Failing Fictions: The Conflicting and Shifting Social Emphases of Kate Chopin's "Local Color" Stories

Along the lines of Duane Carr's earlier point regarding class stasis, the belle in "A Night in Acadie" could have avoided this ensnarement if she had stayed within her own class and married a respectable 'Cadian farmer like Cazeau of "Athenaise" in the first place. This would seem to point to a strain in Chopin's fiction that indicates that 'Cadian girls' prospects for fulfillment are closely tied to their ability to obtain respectable relationships within their own narrowly-defined social class. There is, admittedly, such a strain of thought in the stories, though there is also a strain of disapproval of the system that would so closely restrain women's choices. Certainly, in "The Storm," Chopin's unpublished sequel to "At the 'Cadian Ball," we see her revisiting the situation of Calixta, the sympathetically portrayed 'Cadian belle, who loses her Creole lover to a Creole woman. In the later story, Calixta is able successfully to consummate an adulterous relationship with the Creole man who had earlier deserted her. Here, Chopin's 'Cadian heroine displays an ability (albeit a limited one) to undermine class norms and simultaneously assert her sexuality: "Calixta and her Creole lover, Alcee, both married to other people, act on their illicit passion and consummate their love. Thus, the sequel acts out the rebellion forestalled in the earlier story" (Brown 130). Of course, some previous critics, like Brown, have noted that Calixta's rebellious behavior is perhaps only possible because of her "mixed blood," which allows an expression of sexuality deemed outside the bounds of white norms (130).

But, interestingly, concomitant with Calixta's sexual awakening, so similar to that of Edna Pontellier's, is a "whitening" of the character in the sequel that portrays it. Calixta, described emphatically in "At the 'Cadian Ball" as having "Spanish" blood which make her an ethnic outsider in her community, is repeatedly described in "The Storm" in terms of whiteness. She has a "white neck" and "white throat and whiter breasts" in addition to passion "like a white flame" housed in a body "as white as the couch she lay upon" (Complete Novels 928-29). Chopin allows the 'Cadian woman a successful act of subversion, but only along with a simultaneous stressing of her whiteness, a racial status that was not so clearly hers in the earlier story, where her Spanish blood and her racialized social equality with the lower-class "brown, good-natured Bobinot" is stressed (Bayou Folk 142). Chopin's work, then, both early and late, simultaneously reproduced, half-evoked, and set itself at odds with the various strains of social discourse of her day, but in ways that shifted with time. She apparently struggled to articulate themes of female self-assertion concurrently with themes of class and race conflict, and may be seen, in the later collection of stories, to be moving away from the difficulties of a lower-class fiction.

The pattern does seem to manifest itself fairly clearly, as Chopin moves away from overtly class-oriented fiction and toward more thematically gender-centered fiction, characterized by The Awakening. By placing her novel's heroine in a comfortable upper middle-class social bracket, Chopin was able to remove some of the impediments faced by her Cajun protagonists, freeing her character to explore more fully the questions raised by gender and sexuality. The clashing social forces of race and class that seemed to forestall, complicate, or minimize the agency of female characters in the early fiction are relegated to a less visible role in The Awakening, allowing Chopin to pursue her clarified exploration of (white) female selfhood. This is not altogether different from the sort of movement that Pearl Brown posits, although her assertion that Edna Pontellier's middle-class status allows her to effect, more than her lower-class counterparts, reactions of disturbance in contemporary readers because of her "defiance of the very conventions connected with various subcultures and subclasses" (132) seems unduly biased in favor of the political efficacy of bourgeois fiction. And it also allows the repetition of a dismissive move in terms of Chopin's short fiction. Keeping in mind these effects, one might ask "why would a piece of fiction focused on the life of a middle-class character necessarily suffuse the socius with more subversive force than one dealing with a lower-class character?" Brown says: