an emptiness that comes without the presence of children in her life. Madame Delisle in “A Lady of Bayou St. John” had almost given in to the temptation to run away with the sympathetic Sépincourt, who declares his love while her husband is away at war; but when news of her husband's death reaches her, she commits herself to his memory and the loyal veneration of the conventional ideal of marriage. Of course, since the stifling reality of marriage is now quite out of the question for the widowed Madame Delisle, commitment to the ideal presents no special difficulty. Chopin teasingly adds in a postscript to the story that Madame fared very well in her old age and was a “very pretty old lady,” the memory of her husband still filling and satisfying “her days” (187)—thus suggesting not only that the ideal of conventional marriage is completely palatable, in the purest sense, only when the spouse is out of the picture but also that the cares and duties of marriage and motherhood are likely to take their toll on the physical and emotional vitality of a woman.

Certainly, Chopin offers an array of married women whose lives are brought low and vitality sapped by the demands of husbands and children—witness, for example, the faded beauty of Mentine of “A Visit to Avoyelles.” Mentine happily traded her carefree youthful days for marriage to Jules Trodon, and now some seven years and four children later she is visited by an old suitor, Doudouce, who describes his former love with wistful sadness:

[Mentine] had kept the baby in her lap. Doudouce was wondering miserably if he would have known her outside her home. He would have known her sweet, cheerful brown eyes, that were not changed; but her figure, that had looked so trim in the wedding gown, was sadly misshapen. She was brown, with skin like parchment, and piteously thin. There were lines, some deep as if old age had cut them, about the eyes and mouth … [and her voice] had grown shrill from screaming at children and dogs.

(Bayou Folk 226)

“A Visit to Avoyelles,” with its fading heroine and her chivalrous beau from the past, presents another intriguing possibility for revisionist myth-making in the Cane River stories of Chopin—that of revising the myth of the helpless female who must be saved from her wretched condition by the rescuing masculine hero. Mentine has no desire to be saved; indeed, she made her choice seven years ago, and it was not Doudouce whom she chose. Despite his condescending wish to “save” her, she is obviously content with her choice. Her lost beauty, such a tragedy to Doudouce, doesn't appear an issue or a concern to Mentine.

Such chivalrous rescuers as Doudouce fill the work of Chopin. In “Azelie” young Polyte longs “to rescue” the wayward, ragged Azelie from the poverty of her home situation. Much of the appeal that Azelie holds for the industrious, hardworking Polyte is in the Pygmalian reshaping that he might undertake of her character, were he to get her away from what he considered “the demoralizing influences of her family” and make her his own, his wife: “Polyte believed he would be able to awaken Azelie to finer, better impulses when he should have her apart to himself.” When he proposes to Azelie, she looks “at him in amazement,” neither seeing the need nor desiring to be rescued: “Ah, b'en, no. I ain't goin' to stay here wid you, Mr. 'Polyte; I'm goin' yonda on Li'le river wid my popa” (A Night in Acadie 245).

Another potential knightly rescuer is found in the character of lawyer Paxton in “Madame Celestin's Divorce.” The young wife of the selfish, shiftless Celestin has been virtually abandoned, left without any support from her husband. Paxton offers Madame advice and friendship, attempting to convince her of the necessity to file for divorce; all the while the vision of his “rescue” of the wife of Celestin fires a passion that develops into love. While Madame has some difficulty making up her mind (and coming to terms with the priest and her family on the issue of divorce), Chopin leaves little doubt with the reader about the appeal Celestin holds for his wife, an explicit sexual appeal. On the morning that Paxton comes to propose to her himself, she is “plying her broom” as usual, a fresh bloom in her cheeks. As she informs him that she has decided not to seek a divorce (indeed, that Celestin “came home las' night”), she pointedly fondles the phallic broomhandle—“making deep rings in the palm of her gloved hand with the end of the broomhandle” (Sel. Stories 182). Like Azelie, Madame Celestin has little desire to be rescued and less desire to leave a situation which, though it presents many obvious inconveniences, still answers to the sexual needs of her life, needs which neither Père Duchéron nor lawyer Paxton would willingly admit.

A thoroughly delightful Cane River character whom Chopin uses to revise nineteenth-century notions about femininity and marriage is Charlotte Laborde, “Charlie” to her friends and family. Charlie is in some part a revision of everything a little girl should be: she loves riding and shooting, dons a nifty pair of bloomers she calls “trouserlets,” and refuses to fit into the mold of the obedient and demure Southern daughter. Nonetheless, she claims a special place in her father's heart, and when he is injured in an accident, Charlie comes home from the New Orleans finishing school charged with rounding off the rough edges to become mistress of the plantation. In the process, she chooses to delay and possibly even to reject marriage altogether in order to assume the role of leadership in the family, though Chopin intriguingly leaves the door open to the question of marriage at the end of the story. Certainly, if Charlie marries young Mr. Gus, theirs will not be a conventional marriage, but rather one similar to that of Charles Faraday and Eleanor Gail in “A Point at Issue,” who attempt to revise the conventional spousal institution along the lines of the Wollstonecraft and Godwin relationship—two independent, self-fulfilled individuals who offer each other both friendship and passion.

Chopin goes on in her Cane River tales to shatter other patriarchal myths: the self-sacrificing mother/woman in “A Pair of Silk Stockings”; the fulfillment a wife will find who relinquishes her selfhood and her identity into that of her husband (“Desiree's Baby”); the battered woman who must grit her teeth and bear her ill fortune (“In Sabine”); the wisdom of the Church in determining what is moral and right in a woman's life (“A Sentimental Soul”). Certainly, Chopin wrote some stories which confess to the accepted patriarchal party lines of the nineteenth century; she was above all interested in being published, and often stories had to be rewritten to satisfy male editors and a reading public used to less provocative, less threatening images of women. She has a few self-sacrificing wives and mothers, a young head-strong woman tamed by a strong silent male (Zaida Trodon in “A Night in Acadie”), even a Cajun jeune fille eager to be rescued by a competent young knight (Lalie in “Love on the Bon-Dieu”). However, the vast majority of the Cane River stories overtly question accepted myths and attitudes and are obviously revisionist efforts. These tales were likely the ones that interested her most (though some like “The Storm” she would not even attempt to have published), and increasingly they challenged her creative talents, all pointing in the direction of her finest story, The Awakening.

Chopin was well aware of the power of myth in our lives and specifically the power of literature to create myth, to create a reality more potent than real life. In her first attempt at novel writing, Chopin portrays the unfortunate and ill-fated Fanny Hosmer as a woman who succumbs both to cheap wine and cheap novels—the novels being those “unwholesome intellectual sweets so tirelessly, to be devoured by the girls and women of the age” (At Fault 97). Carolyn Heilbrun writes of this power of literature to produce the myth that shapes the lives of women, women who “can only retell and live by the stories … [they] have read or heard.” “We live our lives through texts,” Heilbrun remarks, “They may be read or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all” (37). Feminist critics are discovering that a sizable portion of nineteenth-century literature by women was created as a response to patriarchal myths—whether the response was direct and overt as in the work of Chopin or indirect and masked as in the work of Christina Rossetti or George Eliot. Heilbrun concludes by saying that there can be true narratives of female lives “only when women no longer live their lives isolated in the houses and the stories of men” (47). Katherine O'Flaherty Chopin for a brief space at the end of the nineteenth century had the courage to write her own story; in doing so, she has helped women today to write theirs.

Works Cited

Bell, Pearl, K. “Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne Jewett.” Partisan Review 55 (1988): 238-53.

Chopin, Kate. At Fault. Cambridge, MA: The Green Street Press, 1986.

———. The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York: New American Library, 1976.

———. Bayou Folk. New York: Garrett Press, 1970.

———. Complete Works. Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

———. A Night in Acadie. New York: Garrett Press, 1968.

Ewell, Barbara C. Kate Chopin. New York: Ungar, 1986.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing A Woman's Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.

McMahan, Elizabeth. “‘Nature's Decoy’: Kate Chopin's Presentation of Women and Marriage in her Short Fiction.” Turn-of-the-Century Women 2 (Winter 1985): 32-35.

Ostriker, Alicia. “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking.” Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980.

Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: William Morrow, 1990.